Bristol’s M-Shed Museum holds 200 years of packaging, photographs, and objects from the Wills tobacco company, and this project will use creative writing, history, anthropology, curating, and public health to explore what that archive reveals about the city’s relationship to tobacco today. The problem is twofold. First, heritage narratives can exclude or divide communities rather than connect them. Second, smoking rates in Bristol are 16.9% compared to England’s 13% average, and in Hartcliffe—home to Wills’ former head office—the rate reaches 31.2%. The researchers ask whether these patterns are a cultural legacy of the company’s long presence. They also note that First Nations people smoke at twice the rate of non-Indigenous people, and Indigenous scholars argue that understanding ceremonial tobacco use is essential to public health efforts. If successful, the project could produce new ways of using difficult heritage—such as the Wills collection—to address public health challenges. It could help cities like Bristol reckon with historical harms while designing more effective, community-rooted strategies to reduce smoking. The work is exploratory and interdisciplinary, not a clinical trial, but it aims to bridge cultural understanding and health equity in a concrete, place-based way.
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CONTEXT AND CHALLENGE W.D & H.O Wills was formed in Bristol in 1786 - the first British company to mass-produce cigarettes. The Wills Collection of Tobacco Antiquities at the M-Shed Museum in Bristol offers a plethora of under-explored packaging materials, photographs and objects from 200 years of Wills (and Imperial Tobacco) company records. Tobacco is one of a number of difficult elements in Bristol's past and its relationship to itself as a contemporary city. Calls for a reconciliation process to address the city's links to colonial violence 1 are reflected in the decision to display the toppled statue of Colston as part of an exhibition about protest at the M-Shed in 2024. Can the Wills collection help us creatively reimagine both our public and cultural health as a city? We are curious if creative approaches can be a bridge between public and cultural health and how our perspectives (creative writing, history, anthropology, curating, public health) will influence what we see in the archive and how we see it. We address two interrelated challenges: Heritage narratives are often implemented in ways that are exclusionary, colonising and contested 2 . Heritage can support human connection. If not adequately managed, it can perpetuate dis-connection within a community. Increasing public awareness of the diverse meanings which heritage conveys is paramount. Smoking rates in Bristol are significantly higher than in England. 16.9% of Bristol's population smoke compared to an England average of 13%. Hartcliffe in Bristol, home to Wills' head office in the 1970s, has smoking rates of 31.2%3 . Could these patterns be a cultural legacy of the presence of Wills in Bristol? Mirroring Bristol's cultural legacies, First Nations people are twice as likely to smoke as non-Indigenous people 4. Indigenous scholars argue that a better understanding of First Nation ceremonial uses of tobacco is essential to public health efforts to lowering smoking rates in those communities 4. Bristol Integrated Care priorities for equitable health are to reduce tobacco harm, recognise historical injustices and utilise community assets. Recognising how historical harms can become part of public health strategies are, we believe, yet to be found. What can we learn from Indigenous scholars' public health efforts?
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