conjunction with English Heritage and the University of the West of England, which was held at the London School of Economics. At the conference Nicholas Draper, (inaugural director of the Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery), discussed the records of the Slave Compensation Commission and their value as a research tool for exploring links between the slave trade and the country house. In 2020, the Trust published its Interim Report on the Connections between Colonialism and Properties now in the Care of the National Trust, Including Links with Historic Slavery. The appendix to the report recorded that George Hay Dawkins-Pennant was compensated under the Slavery Abolition Act 1833 for being deprived of 764 slaves, being paid £14,683 17s 2d. The report itself provoked a strong reaction. The Common Sense Group of Conservative MPs challenged the Trust’s priorities; writing in a joint letter to The Daily Telegraph, "History must neither be sanitised nor rewritten to suit 'snowflake' preoccupations. A clique of powerful, privileged liberals must not be allowed to rewrite our history in their image." The columnist Charles Moore decried the report and stimulated criticism across a range of British media outlets. A complaint against the Trust’s report was lodged with the Charity Commission. Olivette Otele, Professor of Colonial History and the Memory of Slavery at the University of Bristol explored the dominant narrative presented at Penrhyn after a visit in 2016. She examined the prevalent history of the Pennants as social, industrial and agrarian improvers and noted the absence of discussion of the slave-owning origins of their wealth. In 2020, the naming of a road in Barry as Ffordd Penrhyn provoked protests over the perceived links with Penrhyn Castle, “the capital of slavery in Wales.” Although it had already begun consideration of the links between its properties and the British colonial heritage, the murder of George Floyd and subsequent Black Lives Matter demonstrations, including the toppling of the statue of Edward Colston, led the Trust to acknowledge that these protests had given their efforts a greater impetus. Writing at the time of the interim report's publication, Dr Katie Donnington wrote of the Trust's approach, "Is it scones and tea and a bit of Jane Austen-type fantasy? Does it do critical social history? Or is it a place of escapism where there is a resistance to being confronted with the unsettling realities of empire, race and slavery?"