Anti-smoking campaigners have branded a council’s decision to name a road after the cigarette brand “Navy Player’s Cut” as “morally unacceptable”.
Bristol City Council has approved plans to rename the road on a new 70-home housing complex which sits on the remains of an Imperial Group tobacco factory.
Officials picked the name “Navy Cut Road”, out of a choice of four, to celebrate the city’s industrial past with the factory employing an estimated 25,000 workers in the 1970s.
However, the Mayor’s Office is now reviewing the name following a backlash from cancer charities who claim it undermines public health messaging.
Deborah Arnott, chief executive of ASH, told the BBC that “while the name may be legal”, it is still “morally unacceptable”.
Cancer Research: ‘Not the most helpful message’
While they understand “councils are often keen to acknowledge local heritage when naming roads”, Cancer Research told the BBC that “celebrating a tobacco brand in this way isn’t the most helpful message to give out especially to children and young people”.
Richard Eddy, a local Conservative councilor who reversed a previous decision to name the street Crox View, after nearby Crox Bottom Woodland, said changing the name risks “airbrushing” the city’s history and its ties to slavery.
He said: “No one is proposing that we suddenly bring back slavery or anything else [similar] activity
“But the reality is, a significant amount of Bristol’s origins came from tobacco manufacture, trading, we even had participation in the slave trade and doesn’t mean you airbrush history. You remember history, black, white and grey.
“We are not actually a PC [politically correct] modern city, we are gray We have got good things, bad things, we’re a mixed economy and to be frank one needs to reflect that reality of course.”
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