In 2017, the Colston Hall fired the starting gun that sent the debate about Edward Colston and Bristol into the mainstream of the city's consciousness, merely by announcing that it was thinking of changing its name.
In the first few months of 2017, the sheer scale of everything named after Colston was brought into the light, and the campaigners, sensing success, went from one to the other, asking the question.
Over the next couple of years, one or two, then three or four, institutions made decisions. The Colston Yard pub changed its name to the Bristol Yard with not much fuss. There was months of consultation and projects working with historians before Colston Primary School changed its name to Cotham Gardens.
Both the pub and the school, and the Colston Hall too, were three of the few things named 'Colston' that weren't connected with the Society of Merchant Venturers - the guild and body that created what critics call the 'Cult of Colston' back in Victorian times.
They were not for budging, and rebuffed calls to consider renaming both Colston's Girls' School and the private Colston's School.
Then, in early 2019, St Mary Redcliffe School
announced it had completely changed all the names of its 'houses' into which pupils are streamed, and the one named Colston was being renamed in honour of a black American female mathematician who worked out the equations which took man to the moon.
But still, throughout all this, the statue remained - the most obvious symbol for anyone arriving in the city centre of Bristol for the first time.
Getting it removed completely seemed ambitious. Bristol had elected a man who resigned his membership of the Merchant Venturers to stand for election as an independent, George Ferguson, in 2012, and the statue's presence was off the agenda.
In the days after it was toppled, Mr Ferguson said he regretted not doing anything sooner.