Buxton lived at the Director’s House, 91 Brick Lane, from 1808-1815, while he was director of the Spitalfields brewery, then known as Truman, Hanbury and Buxton. It was at the brewery, on June 4 1831, that Buxton entertained members of Lord Grey’s cabinet, who were in the process of enacting parliamentary reform and soon to decide on the abolition of slavery.

Buxton was MP for Weymouth, and took over the campaign against slavery from William Wilberforce in 1823. He sought to ensure that the slave trade was adequately policed, and gave evidence in his 1839 book, The African Slave Trade, that the worldwide slave trade had actually increased since 1807.

His concerns extended to other kinds of social reform, including work to improve prisons and end the Hindu practice of suttee, the self-immolation of widows on their husbands’ funeral pyres. He founded the Aborigines’ Protection Society in 1837, and was conferred a baronetcy in 1840.

Buxton attended Quaker meetings until he was baptised Anglican in 1812, and a plaque erected to him on the Friends Meeting House in Norwich features on the English Heritage leaflet and website Sites of Memory – a trail around English sites linked to black history, slavery and its abolition.

There is also a memorial fountain to Buxton in Victoria Tower Gardens, next to the Houses of Parliament, and a statue to his memory in Westminster Abbey.