Marcus Rashford Mural Tributes – School Visit

October 10, 2024

Children from Beaver Road Primary School recently visited Manchester Archives at Manchester Central Library to view items from the Marcus Rashford Mural tributes collection. The Rashford Mural collection has been preserved and made accessible for educational activities with funding from Manchester Libraries Trust.

The Rashford Mural was commissioned by Withington Walls and painted by artist AkseP19 in 2020. It was created to recognise Marcus Rashford’s efforts to help tackle food poverty during the Covid19 pandemic. In 2021, after the UEFA Euro 2020 final, the mural was vandalised. In the days that followed, local people from Withington and beyond posted messages of support for Rashford on the mural before it was restored. These tributes were later collected and deposited at Manchester Archives, providing a record of this powerful moment of ant-racist community action.

Children from the school were given a brief tour of Central Library and then enjoyed some time in the archives search room, learning more about archives and getting an opportunity to handle some of the Marcus Rashford mural tributes to consider their meaning and importance.

The children worked on a short activity based on the tributes before visiting the archive strong rooms and finding out more about the different collections held at the library. Then there was a final group discussion thinking about what stands out about the collection, and how to share the messages from the collection with more people.

Thank you so much to the children of Beaver Road Primary School for visiting! We loved sharing the tributes with you and hope to welcome many more schools from across Manchester to look at this fantastic collection. We also hope to produce a digital learning resource based on the collection in the future – watch this space!

The Rashford Mural collection has been preserved and made accessible for educational activities with funding from Manchester Libraries Trust.

To make a donation to support future activities like this, visit our donation page.