Football not only takes place on the pitch, but we also see its impact on the streets. Join Sassy Holmes, Participation Producer, as we explore the importance of street art in our recent community project.
From the Rashford mural in Withington, to the Mary Earps portrait in Old Trafford, football street art speaks to and is for members of the community. The large scale temporary masterpieces respond to heroes in contemporary society, and are a canvas of expression, emotion and celebration.
This year the National Football Museum celebrates football street art in new exhibition MARKERS. Nine prolific artists have transformed Score Gallery into a street covered floor to ceiling in footballing heroes. Alongside this, we want to connect with our local community and take to the streets of Manchester, exploring the themes in our new exhibition in outdoor spaces.
For the past few months, the National Football Museum has been working with local charity Young Manchester, a youth-led partnership hub of over 120 groups and organisations supporting children and young people, to facilitate an exciting co-creation mural project.
Our first step was to find two artists to help deliver the project. We reached out to Oskar with a K, a prolific Manchester street artist who’s murals are graphic, colourful, and use letters and language to make a statement in the community. To generate those fantastic words, we recruited poet Ruth Awolola, Learning Officer at the Manchester Poetry Library, who’s beautiful craft will bring the content to life. Both Oskar with a K and Ruth have been developing workshops that will enable the young people to discover new creative skills and craft the content of the wall.
We think football has so much to offer, and this project will push at football’s creative boundaries. The group will explore different creative practises, from writing, poetry and storytelling, to mixed media painting, stenciling, and street art.
Next up our challenge was to find a space for the mural. You might think that finding a group would be the next step, but we wanted to make sure that the young people working on the project would be able to make a mark in their hyper-local community, and therefore the space we transform should be on their doorstep. We worked closely with Manchester City Council to identify an appropriate space for the mural. We wanted somewhere that young people aged 11-18 could access, not only for physically painting the mural but also for seeing and spending time around the mural, and we wanted somewhere that needed a bit of love and attention.
The council offered the basketball court on 5 Appleford Drive in Cheetham Hill. It was already due for a repaint, and it’s got a direct connection to sport, so it seemed like the perfect space to inject some life into.
A highlight success so far has been applying to the council’s Neighbourhood Investment Fund to repair the wall before the mural takes place. You can see from photos that although it’s a fantastic space, the brick was crumbling and exposed, and would make for a difficult surface to work on. We applied with Young Manchester for a large sum to render and repair the wall and we are delighted to say we were awarded the full amount.
This grant will be essential in creating long lasting impact; the rendered wall will help the mural to withstand the weather, and the young people will be able to see their work for years to come.
Since finding a space, we have been working hard to engage with the local community. Both Ruth and I have joined Manchester Youth Zone for their detached youth sessions on Mondays and Fridays, where youth workers spend time engaging kids in the area. We have knocked on doors right next to the court, encouraging people who live nearby to come and join our free workshops when the project kicks off. We’ll also be inviting the young people part of Sharon Thomas’ Cheetham community group to join us for the project.
So, after months of relationship building, thinking and planning, the project officially kicks off this Friday 23 August. Oskar with a K and Ruth will be working with the young people to create the content of the wall. The starting point is heroes, thinking about how murals can celebrate everyone from footballers to family members. This day-long workshop was followed by the mural making on Bank Holiday Monday, where the young people take the content they created and spray painted the basketball court themselves.
We can’t wait to see this basketball court transformed, and we hope the project will celebrate the people, places and spaces in the Cheetham community. Through creative development the mural project will not only celebrate heroes, but also celebrate the special parts of the place that they’re from. The creative sessions with our artists will help develop this, and the final mural will reclaim and relove this area that is currently overlooked.
We’ll be back with another community blog to see the progress of the project, stay tuned for updates!