A new mural on a Liverpool street pays tribute to people who took a stand during the city's toughest days.
Produced by John Culshaw, the mural has been painted on the side of a home on Imison Street, Walton. It commemorates the 1981 People's March for Jobs, during which hundreds of unemployed people walked 280 miles from Liverpool's Pier Head to London in order to make their voices heard.
Often likened to the 1936 Jarrow Crusade, the march began in Huddersfield and picked up the Liverpool contingent on the way to the capital. Before setting off from Liverpool city centre, the city's parish church held a service from a number of Christian churches, attended by the Anglican Bishop of Liverpool, the Catholic Archbishop of Liverpool, as well as representatives from the Methodist church, the United Reformed Church, the Baptist Union and the Salvation Army.
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The march took place two years into Margaret Thatcher's premiership - a time of extremely high unemployment in the United Kingdom. More than 2.5m people were out of work across the country and Liverpool was hit particularly hard by the recession.
In March of this year, historian Greig Campbell told the ECHO: "It's quite a unique event. This is young, unemployed people who felt so marginalised and they had such fear for their own futures, they actually got collectivised and self-organised, with very little help from the institutional labour movement."
Keith Mullen was 19 at the time of the march. He said: "I was a kid who'd been unemployed since I left school. I'd taken part in several Youth Training or Youth Opportunities schemes. I'd even been a gravedigger for a few months.
"Everyone has the right to work, the ability to sustain yourself. But we were part of that first generation who were coming out of school and realising that there were no jobs. Our future was unemployment. So we marched."
It took 28 days for the group to march from the North to London. In the capital, the group was hosted by the Greater London Council (GLC). The GLC hung a banner displaying the number of unemployed people in the city on a banner across the river from parliament.
More than 100,000 people joined a rally in Trafalgar Square before the marchers delivered a petition to Downing Street but the Prime Minister refused to meet them. Unemployment rose above 3m later in the decade and Mrs Thatcher remained in office.
The mural is the first part of a grassroots community heritage scheme called Giz a Job - taking its name from Yosser Hughes' catchphrase in Alan Bleasdale's 'Boys from the Blackstuff', which illustrated the impact of soaring unemployment in Liverpool in the early 1980s. The scheme aims to provide an oral history of the march and will tell the stories of those who were part of it.
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