Bogside Murals

The Bogside murals — formally called the People's Gallery — are twelve large-scale paintings on the gable ends of houses along Rossville Street below the city walls. They depict key events in the history of the civil rights movement and the conflict, from the civil rights marches of the late 1960s to Bloody Sunday, from the hunger strikes to the peace process.

The murals are not museum pieces: they are on working-class street corners, and the neighbourhood is lived-in. Walking through them feels more visceral than any indoor exhibition could. The most famous is the Bloody Sunday mural, but "The Petrol Bomber" and "Death of Innocence" — showing a teenage girl killed by a bomb — are equally powerful. The walk from Free Derry Corner along Rossville Street and back takes about 30 minutes.

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The People's Gallery murals were created by three artists known as the Bogside Artists — brothers Tom and William Kelly, and Kevin Hasson — who spent more than a decade painting the twelve murals on the gable walls below the city walls. They were not commissioned by any political organisation; the artists funded the project themselves and worked without payment. The most reproduced image — "Bloody Sunday," showing a crowd carrying a casualty — has become one of the most recognisable political artworks in the world.

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