Walter Kershaw

Walter Kershaw was an English painter and muralist whose giant outdoor images on the gable ends of Northern terraces earned him the lasting tag of Britain's first graffiti artist, long before street art became a global gallery language. Born in Rochdale, Lancashire, on 7 December 1940, the only son of Florence Kershaw (nee Ward), a school caterer, and Walter Kershaw, an RAF flight sergeant who served at Duxford, he grew up with two younger sisters and attended De La Salle College, Salford. From 1958 to 1962 he studied fine art at King's College, Durham University (now Newcastle) under Victor Pasmore, Richard Hamilton and Lawrence Gowing, graduating with BA Honours. He died on 6 September 2026 at Leighton House retirement home in Rochdale, aged 85.

After a short spell teaching at Bury Arts and Crafts Centre he worked chiefly as a self-employed artist from a Littleborough studio. From the early 1970s he painted condemned and occupied brick walls across Greater Manchester and Lancashire with bold figurative and landscape murals: Giant Pansies on Ramsay Street in Rochdale, a Spitfire and an Alvin Stardust portrait in Bury and Heywood, the 153-foot Condor Ironworks frieze in Oldham, and the celebrated Inside-Out House on Derby Street, Rochdale, filmed for BBC Two's Terra Firma series. He often chose buildings already marked for demolition and treated the short life of the paint as part of the work. Local authorities sometimes chased him for painting bridges without permission on quiet Sunday mornings; those guerrilla colour schemes are now read as early British outdoor art.

Institutional commissions followed. Trafford Park Planning Department backed a vast warehouse mural unveiled by Denis Law and remade at still larger scale in 1993. The British Council and FAAP took him to Sao Paulo with student assistants; Recife Metro later installed his mosaic panels. Manchester United commissioned Old Trafford murals unveiled with Sir Matt Busby and Sir Alex Ferguson. In 1996 he painted temporary boards at Manchester's Arndale Centre after the IRA bomb and contributed to Sarajevo's Winter Festival. Studio oils and watercolours entered public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, Bury Art Museum, Salford Museum and Art Gallery, the Arts Council and Brazil's National Collection of Brazilian Art.

Broadcasters from Melvyn Bragg, Anna Ford and Russell Harty (with Eric Morecambe as co-guest) to Sue MacGregor and Janet Street-Porter interviewed him. A student film, The First Graffiti Artist, won at Cannes. Friends and collectors included George Best and Bob Monkhouse. A 2012 Guardian profile by Bob Stanley and a BBC Radio 4 feature reframed him nationally as a pioneer. In later life he faced serious criminal proceedings for stalking a former model and was imprisoned in 2021. Obituaries after his death returned above all to the murals that had brightened Rochdale's streets and to a career that helped invent British outdoor painting as public spectacle.