£115,000 granite block monument revealed for Parker’s Piece

Plans for an eight foot tall granite football monument in a cental Cambridge park have been established, subject to approval by a council committee

Parker's Piece is the birthplace of the original rules of footballFlickr:manos_simonides

by Grace Donnelly

This article is 11 years old

Wednesday January 14 2015, 11:56pm

The monument has been designed by artists Neville Gabie and Alan Ward. The project, entitled ‘Written In Stone – Interpreted Worldwide – Brought Back To Cambridge’, celebrates the Cambridge Rules; a code of rules for football established in 1848 at Cambridge University.

The 19th century rules underpin the Rules of Association Football that were drawn up by The Football Association that are used today.The original rules are are famous for allowing thrown-ins, goal kicks and forward passes, as well as for stopping players running with ball.

The monument will be eight feet tall and is set to cost up to £115,000, funded by various contributors from housing developers to business schemes.

The monument triumphed over a shortlist that included a life sized female referee, a sculpture spelling out the words ‘goal’ and ‘team’, and a metal structure, shaped like a goal with metal lettering inside. The winning monument is a large granite slab that will be engraved with the Cambridge Rules in nine different languages, and divided into equal sized blocks of the same number.

Gabie proposes the central block will be displayed on Parker’s Piece, while “the other eight will be sent as ‘gifts’ to worldwide locations tracing pioneering stories where football took root”. Recipient countries include Australia, Japan, Russia as well as another European country.

Discussing the project, Gabie describes how its goal in “celebrat[ing] this vast international [football] community and how it in turn enriches our own lives and cultural understanding”.

The monument is in conjunction with an interactive website that invites people from all over the world to share their football experiences and where they play using a variety of media outlets such as photographs, videos and audio clips. Gabie states the intention of this as “creating a worldwide visibility for the original rules and Parker’s Piece. This material will then be used as the basis for a multimedia outdoor exhibition on Parker’s Piece."

The project is anticipated to be completed by the end of 2016.

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