A man who suffered racist abuse as a child has written a one-man show about his experiences of growing up as a mixed-race person in rural England.

Ashton Owen, 25, will perform his show, titled Outskirts, at Sheringham Little Theatre in north Norfolk.

It will premiere virtually on 22 March and Mr Owen will play more than a dozen characters from his childhood.

He said: “I hope the play gets people to think about what they say and do and how it impacts on people of colour.”

The performance is part of the theatre’s Rewriting Rural Racism project, being led by young performers in light of the Black Lives Matter movement and its rise to prominence after the death of George Floyd in the United States last year.

Mr Owen, whose father is of Jamaican heritage, said: “We are trying to make people more aware of issues faced by people living in rural areas, by highlighting real experiences, so they realise it happens here as well as the United States.”

Black Lives Matter activists have launched a toolkit designed to help rural communities across the UK to fight racism in their local area.

Their campaign, BLM in the Stix, is aimed at building on the momentum of June and July, when more than 260 towns and cities held anti-racism protests, from Monmouth in south Wales to Shetland in Scotland. It offers rural communities support to take a stand against racism at a local level.

The online toolkit was launched on Saturday with a protest along the banks of the River Colne in Essex.

“This toolkit is about getting people who are not racist to become anti-racist, especially for people who live in rural areas who might be thinking we don’t have that much racism around here,” said Gurpreet Sidhu, founder of the Wivenhoe Black Lives Matter group and co-organiser of the protest.

The toolkit, developed by Wivenhoe BLM supporters with help from Stand up to Racism Colchester and the Local Equality Commission, provides resources on how to start a campaign in a rural setting, describing some of the key challenges as well as ways to overcome this. It is targeted at white people in rural areas who want to stand up against racism but might not know where to start.