Rashford's free meal tweets made into Google map

Footballer Marcus Rashford's campaign to provide free meals for children over half term has been turned into an interactive Google Map.

Joe Freeman has so far been manually inputting each individual venue offering to help provide food.

He is using tweets by Rashford, who is sharing messages from local businesses which have pledged to support his campaign.

Ministers have ruled out extending free meals beyond term time.

"I was eating my lunch, reading Marcus Rashford's tweets and thinking, 'This is amazing, wouldn't it be great if we could see them all in one place,'" Mr Freeman said.

"It was easy to do - I started off just by searching by each restaurant and the place they were from."

Mr Freeman is a father-of-two from south London. He says that while his family does not require free meals, there are some children in his local school who do.

He is now working on a website where restaurants will be able to fill in a form and request to be included in the map - and he hopes this will become a more automated process. Data is also starting to be pulled automatically from Rashford's twitter feed rather than being added by hand.

A growing number of councils in England have also pledged to provide free meals for children of families facing hardship during the half-term school holidays.