Southport must not be defined by the atrocity at a Taylor Swift-themed holiday club last summer, its leaders have said, a year on from the murders.
The Merseyside town will hold a three-minute silence and lower flags on public buildings on Tuesday in tribute to those caught up in the attack on 29 July last year.
Families of the victims have requested that there are no vigils or large public gatherings and that flowers are not left at schools or the scene of the killings.
In line with the wishes of those affected, public bodies are not describing the day as an anniversary.
The families of the three girls murdered – six-year-old Bebe King, Elsie Dot Stancombe, seven, and Alice da Silva Aguiar, nine – asked for privacy to deal with an “extremely painful and personal time”.
Patrick Hurley, the Southport MP, said it would be a “really emotional day” for the seaside town, which was bearing the “long-lasting detrimental psychological and emotional impact” of the attack.
“We know that what happened in July last year is always going to be a part of the town’s history but there’s so much more to Southport than that,” he said.
“It’s a day to remember the girls who were killed and it’s a day to remember the response of the community when everybody came out and supported everybody else … [it was] just an overwhelming tidal wave of love given to the people of the town.”
Police intelligence officers are monitoring social media for attempts to stir up disorder in and around Southport this week, fearing a repeat of the anti-immigrant riots that spread across England after the stabbings last summer.
Concerns that agitators might latch on to the Southport commemoration have heightened after the unrest in the Essex town of Epping last week, with other protests at the weekend in Leeds, Norwich and Nottinghamshire.
Hurley said: “The only thing we want people to travel to Southport for is to enjoy the prom, have a fish and chip supper and some ice-cream down on Lord Street. Spend some money in Southport, but if you come in to cause trouble, we don’t want you.”
The Labour MP, who was elected 25 days before the atrocity, said there would be other “flashpoints” in the coming months as a public inquiry investigates the “wholesale failure” to prevent the attack.
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Sir Adrian Fulford, the chair of the inquiry, said the murders appeared “far from being an unforeseeable catastrophic event”, given the 17-year-old killer Axel Rudakubana’s well-known obsession with extreme violence.
Marion Atkinson, the Labour leader of Sefton council, said those affected by the attack wanted to ensure that Southport – a town heavily reliant on summer tourism – does not suffer as a result.
“There’s always going to be a memory of what happened but we can’t let this define us,” she said.
Southport’s town hall gardens, where hundreds of people gathered for a vigil a day after the attack, are to undergo a £10m revamp in memory of Bebe, Elsie and Alice.
Their families said they hoped the new square and community space, which is due to open in 2027, would “become a legacy inspired by our three beautiful and amazing girls” and act as a “thank you” to the town.
Phil Porter, the chief executive of Sefton council, added: “We want to be defined by our response to it rather than what happened to us, which was horrific, [and] the racist violence on the second day were things that happened to us. We want to be defined by our response to that rather than defined by what happened.”
