Stone company owner Brent Stevenson got to meet footballing hero Alan Shearer after Brent offered to produce 12 black granite plaques, including one of Alan. They have been installed in a York stone wall running alongside a new link road called Alan Shearer Way near Ewood Park, the home of Blackburn Rovers football club.

Brent Stevenson Memorials in Blackburn and Blackpool offered to provide the black granite plaques displaying not only football but also other parts of the town's legacy – the cotton industry, canals and trams. The plaques are 305mm x 305mm and are etched using a diamond impact machine Brent Stevenson Memorials purchased a few years ago from America (machines that are now sold by The Blast Shop in Manchester).

Brent says: "As a gesture of goodwill we donated these plaques and as a result we were invited to the official opening ceremony of the road." Other guests were local dignitaries and footballers, including Alan Shearer, which ensured the event appeared on both Granada TV and the local BBC news, as well as in the local press.

"I'm a bit of a football nut and I did get a buzz standing next to Alan Shearer," says Brent, although he joked: "But please keep this a secret as I am a lifelong Burnley fan.”

Brent Stevenson Memorials has done a lot for local communities in Lancashire, where it sells and fixes its memorials. Its biggest community project – again, all for free – is recording the names in granite of the 6,000 or so men in Blackburn and Darwin who died in World War I. Because there are so many, Brent's company is producing them a year at a time for the centenary of each of the four years of the war.

The towns had a war memorial, but it has never had the names of those who died on it. Local people have put a lot of effort into compiling that list and Brent offered to produce each year's list on granite plaques. There is not enough room to put them on the memorial itself, so they are being laid into the pavement in front of the memorial. Last year there were a lot of names of those who died at Gallipoli and this year there are a lot from the Somme.

Brent is also working with a cemetery that plans to recreate a section of the trenches that World War I so famously became bogged down in as it wore on. Brent Stevenson Memorials is donating 10 granite plaques, each 1.2m x 610mm, to tell the story of the war. They include pictures, again produced using the diamond etching machine, and text describing conditions in the trenches, with details such as the weapons used and the number of people who died, as well as those who suffered from various diseases (such as 'trench foot') associated with the appalling conditions.

Brent does not want to talk about the cost of his contributions to these and other local projects, but it would clearly run into tens of thousands of pounds if they were produced commercially. But Brent is not charging anything for them.

He says he is doing it because it is for the local community. "It's so poignant. A hundred years ago my two boys would have been serving and they could so easily have been among the names on the lists of those killed. It was so random, this loss of life in such a stupid way. By getting involved with these projects it becomes so real to us."