Two-year-old James Bulger was led away from New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, England, and murdered by two 10-year-old boys, who became the youngest convicted murderers in modern English history.

On 12 February 1993 in Merseyside, England, two 10-year-old boys, Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, abducted, tortured, and murdered a two-year-old boy, James Patrick Bulger. Thompson and Venables led Bulger away from the New Strand Shopping Centre in Bootle, where Bulger was visiting shops with his mother. His mutilated body was found on a railway line two and a half miles away in Walton, Liverpool, two days later.

The New Strand Shopping Centre, known locally simply as The Strand, is the main shopping centre in Bootle, Merseyside, England. Opened in 1968, it was part of a larger Bootle redevelopment during this period, which was also complemented by the establishment of the Girobank headquarters in nearby Netherton. The site occupied by the shopping centre was formerly Victorian houses, in streets that were named after American states. The decision on naming the shopping centre was done so via a public competition, with an 11-year-old school girl submitting the winning entry of "New Strand" in 1965. The Strand opened at a cost of £5 million in 1968, in the centenary year of Bootle receiving its municipal charter.

Bootle is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Sefton, Merseyside, England, which had a population of 51,394 in 2011; the wider Parliamentary constituency had a population of 98,449. It is part of the Liverpool City Region.