Wednesbury was one of the very first town flags that I decided to attempt after the positive reception that my Halesowen and Black Country flags had received. It’s development has been an interesting one, having had such a lengthy gestation. The funny thing it’s not that this flag was difficult to design really, rather it’s been a case of every iteration of the design has left me thinking that it is good but needs a few tweaks and I’d then have to go away and mull things over for a while.

Wednesbury

The Wednesbury coat of arms was my main call for inspiration and initially the flag was much more reflective of the whole coat of arms. I utilised one of my favoured techniques of taking the shield but bringing a stylised version of the crest from above it and placing it in the middle to form the flag.

Maybe it is indicative of the trend in my design philosophy over the past year but the flag has subsequently got simpler with each draft. I ditched the blast furnace crest motif that I had originally designed and instead focussed on the regal lion passant. This is when I looked at Wednesbury rugby club and took inspiration from their strip of white and black bands. As a result I simplified down to a white lion passant on a black background, the lion spans the design of the flag so that from a distance it will look like white and black banding.

The lion is crowned, further indicating that it denotes the two crowned lions on the towns coat of arms. As a finishing touch the lion bears upon its breast the astrological symbol of Mars, which appears in the centre of the coat of arms. This symbol references the Roman counterpart for the god Woden, after whom the town is named and is also the alchemical symbol for iron, an industry that became so important to the town. I don’t think anything else could be more suitable.

Woden’s legacy graces another Black Country town, Wednesfield. The coat of arms has lots of useful symbols to choose from, though I found overall that the colours and patterns needed to be condensed down in order to be suitable for a flag.

Wednesfield

Black and red were the easy colour choices to pick from all of the options on the coats of arms, owing to the representative use the colours have for the towns football team. These colours are likely to have been first used in honour of the bloody battle fought near the town when the Saxons overcame the Danes.

That battle is also reflected in the addition of the golden crown. There is a golden crown on the arms for the town – indeed there are two, so I have taken the shape of the civic crown of bricks but the colour of the golden Saxon crown to reference both. The golden keys denote the towns past lock making industry. Although the black and red in the coat of arms takes the form of a red chevron I felt that this fitted awkwardly when translated into a rectangular flag with the keys on the side. As such I used the horizontal blue and white bands from the coat of arms that represent the local canals and re-coloured them appropriately.

As a final nod to that ancient and godly legacy of Woden I added that same alchemical and astrological symbol onto the peak brick in the civic crown as a small reference to the old legacy that the town has and shares with Wednesbury.