Streetly is a town in the Walsall borough, and this may not come as a surprise but its name is derived from a street. Not just any street through – an important Roman Road known as Icknield Street.

Streetly Flag

The roman heritage was an irresistible hook on which to base the design of a flag, the first thing that came to my mind when thinking of roman symbolism is of course the imperial eagle. As it happened this was a very fortunate icon to utilise in the design as when I researched the towns institutions I discovered that the cricket club logo was an orange eagle/phoenix creature. I elected to use the eagle and give it a yellow-orange colouring in order to tie it closely to the cricket clubs badge. To complete the nod to the Roman Empire I used a red background.

From this I felt that I should emphasise the ‘Street’ element of the name of the town in the design. As such I decided to place a black band over the top of the design, the prominence of its positioning showing how important it is and that it is based on Roman foundations (the eagle behind the band). To further identify the street in question I aligned it from bottom left to top right to parallel the real Icknield Street which runs from Gloucestershire (south west) to Yorkshire (north east). The golden horse shoe and white rose represent those two counties respectively.

Next is Tividale, the village associated with the town of Tipton. Rather than a design from first principles as the Streetly one was, this flag was more of a creative blend between different institutions – primarily the football team and a variety of schools in the area.

Tividale Flag

The blue and yellow colour scheme, whilst not universal, was reasonably common (appearing in the badges of the football club, Oakham primary school and Tividale community school), so that subsequently became the colour rationale for the flag.

Drawing inspiration from Tividale Hall Primary school badge, the flag was quartered. It should be noticeable though that the top half is a lot larger, the bottom half has no charges (extra symbols) and the dividing line between top and bottom is wavy. This has been done in order to reference the fact that the Netherton canal tunnel runs underneath Tividale. So the wavy line represents water and the smaller bottom half of the flag represents the canal being beneath the town.

I had to decide which quarters were to be coloured blue and which to be coloured yellow though, however not even this should be an arbitrary choice! Instead I opted to use meaning to make the choice. Trees or oak leaves appear in either the badges of institutions (the football club) or in their name (Oakham Primary) – in the football badge they are coloured blue on a yellow field. This made me feel that the oak should be referenced by the colour blue on a yellow background. Looking back at the inspiration for the quartering, Tividale Hall School, it became apparent that the tree on their arms was on the left hand side of the shield. As such that became where the oak leaf was placed on the flag. This left a blue space on the right, which became easy to fillwhen viewing the badge of Tividale Community School – a yellow sun on a blue background.

Of final note for this design; I used a oak leaf rather than an entire tree. This was as I felt a full tree would be too difficult to make easily recognisable as an oak. Plus the fact that the sun was such a simple and elegant version, the contrast between that and a complex tree would not have made a harmonious symbol.