In this entry I’m hoping to honour a stalwart of my flag designs, not a person but a lion, the lion passant that I have been using across a number of Black Country town designs. Read the rest of this entry »

Ettingshall was a flag whose final version differed wildly from the original thoughts that I had. This was in part due to the fact that Ettingshall can mean different things to different people and considered in totality, this covers a large area. Read the rest of this entry »

If we were to take the purest definition of heraldic art then we would single out heraldry on its own – coats of arms. Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes I come to create a design for a town and when researching not only do I find inspiration but sometimes I find that the near finished article already exists – the two flags presented are here are two such examples and incidentally from local schools.

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In the last couple of town flag posts I have been looking at a ‘family’ of flags – Bushbury, Oxley & Whitmore Reans – that are tied together by their railway heritage but all differentiated by other important local influences. Read the rest of this entry »

In the course of our search for a name befitting of the Black Country flag we have looked at inspiration from religious, artistic and geophysical sources with mixed success. This week we’ll investigate something that is a powerful symbol of the Black Country by itself – The Black Country Dialect.

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In many of the design explanations that have featured in these blogs you will have heard me use football, cricket and rugby teams as a major source of inspiration. This week I have two flags that have been derived from sporting elements, but interestingly, from different sports than those that I usually utilise.

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This week features another two simple and achingly elegant flag designs, both thematically connected through the contribution (apparent or hidden) of local schools on their communities.

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It would be a great achievement to get one flag flying, but I’m not entirely satisfied with that. That sounds a little ungrateful but there is a very good reason why flying many flags side by side is the best possibility and as such why I am aiming for that in my campaign.

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History is a rich and happy hunting ground when it comes to design inspiration. Over the course of these posts where I showcase my flag proposals I’ve shown how sport, education, geography and many other disciplines can contribute to a design. Although I do not think that I have skimped on my representation of history I felt that bringing my designs for Blakenhall and Bentley together into one post would be a good way to exemplify the way their histories impact on my designs nevertheless.

Blakenhall (and not Blakenall!) is situated just south of Wolverhampton and has a very close bond with its neighbour, in no small part by being home to the Royal Wolverhampton School – whose coat of arms I have used as a base to my design but modified to reflect the history of the town.

I have taken the blue background with three golden orbs from the school arms but rather than leave the orbs plain they were ideally suited to being modified to include sunbeams, which of course denotes the Sunbeam motor car company that was once established in the region. The chevron, whilst being an element in the Royal School’s arms is also a common element amongst the arms of the other local schools, it is kept white to be bold against the vivid gold and blue background. As a final touch a black wolf head is added to the top of the chevron in order to symbolise the shared history that the town has with Wolverhampton Wanderers who originated from St Luke’s school in Blakenhall.

Bentley has a big historical claim to fame despite the fact that there is not much physical evidence left of it. However there is some notable heraldic evidence that exists and it only seemed right to base the Bentley flag on this.

When King Charles II was escaping after his defeat at the Battle of Worcester he stayed in Bentley Hall, which sadly no longer exists. Then a woman called Jane Lane helped smuggle the King to Bristol and then out of the country, she returned to Bentley but discovered that her role in the Kings escape had been discovered. She subsequently fled the country as well, joining the King’s court in exile. After the Kings restoration he rewarded Jane with the prestigious right to augment her coat of arms with the three royal lions of England in the canton.

As such, to commemorate this important moment in history the Bentley flag that I have designed is a stylised form of the augmented version of Jane Lane’s personal arms. I felt it was important to use the augmented arms in order to fully capture the reference to  these historic events but this caused some difficultly. Her arms had not been designed to incorporate a canton originally and as such when it was added the design looked a little awkward and this effect was only increased when transferring the design to the rectangular shape of a flag. As such I decided that the arms would need to be stylised by simplifying it. So I removed the chevron as that was the main element that physically clashed with the new canton and just made the overall look a bit too busy as well. This leaves a background of blue and yellow with counter changed stars (counter changing is where the background and foreground colours swap over areas of the flag or shield). In the canton I have added one royal lion as a reference to these important events and the role that a child of Bentley had in them, I found the inclusion of three lions  made the one corner of the flag look too cluttered and disproportionate to the rest of the flag.

So there we have two flags that show history at work in a design in different ways. One design references its comparatively modern history that all helped to develop the town at breathtaking pace and bring it to the fore of British football and the motor industry. Whilst the other design references one mighty historical event where the future of the country hung for one moment upon a small town in the Black Country.

Article is written by Phillip Tibbets, researcher of Heraldic Art and co-founder of Heartland Heritagewear