My proposal for a Netherton flag has a reasonably long gestation, nearly as long as my Halesowen flag. When I started designing the latter, a good friend of mine, James Tromans, a passionate Netherton native, was keen that I turn my attentions to his home town too!

Netherton Flag

Netherton is another town that does not have any official civic heraldry itself, which is usually something I enjoy as it gives me some opportunities to put original ideas into a design. The lengthy gestation is in part because I was putting too many ideas into the design causing my previous attempts to lose their elegance, which I have now paired back – realising that a coat of arms or even a tartan is a better medium for adding that level of detail.

As such this flag should look very familiar to anyone who has seen the badge of Netherton Cricket club with two diagonal yellow lines on dark blue. Blue and yellow seem to be common representative colours for the town, and the cricket clubs diagonal lines are included owing to the clubs clear seniority over other institutions. I did decide to make the two lines very close together in the design – effectively making a extra thin blue line in-between them. This is to represent the towns position, carving out its own distinctive identity whilst nestled between bigger towns (like Dudley and Halesowen for instance.)

Finally I elected to add the famous anchor to the flag – it is a source of great pride in Netherton that the Titanic’s anchor was forged there, there is even a statue of it in the town centre. I initially put in a generic anchor but then I happened to be passing through Netherton one day and had the chance to stop the car and take a photo of the aforementioned statue, which I then used to model my own hand-drawn version for use on the flag. The anchor is placed in the lower half of the flag to represent the name of the town which derives from the phrase ‘Lower Farm’.

The second flag unveiled here today is that of Walsall Wood, which like the towns name draws some inspiration from nearby Walsall. I started the basis of this design on the same quarters of red and blue as Walsall’s flag but went on to modify them into something quite distinctly different.

Walsall Wood Flag

Firstly, the upper left quarter is changed from blue to green in order to denote the wood part of the name. As wood is such an important distinguishing element in the towns name, the colour was given such a prominent location on the flag. The red cross shape in the middle of the design is used as a reference to the towns football team, outlined in yellow so that it stands out against the background red*. Finally on the green quarter is a golden eagle, a symbol used on the Aldridge-Brownhills coat of arms that referenced Walsall Wood. I felt that as the only official civic symbol the town has had, it was important to make this a prominent feature in the design.

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