If you head down to Parliament Square this weekend you'll see an unusual array of flags on display around the central lawn. Oddly-coloured crosses, flapping chequerboards, wavy lines, golden birds, showy diagonals, several crowns, interlocking stripes and more than one stag, not to mention what looks like three pears on a shield. They're plainly not countries else you'd recognise them. What might be going on here?
That's right, 23rd July is Historic County Flag Day and these are the flags of more than 50 British counties, not all of which technically exist.
The near-luminous cross is Gloucestershire, the blue and yellow checks are Surrey, the the golden martlets are Sussex, the three crowns are Cambridgeshire, the ermine diagonal is Norfolk, the zippy stripes are Northumberland, the full-on wavy number with a stag is Hertfordshire and the three pears on a shield is Worcestershire.
If you're not familiar with the concept, "the aim of Historic County Flags Day is to have as many county flags flying across Great Britain as possible on one day, 23rd July, to mark the nation's historic counties."
The aim's been thwarted somewhat this year by Historic County Flags Day being a Sunday so most civic buildings aren't operational. But true county flag patriots raise their standards no matter what, and the Parliamentary estate has had its display up and flapping since the end of term on Thursday.
You'll recognise some of them as age-old classics. The red and white roses of Lancashire and Yorkshire respectively. The rampant horse of Kent. The black and white cross of Cornwall. The three swords - officially seaxes - of Essex.
But not all of the county flags are as old as you might think. The flag of Middlesex dates back only to 1910 when a crown was added to the three seaxes to distinguish it from Essex. Bedfordshire's stripe of shells - peculiar for a landlocked county - is a 1951 invention. Hampshire and Herefordshire didn't get official flags until 2019. Leicestershire was late to the party in 2021. Aberdeenshire's crowned castle on a gold and purple background was launched as recently as April this year. If you think some of the county flags look like they were designed by schoolchildren, at least five of them were.
And if you're now thinking, hmm, perhaps Historic County Flag Day isn't that historic after all, you'd be right. It was concocted in2014 by the Association of British Counties, an organisation devoted to keeping alive administrative boundaries long since extinguished. To be clear this is "traditional counties", not ceremonial counties, because their members are the kind of diehards who never believed in Cumbria and got grumpy when it was replaced by something that wasn't quite Cumberland.
They picked 23rd July as Historic County Flag Day because the flag of Devon was created on 23rd July 2002, and because that kickstarted wider interest in the adoption of county flags. But lest you think St Petroc's Cross is in any way traditional, it was actually devised by a student called Ryan on his home computer and won out in an online poll organised by BBCDevon. On such non-historic decisions are these so-called traditions based.
The first Historic County Flag Day gained momentum when it received top level backing from Whitehall, specifically the vexillologically-obsessed local government minister Eric Pickles. He detested the destruction of traditional counties by his predecessors, almost as much as he delighted in strangling local government budgets, and launched a series of initiatives to recognise defunct administrative areas and make flying their flags a lot easier.
Eric's dream was the resurgence of defunct county signage, a flagpole in every garden and a nation of austerity-strapped patriots. But it took until 2019 before Northern Powerhouse Minister Jake Berry took the plunge and filled Parliament Square with flags for a week.
As well as HCFD today there are also official days for flying the flags of individual counties, so for example Norfolk Day is next Thursday, Buckinghamshire Day is next Saturday and Yorkshire Day is on the first of next month. But these too are mostly modern inventions, a day plucked from the ether to celebrate an area that might now be a multiplicity of unitary authorities by waving a flag knocked up to look historic.
I love an archaic county boundary more than most, as I'll demonstrate at the end of today's post, but I have an issue with politicians wrapping themselves in flags and urging us all to feel 'pride' like what they do. Forever looking backwards and calling it patriotism isn't the best way to create a cohesive community. Cheerleading past glories with a display of flapping rectangles isn't exactly rational. And idolising an administrative system in which London doesn't actually exist is just what throwbacks like Eric Pickles would like you to think.
Historic County Flag Day has therefore evolved from a peculiarly populist mindset, a fictional creation deemed somehow traditional, and the fact it continues to bump under the radar is somewhat reassuring. But Parliament Square is certainly looking attractive at present, whether you treat it as an emotional display of collective pride or a multi-coloured fluttering of symbolic art.
If you'd like to check what your 'traditional' county is, the map at Wikishire is designed to show you. A far more detailed map has been provided, at Pickles' urging, on which ceremonial and traditional county boundaries can be compared simultaneously. You can then learn more about your county flag at the Flag Institute, and maybe go the whole hog and hoist it up your pole.
For Londoners it's generally a case of whether you live north of the Thames (Middlesex/Essex) or south of it (Surrey/Kent). And to help you decide which side of the line you fall I went to both of the historic triple-points yesterday, or at least as close as I could get without swimming into the middle of the river.
Middlesex/Essex
The dividing line is the River Lea, the traditional Anglo-Saxon boundary between the kingdoms of Mercia and Essex. Where I live in Bow I'm marginally a Middlesex man whereas if I were quarter of a mile further east I'd be an Essex geezer. The triple point with Kent is at the mouth of the Lea, as pictured here.
• In the foreground is Trinity Buoy Wharf - the remotest part of Tower Hamlets and the very tip of Middlesex.
• Across the Lea, back left, are the recycling dumps of Newham and what used to be prime industrial Essex.
• Across the Thames, back right, are the North Greenwich peninsula, the Millennium Dome and former Kent.
» The Blackwall Tunnel is a Middlesex-Kent link; the Silvertown Tunnel and Dangleway are Essex-Kent.
Surrey/Kent
The dividing line is less well defined, both geographically and historically, although Surrey was originally more part of Wessex and Kent was a bit more Jutish. The divide didn't matter much when all this was marshes, but the spread of the capital made it a lot more pertinent. The triple point with Middlesex is about halfway down the west side of the Isle of Dogs. On the opposite bank, if walking along the Thames Path, look out for 200 year-old parish markers on a stone bridge that used to cross the mouth of the Earl's Sluice, as pictured here.
• In the foreground are the top of St George's Stairs at what used to be Deptford Wharf - the northernmost part of Lewisham, ex-Kent.
• In the background is Greenland Pier, now in Southwark, once Surrey and that's the reason why these are the Surrey Docks.
• Across the Thames on the right is Millwall Slipway on the Isle of Dogs, now Tower Hamlets, originally Middlesex.
» The flags don't actually float like that, obviously.
