Pin up

The response to the 600th anniversary of the loggerheads has been heartening.  There are lots of things going on! (See Loggerheads 2025).

Now a history-loving local entrepreneur has designed some pins to mark the occasion!  
The pins are on sale at Shrewsbury Museum shop for a very reasonable £2 apiece. 

 

A new book has now been published to celebrate 600 years of the loggerheads - click here to find out more.

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Salop? Shrops?

 

One of the confusing matters for 'outsiders' is deciding what name to apply to the county - 'Salop' or 'Shropshire'.  The names can be used interchangeably, but such loose usage can also lead to rows among purists. 

The county council was formed in 1889 and switched often between the two monikers until a ruling in 1933 confirmed the name as Salop.  But even then, it was felt to be too old-fashioned; and more rows saw the legal name changed to Shropshire later.

One of the rows was around the the new council’s arms, which you can see in the council's official handbook of 1890 (in the photo above).  The arms - as you can see - were basically no different to the arms of Shrewsbury, with the loggerheads front and centre.  Cue...: objections from the rest of Shropshire!

And the rows continue today really. The various kerfuffles are outlined in the new book about the loggerheads. 

A new book has now been published to celebrate 600 years of the loggerheads - click here to find out more.

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Modern art takes on the loggerheads

To celebrate 600 years of the loggerheads, the Shrewsbury Tourism Business group, BID, commissioned a few artists to paint a couple of broadband-cabinets and bollards, as part of the overall decoration of the town.

Their mission?  To interpret the loggerheads for 2025.

 The artist Snids took a bollard in the town's Fish Street.  She’s got the colours right – gold & blue – and. though she has not represented the leopard-heads in the traditional trinities, she has painted exactly six separate leopard-heads, which… is (sorta) a double-set of loggerheads! 

 

A new book has now been published to celebrate 600 years of the loggerheads - click here to find out more.

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A wax impression

 

Talking of the 1425 Great Seal of Shrewsbury, as we were in the last post, here’s another reference.  The red piece in the bottom row of the photo above is a wax copy of the seal.

Impressions of the seal would have been created by pushing the metal seal into some melting wax on a formal document - to signify the approval of the Shrewsbury town corporation.  (The loggerheads connection to the seal is that the loggerheads were part of its design).

You can find the glass-cabinet in the photo, with all its various seals, very simply: it’s installed in Shrewsbury Abbey, which is open to the public almost every day. 
No one knows how old this wax copy is, though.

 

 A new book has now been published to celebrate 600 years of the loggerheads - click here to find out more.

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Odd use of the Shrewsbury Great Seal

 

Here’s an odd thing.  We came across this sticker recently, attached to a lamppost in a part of Shrewsbury called The Dana.
What’s odd about it is that, for its central picture, it uses an image of the 600 year-old Great Seal of Shrewsbury.  (On the image of the seal you can just about see some loggerheads, which appeared in history for the first time on this seal).

But… what does it all mean?  The motto has nothing to do with the ancient seal and has, presumably, been written by a modern citizen of the town.  It reads: “One Hand Clapping all things in common all people one”.  But who ‘One Hand Clapping’ is, no one seems to know.

What OHC may have seized upon in using such an ancient image is that the seal was cut, back in 1425, to commemorate “the free commune of Shrewsbury”.  Perhaps OHC would like to see the free commune revived…?
It’s certainly wonderful to think that a dusty old historical artefact seems to have inspired a modern-day idealist…!

 

A new book has now been published to celebrate 600 years of the loggerheads - click here to find out more.

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How Well Do You Know Your Loggerheads??

 

The town council in Shrewsbury is running a special ‘Identify The Loggerheads!’ quiz. It’s part of the celebrations of the 600th anniversary of the loggerheads.

 The process of answering the quiz is a bit of convoluted … but here’s how it works:-

1.  Take a walk around the town's Quarry Park and its fringes.  You will find twenty posters on your walk, each numbered, and each with a photo on it of a set of loggerheads. Check the photo above for an example - it is 'poster number one'.
The council have provided a leaflet indicating where all the posters are (see pic right - to see the image more clearly, just click on it once to enlarge it).

2.  Each of the twenty posters shows a different set of loggerheads.  The point of the quiz is to remember where each set is actually located. (Clue: all the pictured sets of loggerheads are situated up on a public place somewhere within the town).

3.   Then, once you have identified the locations of the twenty sets of loggerheads, send your answers (numbered, of course) to the town council’s offices in St John’s Hill  – and, if your entry is correct, you go into a draw for a prize.  The deadline is August 31st.
(You don’t actually need the entry form, but if you want one, you can obtain one at the town council’s offices in St John’s Hill.) 

Sounds easy…   But...  Even for long-time loggerheads-spotters, this quiz is not as easy as you’d think!  
Loggerheads are strange in that you might see dozens of them every day as you walk around Shrewsbury, but you kinda forget about them after a while.  They are ‘hidden in plain sight’, to quote the phrase. 
So I found I really had to rack my brains to remember where each of the twenty loggerheads is actually to be found in the town.
It’s a loggerheads challenge!

A new book has now been published to celebrate 600 years of the loggerheads - click here to find out more.

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Smoking for loggerheads

 

In the old days when nearly everybody smoked, cigarette companies gave away a free card in each pack as a sort of extra incentive to get people to buy.  Depending on the promotion at the time, these might be cards of famous footballers or international flags or Kings & Queens and so on; and there were usually about twenty to be collected. 

This is a photo of such a card.  Perhaps Wills had put together a collection of 'shields of arms of local authorities' (?). It doesn't sound the most exciting promotion though....

A new book has now been published to celebrate 600 years of the loggerheads - click here to find out more.

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