The new crests/badges/logos thread

[ursus arctos]

Yeah, but it is sleepy with docks

You don't get that in Salisbury or Winchester

[Patrick Thistle]

My wife is from Gloucester. It has some quite rough and ready neighbourhoods and was recently quite good at developing homegrown Islamiist terrorists. I think people see the cheese rolling and know the Cathedral was a Harry Potter filming location and assume it's a bucolic country farmers market town. It's not.

The docks is now all developed into apartments and antique centres and whatnot. But in it's heyday it was basically Bristol North. It also shipped out a lot of coal from the mines in the Forest fof Dean area.

[Gangster Octopus]

I thought that the revelations that came out during the Fred West trial put paid to Gloucester's sedate image.

[Simon G]

I work in Gloucester and Patrick has it bang on.

The Docks area has had a regeneration over the last 10-15 years, with Gloucester Quays shopping centre opening 10 years ago. The city centre itself, and surrounding suburbs by and large, though is a complete mess and in dire need of the funding that went into the Docks.

Rugby Union is also God here as well.

[Flynnie]

I never thought of Gloucester as that sleepy since the Shed is basically the only stand in English rugby union that has a vaguely football-like atmosphere.

[Simon G]

I've actually played rugby in front of The Shed. I missed an easy try in the corner as well when my teammate passed the ball and I dropped it into touch.

Fortunately, it was only a few schoolfriends in the "crowd" as we ended up getting our ass handed to us by St Peter's School. Had I scored we'd have gone 5-0 up - we lost 42-0.

Happy days...

[ChrisJ]

I've lived in Gloucester for 30 years and I really like it. It looked after me at a shitty time in my life (admittedly, largely by medicating me with casual sex, cider and weed, but in a heart-of-gold sort of way).

It had, until just a few years ago, a higher proportion of non-white residents than either Bristol or Birmingham. I taught there for 5 years without encountering any racial issues, but I'd been 3 days in a Cheltenham school when a 9-year old referred to Andy Cole as a 'c**n'. Anecdata, but y'know...

The cathedral is lovely, an unknown treasure and the docks are quite nice, though flattered IMO by UA's pic. Glos was once Britains most inland port and the Gloucester-Sharpness canal was, when it was built, the widest and deepest in the world. There are some bits of the city that are rough as fuck though, including the estate where I met my wife and the area where she ran a school for 15 years. She used to come home shaking her head, and she's from Liverpool.

Patrick's wrong about the terrorists though. There was IIRC one guy (who refused to carry out an attack) so it's a bit of a slur to suggest we're "quite good at developing home-grown Islamic terrorists." AFAIK, Cardiff's managed three or four in the last few years including the white nationalist Finsbury Park Mosque killer.

[Patrick Thistle]

Yeah, fair point re terrorists. I just remember the in laws talking about it. (And it was a jokey way of referring to Gloucester not being a homogenous white kind of place)

I like Gloucester btw. It's just not what many people would expect. I'd believe that anecdata about Cheltenham though. I've been conditioned to hate Cheltenham anyway so it matches my assumptions of the place.

[Simon G]

I assumed Patrick's comment was a bit tongue in cheek with Gloucester's national news over the last 30 years being Fred West, Sajid Badat (said terrorist) and the floods of 2007.

I grew up in Churchdown so, despite living in Tewkesbury and being born in Cheltenham, I suppose I am a Gloucester boy at heart - just not the tiggers...

I also agree with the anecdata about Cheltenham. I think Beverley Knight once called it a racist town having attended the University of Gloucestershire (then the Cheltenham and Gloucester College of Higher Education) in the 90s.

[ChrisJ]

Yeah, soz, wasn't having a go, should have put a smiley or summat. I've always been impressed with the degree of inter-racial harmony in Glos, considering what fighty fuckers the locals are over just about every other issue.

Also, I should point out, in fairness, that Cheltenham voted Remain and has a regular(?) Cheltenham Welcomes Refugees stall while Glos voted Leave and... doesn't... However, my wife (our shopping and coffee shop correspondent) goes on about how nice Cheltenham is compared with the people she works with. (Your caretaker's family kill one guy with a machete... she's never taught in Whaddon.) So I feel contractually obliged to trot out the 'snobs and racists' line.

Edit: smiley face.

[Ray de Galles]

I never thought of Gloucester as that sleepy since the Shed is basically the only stand in English rugby union that has a vaguely football-like atmosphere.

Oh, Kingsholm is very raucous but it seemed to contrast with the town itself. I saw Glaws at Saracens on Saturday actually and their supporters were noticeable for their numbers and volume. A proper old rugby club, unlike the hosts.

[Hot Pepsi]

I periodically have moments of panic where I think I'll need to flee the US. Gloucester was an area I looked up because it looked affordable.

I've never been there. I have been to Gloucester, Massachusetts. Most famous for being the home of the Andrea Gail of The Perfect Storm fame. The film portrays it reasonably well except the people there have real New England accents. Most of the fishing economy is gone now, and that's brought some problems, but tourism and, I guess, people living there and commuting to other parts of the greater Boston area have made up for some of that lost economy.

[ursus arctos]

Also this

[Patrick Thistle]

Mrs Thistle always brings up the time her granny insisted she take a cup with her when she went shopping in Cheltenham because you could possibly just drink from a can of pop. In. The. Street! In Cheltenham!

The anti-posh streak runs deep in Mrs Thistle. Her mum came from Matson. It's ingrained.

[Simon G]

I went out with a girl from Matson - got on really well with her Dad, unless we got onto the conversation of the differences between Gloucester and Cheltenham.

I've never heard that before though Patrick - then again, I've only lived in the Cheltenham council estates when living there (the aforementioned Whaddon, Hesters Way and St Paul's).

The thing with Gloucestershire that I love, and I've never lived anywhere else in fairness, is how central it is - everywhere in England can be got to in no more than 3-4 hours - from Cornwall to the North East. Was brilliant when I used to follow Cheltenham home and away.

[Hot Pepsi]

Also this

Yeah. The list of names on the plaque by that statue is remarkable. Even today, the town only has about 30,000 people and there are years in the 18th and 19th century especially when a few dozen locals were lost at sea.

Deep sea fishing is like F1 but with none of the glamour and not nearly as much money.

[Simon G]

Back on subject - Stevenage have unveiled a new crest:


It;s basically Brentford and Bristol City mark 3.

[KyleRoteJr.]

Major change for the Belgian FA. The old one is fairly obtuse, generic, and too intricate, but I don't know if the new one is the right answer. IMO, the new one seems '60s- or '70s-ish, which I don't think is what they were going for.

Interestingly, the new one utilizes English instead of Dutch and French. I guess English is the neutral middle ground. I saw a lot of this at last year's World Cup: fan gear such as scarves, T-shirts, and beanies with "Belgium" on them instead of Belgique and/or België.

[KyleRoteJr.]

Major change for Guingamp as well. (By the way, in addition to Belgium above, this is the first time I've posted images on OTF. If I delete the images off my desktop, will these images disappear from the posts on this thread? Yeah, I'm tech-stupid.)

[ursus arctos]

There's also the issue that German is an official language, even though less than one percent of the population speak it as a first language, and its exclusion from things like this sometimes becomes an issue.

One can see English being used this way in Switzerland as well, given the unwieldiness of using all four official languages (the use of the Latin Helvetia in a similar way on stamps and the CH badge/prefix being an earlier approach to the same issue).

[ursus arctos]

Kyle, as long as they are hosted somewhere else, deleting them from your desktop shouldn't matter.

Nice update by Guingamp. I always found the rectangle off-putting. I wonder if the regional council has reduced their support of the club. In France, that kind of branding is often a condition of a public entity's sponsorship.

[Sporting]

Official languages: great fodder for quiz questions..

[Sits]

I like the new Belgian one, seems more Art Deco than Seventies to me.

[Patrick Thistle]

It's a very round lower case 'b' so it screams 70s to me.

[3 Colours Red]

It's pretty much just the Doors 'd' flipped.