Street Banners
It’s a sure sign that summer has arrived when the banners go up in Tewkesbury’s streets. They seem to help lift spirits and bring a little bit of normality in a confusing world.
What you see in the streets, though, is only a small part of the picture; the culmination of twelve months of effort by dedicated volunteers. 2021 has been particularly difficult, both because of the restrictions on painters working together and because of our determination to put on a good show for the 550th anniversary of the battle. We’ve reached a milestone in our project; 186 banners. This is the maximum number we can deliver with our current resources.
The project has grown slowly over thirty-odd years , starting with a single banner at the Cross. The next year, there were three. The early aim was to persuade shops to fly banners and to flood the three main streets with them. By any measure, this project has been a success. Those first banners, fixed labouriously into Christmas Tree brackets, have grown to 186 banners in ‘proper’ brackets and have spread well beyond the three main streets. The banners have come to represent Tewkesbury in the summer, complementing Tewkesbury in Bloom’s floral efforts and being used to promote the town’s charms. Other towns, spread around the country, have used our experience to start their own banner projects, highlighting their own history.
At the heart of the project are the volunteers who spend Monday afternoons between October and May banner painting in Elizabeth Wyatt House. A very therapeutic activity. They touch up ‘used’ banners (they last an average of five years) and paint new banners all ready for the teams of volunteers who put them up on a Sunday in June. That’s grown into a complicated operation. Every banner comes with a leaflet describing its medieval owner.
The Banner project’s success has created a problem, though. Demand is exceeding our ability to supply, and this is a worry. One certain consequence of putting up the banners is a lot of requests for more, and we’re no longer in a position to meet these requests, so thinking caps are on for next year. There are a lot of pinch points. We have capacity for more banner painters, if they can be recruited, but we’ve reached our maximum storage capacity. The room is packed, and there isn’t another store room available. We also rely on a single person to draw the designs and manage the whole process. There’s a limit to what he can achieve. Putting banners up, and taking them down, in the town centre is a relatively straightforward task, involving walking the streets with a ladder and trolley full of banners. Further afield involves vehicles and more complications. We’ve got no wish to say no, and most banners we put up are visible to visitors to Tewkesbury, to the Medieval Festival or to the battlefield, or all three, but the time has come to think about the future if the project is to continue, bearing in mind as well that the people who started it back in the last century are running it still and getting older.
It might be that we will offer a different option, asking willing people to store and maintain their own banners with our support where they’re further away. What we don’t want to do is to say no, so we’ll be thinking hard and working through ideas through the summer, hoping to have a solution for next year. A solution which will help us get to 200 banners.