#43 RIAT ’17
The Royal International Air Tattoo is an annual excuse for many of the world’s air forces to congregate and show their cool stuff off to vast crowds: a full long weekend of fast pointy things, military nostalgia and incredibly loud engine noises. It’s a delight, despite being near Swindon, and the only hard part is choosing just one badge to pick out of the thousands upon thousands on offer. I got this patriotic little Eurofighter after some internal consternation.

#44 HAMPTON COURT PALACE
The second (and last… for now) astronomical clock in my collection! This one, from Hampton Court, is from 1540 and still works. On the Thames upstream of London, Hampton Court is probably the best of London’s royal palaces: a huge, sprawling and extremely engaging architectural pile, half authentic Henry VIII Tudor bits, half Dutch William-era English Baroque (a 1690s refurb was cancelled halfway through owing to the death of Queen Mary II.)

#45-49 WELSH ADVENTURE 2017
I went to Snowdonia with my parents and partner in the summer of ’17 and, well, went a little bit mad.
Cadw, the Welsh heritage organisation, produce custom badges for all their castles, with Caernarfon and Conwy shown. We climbed to the top of Mount Snowdon honestly but rode the Snowdon Mountain Railway down (it was raining and my other half has short legs). No.8 is from Portmeirion, where The Prisoner TV series was filmed, and the train is one of the mini-Garratts from the Welsh Highland Railway (the loco has a fascinating history, having been built to haul crops on South African fruit 5lines that were themselves built from surplus First World War trench railways). After this splurge I started restricting myself to one or two per holiday.

#50 NATIONAL MARITIME MUSEUM
The National Maritime Museum in Greenwich has been knocked about a bit by a refurb and is quite difficult to navigate (I’ll always be bitter about the loss of the 20th Century Seapower gallery) but is still an unending treasure, especially the new Nelsonian and Empire galleries, which present nuanced and compelling histories of the period when Britain – for better or worse – ruled the waves. This little pewter ship of the line is a first-rate souvenir of the place. Background is NAM Rodger’s “The Command of the Ocean.”#50A
Some years ago I was struggling quite badly with a temporary job posting I absolutely loathed and which made me deeply morally uncomfortable. To cheer me up, my then girlfriend* got some DIY advent calendar boxes and filled them with little gifts, one for each day I had remaining in that job, each with a tiny accompanying letter. One of those was this badge featuring a naval crown – note that it’s made of sails and sterms – which has somehow ended up as a recurring theme in our relationship.

#51 LEAF (Dartmoor)
On a heavily delayed train west to Devon to visit the Reeves, I found myself chatting (as I commonly do on trains) with a lady across the table from me. She turned out to be the chief executive of the farming-environmental charity LEAF, and as I was working on a farming related policy area at the time we had an excellent and (I hope mutually) enlightening conversation about work. She gave me this LEAF badge as a present. Background is Philip’s book A Darkling Plain.

#58 BRISTOL MUSEUM
The city museum in Bristol is a perfect urban museum: it’s a handsome old Victorian building with high ceilings and mosaic floors and holds a little bit of everything. It has historic maps, local conservation, dead animals in glass cases, an incredible collection of shiny rocks, the mandatory Egyptians (and bonus Assyrians!), lots of paintings and interesting ceramics, and of course DINOSAURS. Of which this is one. Backing is a lovely Bristol print a friend gave me for Christmas.

#35 CHURCHILL WAR ROOMS
The Churchill War Rooms are a museum in the basement of the Treasury building in Westminster. Previously the Cabinet War Rooms, they’re now a part of the Imperial War Museums collection, hence the badge celebrating the centenary of the original IWM. I’m honestly a little uncomfortable with the weird Churchill-hagiography tone of what used to be a more even-handed exhibition focused on the (extremely cool) set of planning and operations rooms, but whatever gets the punters in.

Background is said Treasury building. Churchill announced Victory in Europe to a cheering crowd from the balcony on the right.

#36 MONUMENT TO THE GREAT FIRE OF LONDON
One of the more handsome custom pins in my collection! Once a major part of the London skyline, now almost totally obscured by the City skyscraper thicket, the Monument was built on the site where the Great Fire of 1666 started.

The backing is the certificate you are awarded for climbing the whole thing… (Fun fact: the inscription at its base originally blamed the Catholics for the fire, a bit of sectarian horror I’m glad we’re mostly past.)

#37 ROYAL ARMOURIES
The unofficial symbol of the Royal Armouries, a totally bizarre grotesque helmet from the early 16th century with horns, spectacles and piercing leer. You can read more about it here: https://royalarmouries.org/stories/our-collection/the-horned-helmet/

The background is a really cool knife my brother gave me, which is honestly the closest thing I have to a sword.

#38 OLD ROYAL NAVAL COLLEGE
Originally built as a retirement home for seamen, the Old Royal Naval College is the heart of the maritime Greenwich area (which also contains the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Observatory, and the preserved tea clipper Cutty Sark). It’s also an absolutely magnificent set of buildings in the English Baroque style, including the outstanding Painted Hall (which has now been refurbished – hurrah! – but they now think they’re charging £12 a head to visit what you could just walk into for free – not hurrah.)

#39 DOVER CASTLE
As the closest piece of England to the Continent (and the classic enemy, France,) Dover Castle has been continually fortified and expanded over several thousand years. Pre-Roman earthworks have been found around the site of a still-standing Roman lighthouse; a Plantagenet keep at the heart is nine hundred years old, the immense Napoleonic bastions, Victorian casemates and WW2 ack-ack batteries are more obviously recent additions.
They didn’t have anything specifically Dover-y at the castle, but they did have this handsome little rhomboid tank. Background is a booklet about the Western Heights, a less well known but almost equally impressive agglomerate of fortifications, which until recently was the site of a Home Office immigrant prison camp.

#40 WESTMINSTER ABBEY
Westminster Abbey is one of the best churches in Britain, being absolutely chocka with dead kings and queens, poets and sea-officers. It’s also very near where I work. And yet I never visited until 2017! We fixed that with a visit from my Copenhagen friend, along with a ride on the (now defunct) London DUKWs.

#41 CHATHAM DOCKYARD
Chatham, down among the many low-lying mud-flat spurs of the Thames estuary, was for centuries one of the most important dockyards of the Royal Navy. In the 20th century the increasing size and complexity of capital ships and the confines of the River Medway shifted the dockyard first to escorts and submarines, and ultimately closed it entirely. The historic dockyard there is both a fantastic museum of Warship Stuff and an artifact in its own right, with vast old hangar structures, preserved warships and a line of 18th century fortifications.

#42 KENSINGTON PALACE
Kensington Palace sits at the far west end of the parakeet-infested Hyde Park, not far from Exhibition Road and various Prince Albert themed megastructures. It currently still officially houses Prince William and various pointless minor members of the royal family, but large sections are now a museum run by Historic Royal Palaces.

Its main draw at time of visiting was a Princess Diana fashion show (hard pass), a really excellent William and Mary exhibition, and some Queen Victoria apartments which did their best to ascribe some interesting and dynamic human qualities to Vic but still managed to paint a portrait of a rather sad, boring sex maniac. Lovely palace though.

#25 NEWPORT TRANSPORTER BRIDGE
I had a job in Newport, South Wales back in late 2016. One of the city’s more interesting attractions is the Transporter Bridge, a wonderful, completely mad piece of Edwardian infrastructure (imagine halfway between a cable ferry and a chairoplane). In their gift shop was this little “FONTB” (Friends of Newport Transporter Bridge) badge.

GIFT: NEWPORT SHIELD
My team at work had cottoned on to my love of badges, and as part of my very nice leaving do they gave me this (the Newport crest appears to have been soldered onto a two-flags badge. I wonder what’s underneath…)

#26 UK SUPREME COURT
The symbol of the UK Supreme Court is to my mind one of the loveliest pieces of government graphic design. Note the omega (representing the court of last resort) which also resembles scales (justice), and the floral motif combining the national plants of England (rose), Scotland (thistle), Wales (leek) and Northern Ireland (flax). It’s free to visit, and well worth a peek around if you’re in Westminster.

#27 LOCH NESS
Nessie! Presented against a background of another, ceramic Nessie bought at one of the many gift shops that fringe the loch. Part of a trip round Scotland for New Year 2016/17.

GIFT: CUBA
One of my friends on the Scotland new year trip had just been to Cuba, and gave me this little Cuban flag badge. I’ve never been, though I would like to one day. (I didn’t have anything Cuban in the house to serve as a background, so the backing here is the only thing even tenuously related: RUM.)

#28 CASTELL COCH
The Welsh heritage organisation Cadw have seized on the pin opportunities presented by looking after lots of castles (unlike English Heritage!) and produced pin badges representing each of theirs (you’ll see Conwy and Caernarfon later.) Castell Coch is a deliberate fairytale castle, built by eminent Victorian architect William Burges on the site of a much older fort. It has some of the loveliest interiors in Britain.

#29 BUDAPEST 3
The third (and last, I’d calmed down a bit by this point) Budapest badge. Stuck on an amusing dog that my Hungarian pall Lacc gave me (I met him IRL for the first time on this trip.) I really quite like the deep green going on here.

#30-31 – PRAGUE AND ČESKÝ KRUMLOV

In Spring 2017 I attended a friend’s wedding in the Old Town Hall of Prague. If you’re at all interested in early modern history, Prague is one of Europe’s best cities, and one of its many many highlights is this 15th century astronomical clock, now the oldest functional one in the world. You can read loads about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prague_astronomical_clock

As part of the same trip, we visited Český Krumlov, a town in southern Bohemia possessing what Simon Winder described as “a castle complex of ineffable charisma”. He’s right, you know.

I didn’t have a specifically Czech backing, so used a Joseph Roth anthology, a gift from my friend Alex.

GIFT: CHARLES BRIDGE
A gift from my friend Lilla, who was also in Prague in 2017. Another of Prague’s many wonders is the 600-year-old Charles Bridge. This badge shows the defensive towers (which saw actual combat during the Swedish occupation in the Thirty Years War) and the rows of baroque saintly statues. I saw this badge in town but went for the astronomical clock instead – glad I have both!
The backing is the cover of The Blonde Hurricane by Jenő Rejtő (another gift from Lilla, who is something of a blonde hurricane herself.)

#32 DOCKLANDS MUSEUM

One of the less well known treasures of London’s East End is the Docklands Museum in Canary Wharf. It’s an absolutely fantastic place, and highly recommended.

This badge is a Roman owl, symbol of the goddess Minerva. I don’t actually dislike the owl, but since buying this I’ve seen it in a number of other museums and realise it’s generic rather than specific to the Docklands.

#33 TAMWORTH CASTLE

My partner used to live not far from Tamworth, which a thousand years ago was home to the kings of Mercia, ruling from their hilltop castle. Now run by the local council, its grounds are a lovely public park, and the castle interiors have been restored to also present Norman, Jacobean and Victorian periods, with many interesting artifacts (including, I recall, a lot of pottery jugs shaped like people, all of whom are really surprised to be jugs).

#34 CROFTON PUMPING STATION

Driving from Bristol to London with a friend, we saw a plume of smoke from a very tall chimney and investigated. It turned out to be Crofton, a pumping station that kept the old Kennet & Avon Canal (which fell derelict with the advent of railways, but has recently been restored by volunteers) full of water. The station was operating an original 1812 Boulton & Watt beam engine, the oldest working one in the world.

This badge is another printed steel one, which shows a number of the canal’s locks.

#11 ST HILDA’S
Souvenir of a visit to Oxford: this is the coat of arms of St Hilda’s College, where my mum studied. Note the coiled snake, which looks a lot like an ammonite. According to legend, Saint Hilda of Whitby turned a plague of snakes into stone; ammonites (which are found along the Whitby coast) often had snake heads carved into them as symbols (or souvenirs) of this purported miracle.

#12 PEENEMÜNDE
Some years ago I spent an excellent road trip going around northern Germany visiting huge abandoned Nazi structures: the rocket works at Peenemünde and the holiday resort at Prora (which you can see in the postcard behind it – a small section has been turned into a youth hostel, tho’ the overall structure is IMMENSE.) You can read more about the travels (and a third ruin-exploring adventure, the postwar Teufelsberg in Berlin) here.

#14 BRUGES
Bought while passing back through Belgium coming back from the trip which also involved badge #13. We climbed the cloth hall tower, stopped for moules frites in the square, and talked about what a fackin fairytale fackin town it is, how can that not be someone’s thing? (Not technically an enamel pin! A portrait pin, with a printout under an acrylic dome on a metal back. Nice in itself, but I feel not as interesting as the cloisonné style you get with enamel. Maybe I’ll go back some day and get another.)

#15 WHITE CLIFFS OF DOVER
I bought this visiting my aunt and uncle in Deal, just up the coast from Dover. We explored the White Cliffs, visited the Fan Bay deep-level shelter and the acoustic mirrors used to detect aircraft and shipping there, and retired to the National Trust visitor centre for cream tea. As we were tucking in, a Spitfire flew overhead. It was possibly the most British moment of my life.
Background is a pocket Jane’s book of hovercraft my uncle lent me.

#16 ROMNEY, HYTHE & DYMCHURCH RAILWAY
Part of the same trip was a tour on the Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch railway, all the way along the coast to Dungeness. For those who don’t know it, the RH&DR is a charming 15”-gauge miniature railway that runs along the southern Kent coast. This badge shows “Hurricane”, which took me from Hythe to Dungeness power plant. You can see pictures of it here: https://www.rhdr.org.uk/locomotives/hurricane/

My favourite Hungarian visited me in London in the summer of 2016 and I was pleased to show him around all our best war museums. Top to bottom: The Tank Museum, Bovington; HMS Belfast; the Imperial War Museum in Lambeth and the RAF Museum in Hendon.

Most of these were originally posted on my Instagram. I’m keeping them on my blog for posterity and because Instagram is an utterly horrible website.

#1 МОСКВА (Moscow)
One of the largest badges in my collection! This is a Soviet-era badge depicting the Red Gate administrative building, one of the Stalin-era skyscrapers known as the “Seven Sisters”. The Cyrillic “здание на лермонтовскои площади” says “Building on Lermontov square,” the old name for Red Gate Square.
I visited Moscow in 2011 with two friends – you can read my travelogue here.

#2 TOKYO TOWER
Tokyo Tower is a bright orange knockoff of the Eiffel Tower (it’s actually several metres taller than the original, but rarely looks it in photos because it’s surrounded by big ol’ buildings), used for TV broadcasts and generally adding visual interest to the Tokyo skyline.
This badge was actually bought for me after the fact by my girlfriend, some time after I went out to visit her in 2012, spending a week in Tokyo and a week in Tendo.

#3 ORSZÁGHÁZ
This badge shows the parliament building in Budapest, which for my money is one of the best buildings anywhere. I’ve been to Budapest quite a few times since (it’ll recur as I upload more of my collection), but this was from my first visit in 2013, which I wrote all about here.
(This is quite an old photo, pinned to the red ribbon I used to display my badges before I started making cases to put them in.)

#4 VIENNA
The oldest badge in my collection, this one dates back from before the Great War to the Austro-Hungarian Empire – note the double-headed eagle. Little badges like this were popular souvenirs a century ago, as they are now. It’s resting against some Mozart balls from my Vienna-resident friend Alex.

#5 AMPELMANN
Ampelmann is the “green man” who was used at pedestrian crossings in Communist East Berlin. Nowadays, he’s a powerful piece of “ostalgie” (‘east-nostalgia’ – Soviet kitsch, basically) and has been marketed within an inch of his little green life – this badge was purchased at an entire Ampelmann-themed shop on Unter den Linden when I visited Berlin in 2014. More on that here.

GIFT: LANGER KERL
“The most beautiful girl or woman in the world would be a matter of indifference to me, but tall soldiers—they are my weakness.” This stern looking fella is one of the “Potsdam Giants”, Frederick William of Prussia’s absurd collection of larger-than-life-size soldiers. A gift from my friend Bill.

You can read more about the Lange Kerle (Long Lads), and see the painting this badge was based on, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potsdam_Giants

#6 TRANSYLVANIA
The crest of Transylvania – “the land beyond the forest” – has a black eagle between the Székely sun and moon, with seven red towers representing the seven cities of the region. The background is a wall hanging that Ionut and Adi, my fellow travellers on my Transylvanian road trip, gave me as a souvenir.

#7 TRYZUB
The official coat of arms of Ukraine (you can also see it on the hryvnia note in the background) is this gorgeous stylised Trident of Volodymyr. It’s an ancient symbol that goes back at least as far as the 10th century, although there is much debate as to what it actually depicts.
I bought this in Kyiv near the exquisitely strange St Andrew’s Church, as part of my trip to Chernobyl in 2016.

#8 VABADUSRIST
The only alternative to all the extremely kitschy Estonian-flag-plus-your-national-flag badges in the tat shops of Tallinn was this. It’s based on the “Vabadusrist”, or Cross of Liberty, a medal commemorating the *first* Estonian independence day from Russia in 1919. There’s a huge glass memorial cross based on it in Tallinn’s Freedom Square. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Liberty_(Estonia)

#9 LENINGRAD
Another Soviet-era badge. I bought this in St Petersburg, but those who read Cyrillic will notice that it has the city’s USSR-era name, Leningrad. This badge shows the golden spire on the Admiralty building, one of the most famous and distinctive points of the Petersburg skyline. The background is a fridge magnet from my lovely hosts, Misha and Olga.
It’s not clear from the picture, but this badge is absolutely tiny – little more than a centimetre wide. I’m very impressed with the detail.

#10, #13 – AMSTERDAM/DEN HAAG
These are souvenirs of two separate trips to the Netherlands – the first from Amsterdam, the second The Hague. Scheveningen is the beachfront district of The Hague, featuring three herring with golden crowns. Why crowns? I have no idea.
The background is a postcard of Escher’s “House of Stairs”, from the Escher museum in The Hague.