Camden triumphs in London Borough Logos World Cup
Camden’s 1965 logo depicting four pairs of linked hands has won the London Boroughs Logos World Cup in a tight final against Hackney on Twitter.
The full tournament saw around 40,000 votes cast across multiple twitter polls with 33 logos from the 33 London municipalities competing for the title of best borough logo.
Camden faced Hackney in the finals with the City of London beating Brent to take 3rd place in the playoffs.
Camden won its crucial match with 54% of the nearly 3,000 votes cast during the 24-hour final.
About Camden’s Logo
The borough of Camden was created in 1965 from the former area of the metropolitan boroughs of Hampstead, Holborn, and St Pancras whose crests are shown below.
When it formed, the borough of Camden was granted a new coat of arms, featuring the red cross of St George, a golden mitre and three silver escallops – emblems which have their roots in the earlier metropolitan borough heraldry. But the progressive borough leaders felt that a coat of arms would be too backward looking for Camden’s modern aspirations so commissioned a contemporary logo.
Designed by Wolff & Partners to suggest voting, giving, receiving and unity, the new logo showed 8 hands clasping in a circle. Circles and hands are both popular symbols of communality and democracy which aptly captured the aspirations of the 1960s municipal government.
The logo was accompanied by a chunky serif typeface spelling the word ‘Camden’ which lent some historic formality to the emblem that has since been replaced with a sans-serif typeface seen at the top of the page.
Other than the tweak to the typeface, the Camden logo has remained unchanged since the creation of the borough in the 60s making it one of the oldest borough logos still in use. It is older in fact than many of the boroughs crests, some of which though traditional in style were adopted as the emblem of their boroughs more recently such as in Islington.
Congratulations from everyone at Open City and the Open House Festival to Camden. A worthy winner.
