Official Platinum Jubilee emblem souvenirs go on sale

Souvenirs featuring the official Platinum Jubilee emblem have gone on sale.

The range from the Royal Collection includes a fine English bone china coffee mug for £15, an £8.95 tea-towel, and a shopping bag made from recycled plastic bottles, also £8.95.

Other items include a reusable water bottle for £9.95, a £4.95 keyring, an umbrella for £12.95, and, in the age of a pandemic, a bottle of Platinum Jubilee hand sanitiser for £3.95.

Each features the Jubilee emblem created by 19-year-old graphic design student Edward Roberts, from Nottinghamshire.

Mr Roberts’ design was selected as the winning entry in The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Emblem Competition, run by the Victoria & Albert Museum in conjunction with Buckingham Palace.

A continuous line drawing, it symbolises the Queen’s long reign, with the purple colour reflecting the Queen’s Robe of Estate, worn at her Coronation in 1953.

The font used for the lettering is Perpetua, which means “forever” and imitates the font style that appeared on the Coronation Order of Service.

Mr Roberts has also worked with the Royal Collection Trust to design an additional emblem of the UK’s national flowers in the same style as his winning entry.

The continuous line drawing traces the outline of a rose for England, a daffodil for Wales, a thistle for Scotland and a shamrock for Northern Ireland.

Three new products will incorporate this design in the coming weeks – socks made in Wales, costing £16; a fine English bone china coffee mug made in Stoke-on-Trent and priced at £25; and a tin of shortbread biscuits, for £12.95, made in Scotland.

Each will be sold in a limited edition of 2,022 in recognition of the Queen’s historic Jubilee year.

Mr Roberts visited the Potteries in Stoke-on-Trent, where official commemorative china has been made for the Royal Collection Trust for nearly 30 years, to see the work on the items.

He learned how to apply a decal of his design on to a fine bone china mug to prepare it for firing, working on a yellow cover coat which allows the print to be transferred on to the chinaware and is burnt off in the firing process.

He said it is lovely to see the souvenirs in the shops, adding: “With the new design, I wanted to create a set of products that stayed true to and worked well alongside the emblem design.

“Like my original submission, the flowers are part of a continuous line, capturing the delicate nature of these national symbols.