Topic: City of London Ceramic Mantle Souvenir (Green with Metal Coat of Arms)

[Rabical]

Hi all. Needing some help in identifying what this is? Looks like some sort of vintage souvenir piece, well obviously from London! Made of green ceramic with lighter polished rim, also has a nice metal coat of arms section screwed on top with painted England cross on shield.

Unfortunately i don't have access to natural light at the moment, so hope these are clear enough to see.
http://s9.postimg.org/et5qf6ft9/20151212_205602.jpg
http://s16.postimg.org/izi9c8clf/20151212_205617.jpg
http://s9.postimg.org/vseoufr0t/20151212_205708.jpg
http://s9.postimg.org/ph9he0psd/20151212_221711.jpg
http://s9.postimg.org/ska7he4r1/20151212_223221.jpg
http://s9.postimg.org/9a7sbp85p/20151212_224650.jpg
http://s9.postimg.org/60orrhuod/20151212_222007.jpg

Length - 24cm
Width - 8cm
Height - 8.5cm

Weighs 391 grams.

Also wonder who made it and what period it's from.

Thanks in advance.

[Anne]

Hello and welcome to the board.  :cheerleader: We may not be as populated as the Glass board but we try to be just as helpful, if not more so.  :bny:

I'd suspect it's a desk tidy or similar.... for keeping your keys. paperclips and pens in, or it could I suppose be an ash tray of some kind. City of London means the actual City (the square mile) rather than the whole of London, of course.  https://www.cityoflondon.gov.uk/

Desk tidies like these were very commonly seen from the 1950s onwards, as pre-war they usually included an inkwell, post-war and into the 1960's the biro was in more common use so an inkwell wasn't needed.

I assume there is no hint of a mark anywhere on the base?

[Rabical]

Hi Anne, many thanks!

Glad to hear, thought the threads here were more likely to go unnoticed, but i've been proven to be wrong! 

Ah yes that must be what it is. They would've been a common sight on the desk of some military sergeant from the 50s

Can't see any markings on it whatsoever.

[Anne]

I check here several times a day usually, as do some of the others. We're just not very vocal!  :24:

I'd been wracking my brain trying to think why the colour looks familiar to me: I have a 1960's/70s Lancastrian coffee set in this mossy green colour, but it's marked (as is usual for Lancastrian) so other than help date it doesn't help with maker.   :bh:

My Dad was a Londoner and we visited relatives there every year when I was a child, so saw a lot of the souvenir stuff that was around in the 1960s/70s, and I remember seeing the metal heraldic crests on things.