Home front: English flags on English houses

Words: Tom Reed

Images: Tom Reed

So come away, won't you come away
We could go to...
Deptford, Catford, Watford, Digbeth, Mansfield
Ahh, anywhere in Albion
Anywhere in Albion
Anywhere in Albion

All images shot on film in the Midlands of England.

The sound of England at Euro 2024 has been characterised by the roar of the travelling fans in the German stands, with each precious goal.

Back home, the quiet game makes its own noise, the patter of plastic glasses onto the ground, the sighs of spunking £8 on charcoal to burn £2 sausages.

The flicker of an England flag, hanging from a partially open window.

It’s strange, this tradition of draping the cross of St George from our houses. There’s a sofa on the street outside, it’s 14 degrees in July and someone’s having loud sex down the way, screaming “oh Derek”.

Yeah we know we are in England, mates.

Yet for every football tournament, the red and white flags are dutifully displayed from our terraces and our semis (try Viagra Derek) as beacons to our national side asking them not to embarrass us.

If we’re going to make up a chant to a tune by the eternally naff Bruce Springsteen then you better get past the Quarters.

Maybe football is the last defence against the retreat of society back into the very homes that we hang the flags from? As cinemas, pubs and libraries close, football remains the one place where people can truly congregate.

There’s few large-scale employers anymore, bar Amazon and the sofa is not just a place that life revolves around, its a place that many work from.

Perhaps the flags hanging from the houses say “I might be on the toilet but I’d rather be at the match?”

England fans out in Germany wouldn’t have missed the final versus Spain for anything, even enduring a train with a carriage full of Bristol City fans singing the hits of the Wurzels for the craic.

But the moment the last whistle blew in Berlin, they’d have been aching to kick their lived-in Adidas off at their own front door and to go and deal with the knots of the flag at the window.

What does it mean to be English? It’s a tough question isn’t it. Perhaps it means a fair fight?

That’s what Gareth Southgate characterised, a good man who kept England in the scrap till the end.

It seems many England fans see the national team as something more, something sacred almost, but the flags will be put away and the Premier League will take precedence once more.

As a World Cup approaches and divisive politics take hold globally, these flapping scraps of cloth can stand for a better future, something decent.

The England flag’s been misrepresented for years as something unsettling but we might have come full circle, meaning it can remind us of the struggles of being away from here but also what makes home.

We won’t be lied to or encouraged to repeat the mistakes of the past. We’ll look after our neighbours, like the people on that estate in Bermondsey where you can’t see the flats for flags and the mural of local lad Eberechi Eze.

You’ve finished your shit now.

A cat’s asleep on the sofa in the street.

Derek’s climaxed down the way.