‘They don’t want us here’: Reworking neighbourhood nationalism in post-Southport England

From mid-July 2025, an organised nationalist movement known as Operation Raise the Colours (ORC) began saturating English residential streets with St George’s Cross and Union Jack flags. Emerging one year after the Southport riots of summer 2024, ORC has converted lampposts, roundabouts and motorway bridges into a communicative grid that addresses certain bodies as out of place. This article asks how young people read, feel, and navigate this transformation. Drawing on three gender-specific focus groups and eight follow-up interviews with twenty-two participants aged 18–25, conducted between December 2025 and February 2026, the article advances three theoretical claims that together constitute a structural reworking of Les Back’s concept of ‘neighbourhood nationalism’. Where Back’s 1996 South London ethnography found neighbourhood-scale belonging to be sometimes hybrid and inclusive, ORC’s neighbourhood nationalism is durably exclusionary, deliberately engineered, and distinctly gendered. Empirical analysis develops these claims through the strategic translation of radical-right symbolism into mainstream patriotic respectability, the relational damage of flag-saturation among proximate neighbours, and the embodied risk-calibration practices that Muslim women perform in saturated streets. The article extends Mirza’s embodied intersectionality from a narratological into a territorial register and Mondon’s mainstreaming framework from discourse into space.