The voices are quiet at first and then loud all at once. On the vast empty beach of Gravelines in northern France, as an orange morning sun rips through grey clouds, two men prowl the dunes. In a few minutes they cross the beach, filming everything on a GoPro, iPhones in hand, stopping occasionally to pick at coats, trainers, sweatshirts, and empty teargas canisters that litter the sand.
Danny Thomas from Portsmouth and Ryan Bridge from Birmingham are filming content for their Instagram pages, one of which is “Raise the Colours”, the account behind this summer’s surge in Union Jacks, of which Bridge is a co-founder.
