The process of making a union jack is a meticulous one. 31 little puzzle pieces of fabric held together by sovereignty. I think back now to Cornelia Parker’s 2022 exhibit at Tate Britain, she’d presented a short film that I'd had little interest in initially, something I’d neglected to share with my date beside me. A sea of royal blue unfurled elegantly across the table and seemed to cast the whole small room in shadow. Stark white and deep crimson, from certain angles it resembled the flag of France, and from others the imperial shroud of the United States of America. By the end, the screening room was silent. Not in the polite fatigued silence of an unwilling audience but the heavy, pensive kind. It was as though the moment the pieces of fabric became the Union Jack it sat atop us, flowed across the walls and held us tightly beneath its watchful eye. 

Those heavy pieces were likely purchased in a place like this. Under grey sheets of soft rainfall, I imagine a flagmaker weaving between the aromatic food- stalls; past Lebanon and Turkey, all the way to Ethiopia; in search of the famed fineries of the historic marketplace. Shepherd’s Bush market has been a place for one culture to lay shoulder to shoulder with another for over a century. I picture the prospective flagmaker reclining at a Yemeni coffee shop as the stall owners chat animatedly across the aisle; adjacent from a tailor who sits in ruminating silence by her window, walls swathed in the types of bright, beaded fabrics the market is so famous for.