The flag police of Finchley

Don’t ask about the red paint: that’s the impression we get in Finchley. If you walk past a certain Persian restaurant on Ballards Lane, a giant splatter is still visible on the portico above 3D letters that spell out its name: M-O-T-H-E-R. The more inquiries we make about this, the more varied explanations become. 

For one, there’s an opaque conversation with Ami, the venue’s handsome young manager. He distances himself from the flag in the window, saying the restaurant’s owner is responsible for its installation and the red paint was a “joke”. That’s not what we’ve heard; two different sources have suggested the red paint was a warning left to the “very pro-regime” owner. When we return for a second visit, where we’re supposedly going to meet this owner, he’s not there. Ami still is though, and this time he says the red paint job was perpetrated by supporters of the regime. 

The red paint isn’t an anomaly, either. At the dry cleaners up the street, Nasser Keyvani has a similar story: his friend Reza runs the nearby Rex Patisserie, another flag-bearing shop, and earlier this month caught a teenager clad all in black throwing red paint on his shop front.

It hasn’t always been like this. We’re told that in Finchley, nobody used to talk about politics. But since things changed in Iran this year, they did here, too — and understandably so, since the neighbourhood is home to the largest Iranian community in London. Now flags and paint function as a sort of morse code that you can register at a glance — who backs who, who believes what. Given this, tensions are rising.

Within minutes of entering his business, Keyvani is showing me a video of a dead body on his phone. The footage was sent to him by a friend in Tehran in January; the corpse belongs to one among thousands killed in a brutal state crackdown on civilians after weeks of demonstrations.

No one really knows how many died, executed by bullet or knife. It could be 7,000; it could be 30,000. Internet blackouts prevented accurate figures from getting out, though activist networks tried their best to cobble together estimates, compiling numbers of shattered and bagged bodies.

News trickled through to Finchley. Keyvani had greeted initial clips of massed crowds with excitement — perhaps, at last, change was really afoot. Now he stared at incoming missives from his former home country with mounting dread, waiting for the international community to intervene. When they didn’t, he explains, is when he put the flags up.

The flags are the reason The Londoner has arrived on Ballards Lane, a long thoroughfare that stretches up for a good 25 minute walk until you reach the High Road junction. It’s on this road where Finchley’s reputation as ‘Little Tehran’ (although this nickname only seems to have come into being post-2018) is most visible, via shops with Farsi inscribed above them, restaurants advertising Persian cuisine (one Italian establishment, now sadly shuttered, tried so hard to appeal to locals it was called 'Farsiano'), and well, lots of the residents themselves. And since January, the flags. 

It’s one flag really, but in excess, pasted in every grocer’s window, or hung above serving counters. The standard which hangs all over Finchley isn’t Iran’s current flag, a green-white-red tricolour stamped with the crimson emblem of the Islamic Republic. It’s a predecessor. Same tricolour combination, but the red emblem is supplanted by a golden lion in front of a rising sun, holding a shamshir (a curved sword). It’s the Lion and the Sun; Iran’s official flag from 1907 until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

Everyone in Finchley can agree on one thing: the flag means opposition to the current Iranian regime. What they seem less clear on is how each flag is intended — and the impossibility of decoding individual intention is causing an already fraught situation to worsen.

For some, bearing this flag is an endorsement of Iran’s exiled wannabe king-in-waiting: Reza Pahlavi, son of the last, vastly unpopular, Shah of Iran, who fled the country amid the mass uprising in 1979. For others, it means something a little different — after all, the flag predates the Pahlavi dynasty’s rule of Iran by some 14 years. 

In the Turkish barbers, we find soft-spoken Reza, who is not Turkish at all, but Iranian and works there seven days a week. Like the majority of the 20-odd people we will speak to on Ballards Lane, he is nervous at first to share his views. The flag was put up by his boss, he says. He supports it though. 

And the Pahlavis? 

“I support the flag, not the family,” mumbles Reza. 

Now 29, Reza arrived in the UK to study in 2014, following his father. While here, he converted to Christianity. Somehow, state security forces found out — Reza thinks from some writing on his WhatsApp profile picture. Last year, they paid his family in Iran a visit. 

“We are looking for your son,” they told his family. “He has done something”. 

He shakes his head. “If I go back, I will be killed”.

But unlike some on Ballards Lane, he doesn't subscribe to the notion that ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ and isn’t pleased about the current war being waged on Iran by the US and Israel. He doesn’t mind the alliance per se, but: “I don’t like it, it’s a war — people are dying”. 

Reza’s position is at odds with others up the road — at Buffalo Butchers, two massive flags hang behind a server, one the standard Lion and Sun, the other a Frankenstein’s flag monster melding the old Iranian banner with the Israeli national flag. It’s a symbol of hardcore Pahlavism — Reza Pahlavi has advocated for Iran to rebuild “historic relations” with Israel, and has supported airstrikes by Israel on his own country. In return, Israel has deployed its digital influence to aid Pahlavi’s quest to see Iran’s monarchy restored, with him as Shah, a 2025 Haaretz investigation found. 

Since the US and Israel launched their military operation against Iran in February, those in support of such ties have only got louder. Sundays in Finchley, we’re told by several people, are now regularly marked by demonstrators in SUVs zooming up and down Ballards Lane, flying an array of giant flags, including but not limited to: the Lion and the Sun, the US flag, the Israeli flag, the Union Jack and some “really ancient Persian ones”. Some get very exercised. 

At a recent Whitehall protest against the US-Israel war, organised by the ‘Hands Off Iran’ coalition who support the Islamic Republic “in its totality,” organiser Raza Kazim tells me, a prominent pro-regime attendee was stabbed. Charged in connection with the offence is Vahid Madaffard, another Iranian national who has strong associations with pro-Pahlavi groups. Across Britain, Islamic Centres — specific institutions linked to the Iranian government but used by Muslim civilians — have faced vandalism, attacks and protests by opponents. In Maida Vale, the Islamic Centre was the subject of a February arson attack. 

On the other side, a new group calling themselves Harakat Ashab al-Yamin al-Islamia (meaning 'Islamic Movement of the People of the Right Hand'), emerged in March 2026, claiming responsibility for a string of arson attacks on Jewish, Israeli and Iranian opposition businesses, organisations and religious sites across Europe, including several in the UK capital. Little is known about their origin or funding; some speculate they are a proxy for Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, others say they are merely “opportunistic”. 

I'm Moya, one of the authors of this story. For this short piece, Andrew and I spent several hours in Finchley, canvassing every shopworker and pedestrian we came across, and then many more afterwards ringing around for context and contacts who could give us the full picture. This report is the finished piece - there were lots of interviews behind this that didn't make it to print, but were essential in order for the journalism to be robust and gripping.

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The thing is, the most devoted on either side have become proxies, willing to play out the battle for Iran wherever they find themselves — including Finchley. Some die-hard Pahlavis in the area have even taken to policing those ostensibly backing their chosen leader. 

“They’re lunatics,” says a 25-year-old with long dark curly hair like a young Brian May, who’s only willing to be called ‘John’. John is second generation Iranian, born and raised in Finchley, and therefore says the situation in Iran “doesn’t impact” him as much. It’s different for the first-gens, he notes, who “just got here”. But the chilling effect on Finchley since the January massacres and the outbreak of war has been “wild”.