I asked grumpy people in the rain why they were there. Their answers said it all.
The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee was less than a year ago, in June 2022. That makes Saturday’s coronation—or the “corry nash,” as it seems to have been decided people are calling it—the third major royal event in a year, after the queen’s funeral in September. An unofficial shortening of national events is a fixture of life in Britain: The platinum jubilee was the “platty jubes,” and even the country’s current cost-of-living crisis has been given the unbelievably stupid moniker of “the cozzy livs.” But outside in brutal rain in London during the coronation on Saturday, the “corry nash” designation seems especially grim.
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I knew that trying to get down to The Mall, one of the main thoroughfares that leads to Buckingham Palace, on the morning of the coronation would be an exercise in futility. People who like to be front and center for royal events have had two occasions to fine-tune their techniques in the last 12 months: how many hours to camp out for beforehand, what provisions to bring, where the best viewing spots are. A friend of mine who walked down the Mall late last night saw a man on a camp bed settled in for the night draped head to toe in a Union Jack blanket, looking like a dead soldier at his own funeral.
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Instead, on Saturday morning, I decide to head for one of the Royal Parks in the center of town, where big screens have been set up to broadcast the television coverage, including the King’s procession in his golden coach from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey where the service itself takes place. By the time I get down there, at 9:30 a.m., Green Park is completely closed off: It’s too full. Instead, a few thousand other people hoping to watch the proceedings and I are herded to Hyde Park, shuffling through central London in the rain. Many of my fellow walkers are decked out in full novelty Brit regalia: Every style of hat you could care to name in Union Jack print, flag-print dresses, various paper and plastic tiaras for the girls and crowns for the boys, some of which I’m pretty sure came from Burger King. There a good number of preachers down here too. One man just outside Hyde Park is carrying a sign reading “Repent, Confess, Jesus is Lord” in pink highlighter, saran-wrapped against the rain. “Prepare yourself for the coming of King Jesus, it’s going to be terrible, dreadful,” he shouts at the unmoved crowd. I feel sorry for the nonplussed Spanish family in matching raincoats who I overhear asking a steward how much of London is closed because of all this. “All the tourist places, really,” he has to tell them.
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“Aimless sort of guy isn’t he, talking to flowers and all that,” someone tells me of Charles.
Lots of people around me were intending to get a good bit closer to the action than this, and weren’t anticipating being herded like cattle trying to get at the big screens. “This is a disgrace. Why weren’t we told?” someone complains to his girlfriend, although it’s not clear who he might have been told by that the once-in-a-lifetime coronation of a new monarch might attract crowds. “I get anti-monarchists, when you see this. We’re being kettled. While they’ve been bringing money into the country I’ve been all for it, but you know what, fuck them,” another person rails, although he admits he’s mostly cranky because he didn’t take a piss before he left the house. There’s not much signal, so people are congregating around whichever stranger has managed to get the procession of the royal carriage from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey up on their phone.
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Eventually, we make our way into the park and over to one of the big screens in time to see the start of the coronation service. The mood here is celebratory but muted, not least due to the weather. There are families making touchingly doomed attempts to have a picnic—wet blankets on the floor, huddled around a damp packet of sausage rolls in full rain ponchos.
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This is far from the best place to see the ceremony itself in any detail, which people around the country will be watching warm and dry in their own living rooms. So why have all these people decided to come out and watch it in public? It’s not to show their undying support for Charles, it seems. I meet Debbie, Denise, and Penny, three women in their 60s who came up from the south coast for the day, and who apologized that they couldn’t offer me some of their pink prosecco because they’d run out of plastic cups. I ask them what they make of Charles, and they all look at each other warily. There is a pause. “Um … well, he cares a lot about the environment, doesn’t he? So that’s good,” Debbie says. “Aimless sort of guy isn’t he, talking to flowers and all that,” someone else tells me. “He doesn’t make one decision in his life,” another scoffed.
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There are plenty of people down here who just view this as an opportunity for what is affectionately known in this country as a “bag of cans”: an excuse around which to buy beers and drink them. One such group, three guys in their late 20s, offer me a Birra Moretti and tell me they just came down to “get involved.” “It’s a social, mainly,” one of them said. I leave them arguing with each other over whether they would join in with the pledge of allegiance to the King that will form part of the ceremony later on. Jack and Emily are down from Leeds and also nursing pints. “I don’t really know why we’re here,” Jack tells me cheerfully. “I guess we’re only gonna get two of these.” One little girl in a sequin union jack T shirt is passing the time by throwing shapes you would not believe to Handel’s “Zadok the Priest.”
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Others feel more strongly about being here. Ben and Anna met queuing to get into Hyde Park. They’ve both come on their own and so have struck up a friendship. “Nobody in my household was interested,” she says, “but it’s the only sense of Britishness we’ve got really, coming out for stuff like this.”
I think there is a strange kind of magnetism that happens with historic events like this coronation: People get drawn toward them without knowing quite why. Wanting to be near something, wanting to be able to say later that they were there, even if “there” only means standing in the rain in a park two miles away from the event itself. But it’s an odd occasion, for several reasons. If you’re minded to oppose the monarchy, as I am, there’s something depressing about seeing so much seemingly uncritical and uncomplicated positive feelings expressed about the existence of the royals in one place. There are protesters being arrested all over the city for daring to voice anti-monarchist sentiment, and online, people are busily reposting the greatest hits of British royal hating (like the actor Christopher Eccleston’s infamous Instagram post of the queen with the caption “Parasite in chief in her idiot hat”).
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But even if you don’t hate the royals, I’d argue it feels weird. Up on a screen, a centuries-old ceremony of enormous historic import is taking place, and beneath it, people don’t quite know what to do with themselves: watch respectfully in silence, or treat it like a sleepy afternoon slot at a music festival. There is a swell of ooos as the crown gets lifted up, and a cheer when it gets plonked down on Charles’s head. At one point, the Archbishop of Canterbury invites viewers at home to join him in saying “God Save the King,” which everybody gathered here in the park duly does. “Bit of karaoke, lovely,” says one woman.
It’s longer than people seemed to think it was going to be. After the crowning itself, a good number of attendees look up at the grey clouds, and around at their friends, and decide now’s as good a time as any to check out. A grumpy child bashes a helium balloon in the shape of Charles’s famously swollen fingers into the mud. And so ends another classic of British public events: slightly underwhelming, absurdly outdated, and above all, rained out.
Source: Slate
