My mother’s aunt, Kathleen Brown, was a suffragette. She was imprisoned for throwing stones in Whitehall, and then received a hero’s welcome when she returned to her home city of Newcastle. She and her friends commandeered a horse-drawn fire engine in Tottenham Court Road and drove it to Parliament Square. She pursued Winston Churchill in a dinghy down the River Thames, and on another occasion climbed on to his carriage.
These actions could have had harmful effects on the general public. Perhaps a house burned down or a cat remained stuck in a tree while that fire engine was otherwise engaged. More famous suffragette protests included the slashing of Velásquez’s Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery, Mary Malony’s use of a hand bell to drown out Churchill’s speeches and Emily Davison’s fatal throwing of herself under the king’s horse at the Derby.
Again, they can be criticised on grounds of health and safety, law and order, public convenience or free speech, but history, given the manifest injustice and absurdity of denying women the vote, looks kindly on them. The much-condemned decision of Just Stop Oil protesters to interrupt one match in the first round of the World Snooker Championship in Sheffield, by pouring orange powder on the green baize, looks very mild by comparison.
High-flying kitsch
It wouldn’t be a proper coronation if it didn’t come with a cascade of kitsch. Such as, for example, the “Coronation Capsule”, which “replicates the Westminster Abbey experience”, where you can take the “perfect stately selfie” with copies of the 700-year-old coronation chair and of the crown jewels, all inside one of the pods of the London Eye, up to 135m above the ground.
It’s strange to make imitations of venerable medieval furniture and stone-carved architecture fly through the air, but this conflation of pageantry and technology isn’t new. In the Great Exhibition of 1851, the revolutionary steel-and-glass Crystal Palace sheltered equestrian statues of knights in armour, elaborate coats of arms and elephants with ornate howdahs. Over the following century, high-minded critics such as William Morris and Nikolaus Pevsner would deplore such tasteless incongruity, but their laments haven’t influenced the marketing people at the London Eye. Perhaps because, with a bit of stage scenery and complementary glass of champagne (or soft drink), they can charge £60 a ride rather than the usual £30.50.
Wimpy protests
You may not know that Wimpy Bars, purveyors of mildly disappointing culinary experiences to the British public since 1954, were in the 1970s the scenes of all-night sit-ins by members of the Women’s Liberation Front and the Gay Liberation Front – they were protesting against a bizarre custom of refusing entry to women after midnight for fear they might be sex workers.
This is one of many nuggets from Queer Footprints, a personal and polemical guidebook by the activist Dan Glass that takes you on tour of the sites of pleasure and struggle of London’s LGBTQ+ communities – a NatWest Bank, for example, on the site of Miss Muff’s molly house, where in 1728 “nine male ladies” were arrested in full masquerade ball outfits.
You can enjoy this book even if you’re straight, as it reveals the places and lives that help to make a great city what it is but tend to go unrecognised by official histories and blue plaques. Anyone should be able to appreciate what Glass calls the “glorious and glittering collective action” that “can create beauty against all odds”. As he recommends: “Think of the biggest homophobe in your life and buy it for them for their birthday.”
• Rowan Moore is an Observer columnist
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