The Queen with her Jubilee cake to celebrate the start of the Platinum Jubilee (Joe Giddens/PA)
(Picture: PA Wire)Is the Queen a Londoner? As we celebrate the beginning of her Jubilee Year, I’d say it’s time to ask the question. Notionally, she belongs to all the UK impartially. But she really belongs here. I have a particular take on this as the joint author of that groundbreaking work of social anthropology, The Sloane Ranger Handbook.
There’s a long-standing Sloane Ranger mindset — and Sloanes are important here as the most royal-worshipping of middle-class subjects — to maintain that they’re country people at heart, even if they spend five, or seven, days a week in a London postal district. You don’t get that vibe exactly from the Queen.
Of course, she loves dogs, horses and — especially — racing, and all those headscarvy things but, like any City plutocrat with a big place in Berkshire and another in Norfolk, the real stuff happens in London, specifically in Buckingham Palace with its 188 staff bedrooms. Things such as the meetings of the Privy Council and the receiving of ambassadors. She has two places outside London in England, Windsor Castle (royal/official/publicly owned etc), which is, when you think about it, practically outer London, and Sandringham House in Norfolk, owned by her privately.
But almost all the big, set-piece royal events happen here: the Coronation, the Opening of Parliament with the Queen’s Speech to the Commons and the Lords. The Queen is handily up the road — the Mall — for Parliament and Westminster Abbey. Harry — the spare — was married in Windsor, but William — the heir — was married in Westminster Abbey where, 70 years ago, the Queen was crowned. The royal family are a major tourist attraction for the UK, but disproportionately so for London. The capital has a royal show running all year whether the Queen’s here or not — the Changing the Guard, the Queen’s Gallery, the opportunities to visit bits of the house and garden.
Buckingham Palace shows up as a central attraction in all the Visit Britain research around the world, not so much as a place to go in as one to stare at. And for Londoners, the possibility that a royal motorcade commanding a major road with flashing lights might sweep past is exciting (if not quite as exciting as when they had those huge Rolls-Royce Phantom Vs, or the Queen Mother’s maroon Daimler). A gold-coach-cade is better still of course. If the royal family aren’t Londoners, then where exactly are they from? Every great institution is now pressed to export itself out of London, to avoid the charge of metropolitan elitism, to go to Salford or Sunderland. But the fact is that the past few hundred years of royal history are London, London, London. And the Queen was in fact born in Mayfair (at 17 Bruton Street).
Princess Margaret famously got out and about in London. But the Queen seems to stay mostly in the royal mile of SW1 and the Kensington Palace outpost in W8 when not on royal duty, though we do know she enjoys dinner at the Berkeley or the Goring.
Does she go off-piste? She has let it be known that “she wants to get out and about amongst her people” for the Jubilee Year. Well, in the capital, she won’t have far to go. In his 1973 book Dreams about H.M. The Queen, Brian Masters reported that people used to dream that the Queen might drop by. This is a very different age, but the global glow of the royal home city sounds altogether more grounded in London, where we can see from the flag outside Buckingham Palace whether HM is actually at home.
On V.E. Day, May 8, 1945, according to a story in the Evening Standard, the Queen — in her ambulance driver uniform — with Margaret and a gang of cheery young officers in mufti, slipped away from the official celebrations in Buckingham Palace and into the crowd outside, singing and dancing with them and doing a conga from one end of the Ritz to the other. When we read that, we Londoners say “of course”, and then wonder where else around the city she’s been in the following 68 years. This year, she may get to parts of London she doesn’t often see.
The Queen has always seen herself as a unifying figure for the nation, and over the past 70 years she has given every part of the United Kingdom, from Bangor to Belfast to Berwick the impression that she belongs to them. But the truth is, she belongs, uniquely, to London.
