“It’s very sad, how she’s passed away,” said Tina. “She did so much. She was the longest-reigning person who ever had the crown. And now she’s not here, there’s a big loss in the world. She brought us together, I think.”
We were in Milton Keynes, the new town that was granted city status to mark the Queen’s recent platinum jubilee. We chatted outside the council house Tina has lived in for more than a decade: the kind of modernist home, looking out on green space, that once brought droves of people to a place conceived in the last big burst of postwar optimism. But the Netherfield estate now looks noticeably rundown and unloved, and the details of people’s lives are often of a piece.
