The street parties for the 1977 Jubilee celebrations and the 1981 royal wedding are conflated in my memory. Either way, I was a young boy and it was trestle tables, bunting and the chance to play in the street without Ford Capris tearing up the place. Yes, before the ‘bumpy’ years, before the annus horribilis (but that’s enough about Prince Andrew), there was a time when the Queen’s loyal subjects danced merrily around maypoles while tugging their forelocks in her honour (Observer Magazine, 26 June 1977, ‘The People’s Jubilation’).
Or at least that was the case at Lacock in Wiltshire, where they voted theirs ‘the best get-together since the 700th anniversary of the Abbey 45 years ago’. One can only imagine the stiff competition it had been up against in the intervening years. It was slightly different in Mayall Road in Brixton, where a children’s street party ‘spilled over with banners, street theatre, a steel band, pop group, magician, fancy dress competition and teas in the church hall’.
The weather was bad everywhere. At Edinburgh Road in Jarrow, even though it was ‘rained on but not off’, there was ‘monster cake a yard long, a glass of sparkling wine for everyone and a ceilidh band’. Organiser Mrs Blake, who had to entertain about 400 now jammed into the youth club, said she was glad it happened only every 25 years: ‘I’m aching now from top to toe.’
The pictures have a garish Martin Parr quality to them and they feel somehow more immediately postwar than of their time. It’s the old double-bind – organised fun. The nearest thing to reflecting the fact that the Sex Pistols were at No 2 with God Save the Queen was at Glanrhyd Street in Cwmaman. Here the reporter claimed there was ‘one anti-royalist lurking among the street’s 62 terraced houses… and his wife insisted on attending the party.’ All together now, ‘No future, no future…’
