Opinion: What do the Jubilee celebrations say about Britain’s national identity?  

Opinion: What do the Jubilee celebrations say about Britain’s national identity? | Soho House

Beyond the bunting and Elizabeth Line hysteria, the reality is more disenchanting than a four-day hangover

Thursday 2 June 2022    By Róisín Lanigan

Trains are cool now. A long-held British pastime, the rail enthusiast has been reborn in the past year. Gen-Z trainspotter Francis Bourgeois has a Gucci partnership and 2.6 million TikTok followers. Last Wednesday – the debut of the long-overdue, hotly anticipated Elizabeth Line – Londoners tweeted (with only a hint of irony) about their excitement and I joined them, taking the line to go into central London, pointlessly, on one of its inaugural journeys. On BBC News there are videos of people queueing up at 6am, wearing royal portrait masks – grinning, eye-less Williams, Kates, a few Meghan and Harrys, and even some Philips – piling into pristine purple seats.
  
Sadly, or perhaps fortunately, none of those ultra-royalists are on the train I’m on, but there’s still a kind of palpable, self-conscious excitement. Emerging in Paddington, you can take a left and wander through Hyde Park to Notting Hill, where the excitement becomes less ironic.  
 
The city – in fact, the whole country – is preparing itself for Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee. The way it is doing so is as bizarre as the fact the monarchy still exists. The window of an aesthetic laser clinic has been decorated with huge cartoon corgis and an offer on baby Botox. A British Heart Foundation charity shop has dressed mannequins in royal blue dresses, lace and pearls, planting an extremely upright Union Jack in its empty head hole.  

Opinion: What do the Jubilee celebrations say about Britain’s national identity? | Soho House
Opinion: What do the Jubilee celebrations say about Britain’s national identity? | Soho House

M&S has released a special Jubilee sandwich, ham and egg, the egg bafflingly unsliced, cut in half and shoved in plastic and clearly unseasoned (very British). Leaving the Underground, my phone reconnects itself and delivers me a notification of an email in which someone is selling roller blinds with the Queen’s stamp-era face on them in rainbow hues. On TikTok, earnest young royalists post breathless explainers of Liz and Phil’s love affair and FaceTuned photos of her in her youth, while the more treasonous among them post jokes about which hyperpop songs would kill her outright. 

If there’s a frenetic quality to the Platinum Jubilee preparations and accompanied bizarro merch it’s spawned then that’s only because there’s a frenetic quality to modern British identity, too. What is it? It’s not what it used to be. Is it still OK to celebrate what it used to be? If not, what are we celebrating? Do we celebrate what it is today? Is that too depressing? The Jubilee is the relatively safe centre of an increasingly unstable sense of self for the British. And even that centre spins wildly on its own axis. It manifests itself in ballads sung by elderly WW2 veterans, in 12-foot-high Union Jacks on Oxford Street and Twitter debates on whether or not they look, actually, a bit too Nuremberg. In passive-aggressively organised street parties and vegan gingerbread men dressed in crowns, and off-season poppy displays. What is the Jubilee if not an attempt to inject life into a dying empire through the conduit of an ageing Queen?

Opinion: What do the Jubilee celebrations say about Britain’s national identity? | Soho House
Opinion: What do the Jubilee celebrations say about Britain’s national identity? | Soho House

There are some things the British are, in spite of themselves, still good at. Public transport, at least in the capital, even if its infrastructure is delivered woefully past deadline. They are good at remembering the past, even if they only remember the glory bits and hide the colonising, and the whole decline of the empire thing. They’re good at collective hysteria (the Queen is great, deserving of tax money, will live forever, we can beat Italy at football, etc). They are good at idolising the Queen, and this weekend they will do it in street parties up and down the country, eating egg yolks in bread, singing Vera Lynn, clapping, baking… 
  
There are some things that the British are not good at. They are not good at reinvention (with the notable exception of their Gen-Z, Gucci-wearing trainspotters). Because of this it is impossible to make the Jubilee cool. Even if you try to equate it in the minds of the populace with long weekends and Uber Eats vouchers and TfL. And they are not good at mourning (upper lip is too stiff). So, they have to mourn – or rather, become emotionally available about – the Queen before she vanishes, which is what the Jubilee is, really, at its heart. What do they say? Give them flowers while they live?  

Opinion: What do the Jubilee celebrations say about Britain’s national identity? | Soho House
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