The Coronation before last

Like almost everyone in Britain, I spent some time last month watching the Coronation. But I am one of a diminishing number of people who remember the previous Coronation, in 1953, when Elizabeth II was crowned. Few people at that time had televisions, and so the event largely took place through street parties. I was six years old, and the family then lived in a rented semi-detached house in Stroud Road, Shirley, Solihull. My memories of the event are uneven. The weather was cold and wet, but I can not remember if there were any tables laid in the street or any party food. I do remember that there was a children’s fancy dress competition and that I won first prize. I was dressed as what we then called a ‘chinaman’, complete with traditional robes that did indeed look Chinese. I carried a pole over my shoulder, holding what I was told were two genuine Chinese lanterns. Second place went to a girl dressed as Britannia, who shivered from the cold. My younger brother and the girl next door were three years old and carried a bucket between them, as Jack and Jill. This was the last time I ever went to a fancy-dress event.

I have better memories of my later years in Stroud Road, which I eventually left at the age of 11. Street then had few cars, and children played outside at any available time. It was possible to walk to woods and open countryside and fish for sticklebacks in a local stream. Shirley still had some quirky older buildings, inherited from its time as a country village. In the next few decades, the fields became housing estates, and the older cottages were demolished. I became an inhabitant of the staggering blandness of the English suburbs.

At this most recent Coronation, I live in a country village in a neighbouring county. But suburbanisation has followed me. A new estate of suburban houses has just been approved by the Planning Inspectorate. This, like all the others, will be a group of breeze-block houses on minimal plots, arranged in cul-de-sacs, with patches of ‘green space’. It is promised that the latter will be landscaped, but we have had promises of this kind before. What the residents of such estates usually end up with are mowed lawns, with some fitful planting of trees, most of which soon die. There are fortunes to be made in developing such estates, in planning and promoting them. But those who make such fortunes choose to live far from what they have created, in land they have yet to despoil.