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Sheila Bridges had been up since 6am. She’d spent the morning preparing food – coronation chicken curry, coronation quiche, pizza – for the 40 or so neighbours who’d soon be filing into the huge union jack-draped gazebo outside her house.
It felt like a last-minute rush, but the residents of Adelaide Gardens had been planning their party for weeks, from sourcing a lifesize cardboard cutout of Charles to organising a pin-the-diamond-on-the-crown competition and ordering a purple cake big enough to feed the whole street.
“Everyone mucked in,” Bridges says. “I’ve lived around here for nine years, and as a street we’ve got such a great community. ”
Bridges and her husband Alan, from Benfleet, Essex, live in the middle of what is supposedly the most pro-monarchy place in Britain.
In a recent poll, 67% of people in the district of Castle Point – encompassing Benfleet, Canvey Island and Hadleigh – said they thought the monarchy was “a good thing”, according to a poll by Focaldata for UnHerd. Nationally, the figure was 55%, while in the lowest-ranked UK constitutency, Glasgow, it was 37%, closely followed by Liverpool with 38%.
As a staunch monarchist, Bridges is part of the 67%. “I love the royal family. They bring a hell of a lot of money to the country and I think we should celebrate it,” she said. By Saturday afternoon – after Charles and Camilla had been crowned – she said she’d found it all “quite emotional”. “I think it’s the enormity of it. It just gets you.”
Others on the street were less sentimental. Richard Miller, 52, a musical archive manager, said Charles seemed like an “all right bloke” but admitted that he was “here for the booze”. “I think people just like getting together and celebrating things,” he said.
Across Castle Point, the excitement levels were similarly varied. Some residents marked the occasion with street parties, although the local council website said there were about 30 planned for the coronation weekend, compared with 77 for the queen’s platinum jubilee. Churches held cake sales while residents knitted decorations to sit on top of postboxes, and someone spray-painted a crown on the hill outside Benfleet station.
Other businesses arranged takeaway coronation afternoon teas while the Oak dental surgery in Canvey Island created a window display complete with a papier-mache Charles and stickers spelling out: “My dentist always told me I needed a crown.”
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At the Bread and Cheese pub in South Benfleet, which temporarily changed its name to the Charles and Camilla, a big screen in the garden went unwatched during the morning events after rain dampened appetites for outdoor celebrations.
But inside, retired charity worker Pat Coates, 73, and her daughter Emma, 42, sipped cocktails and watched events unfold. “We love all the pomp and ceremony,” said Coates, who made a trifle and a quiche in the monarch’s honour. She thinks Charles will “do well”. “It’s about looking after the people you’re reigning over and really doing the best for your country and people,” she said.
Castle Point, home to 89,600 people in 2021, is a traditionally Tory area that briefly swung to Labour during the Blair years and now has a significant proportion of independent local candidates. The median age of people living in the area is 45, compared with the national average of 40, and it has the highest percentage of property ownership in England, according to ONS data. It’s also one of the country’s biggest backers of Brexit, with the third highest leave vote in 2016.
Father-of-four Kevin Johnson, 59, a taxi driver, believes these stats reveal why it’s so pro-monarchy. “It’s like the Brexit thing, isn’t it? We’re very patriotic and proud to be British around here,” he said. “I’ve lived in Canvey all my life, and my family, they’re all pro-royal. I have got one daughter who’s so-so. But she’s in London. I think that’s got a lot to do with it. I think people around here think London’s a bit detached from everything.”
Fellow taxi driver Pam Martin, 80, a grandmother of four who has lived in the area for 50 years, wore union jack earrings to mark the coronation but admits celebrations were more muted than for last year’s jubilee. On some roads, there were no decorations at all. “Not a soul has got a flag here,” she said, driving along a stretch of the Kiln Road in Thundersley, Benfleet. “I can’t understand it really.”
Sharon Gallagher, 51, owner of the Sha-Lou Boutique near Benfleet station, agrees that others aren’t as excited as they have been for previous royal celebrations, but says that she is. She had to work on Saturday but bought a red, white and blue dress to wear especially, and watched the celebrations on an iPad below the till. “It’s a good atmosphere,” she says. “And I think Charles is a nice person.”
For Marilyn Griffiths, 78, a retired Co-op worker who has lived in Benfleet since 1970, there were more important things going on than the pageantry. “I’ve no objection to Charles being king at all, but I don’t really care,” she said.
At the moment the king was crowned, she was standing at a bus stop in the rain. “I did consider watching it but I had to get to the postbox for the last collection at 12.15,” she says. “There won’t be another one until Tuesday because of the bank holiday.”
