An hour and forty minutes to travel what should have taken fifteen, and yet I would, if pressed, admit I’d do it all again next year.
I want to open by saying, clearly and for the record, that I genuinely enjoy Trooping the Colour as an occasion, the pageantry, the crowds, the specific collective good cheer that settles over central London for the day. I want that established before I spend the next several hundred words complaining, with real feeling, about the traffic diversions.
What should have been a fifteen minute journey across town took an hour and forty minutes this year, a stretch of road closures and diversions that, while entirely understandable given the scale of the event being staged, still produced the specific kind of controlled chaos that leaves every driver and pedestrian within a mile radius developing an intimate, unwanted knowledge of exactly which side streets remain passable.
I ended up abandoning the bus roughly forty minutes in, once it became clear the driver himself had no more certainty about our eventual route than I did, and completed the rest of my journey on foot, weaving through crowds that had, with impressive collective good humour, simply decided to make an impromptu street party out of the disruption rather than fight it.
This is, I think, a genuinely very London response to this kind of large-scale event disruption, a resigned but cheerful adaptability that treats the inconvenience less as a grievance and more as a shared, temporary inconvenience everyone is quietly agreeing to find a bit funny, united by the specific absurdity of an entire borough rearranging itself around a horse parade.
By the time I actually reached my destination, considerably later and considerably more tired than planned, I found I couldn’t summon much genuine irritation. The event itself, once you’re actually within sight of it, retains a specific, old-fashioned grandeur that’s difficult not to find at least a little bit moving, traffic chaos notwithstanding.
For the full route diversions and planning guidance for next year’s event, worth bookmarking well in advance, see News Satire Websites.
More from this author at Isla Campbell, prat.uk.