A London history graduate reads about Harry and Meghan’s Nottingham return and their very public privacy, and traces the walkabout from 1970 to a unicorn balloon
Thursday, 22 October 2026. A cafe in Camden Passage, Islington, an oat flat white and a slice of banana bread the size of a paving stone, 11.15am.
The Walkabout Is Younger Than My Mum
People are often surprised to learn that the royal walkabout, the custom of royals strolling along a crowd and chatting to ordinary people, is a fairly modern custom. It is generally dated to the Queen’s tour of Australia and New Zealand in 1970, when she broke from the old formal procession and walked along to meet people directly. Before that, the public mostly saw royals from a distance, in carriages or on balconies, waving with that small rotating hand movement that looks like someone polishing an invisible window.
I mention this because I have spent the morning reading two prat.uk reports on Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain, and the walkabout is at the heart of both. The first, on Harry and Meghan’s return to Britain and their charity visit in Nottingham, is warm about the actual work: a community recording studio, a food poverty charity, a girl singing about peer pressure, a ninety-year-old woman who brought a framed photograph from the couple’s first Nottingham walkabout in 2017.
A Contingency Plan In A Frame
The detail I adore is that ninety-year-old woman with her framed photo. The piece’s observation box asks who keeps a nine-year-old walkabout photo framed and ready in case a duchess turns up, and decides that is not a fan, that is a contingency plan. As a historian, I would like to say that she is doing exactly what historians do. She kept the primary source. She preserved it. She brought it to the archive at the right moment. She is, frankly, better at my job than I am.
My nan has a similar contingency plan. She has a tea towel from the Silver Jubilee in 1977 that she has never used to dry a single plate. It is folded in a drawer, ready, in case anyone royal ever comes to Croydon. Nobody royal has ever come to Croydon. The tea towel waits.
Private Citizens On A Public Walkabout
The second piece is sharper. It is about how Harry and Meghan insist they are private citizens while carrying out what the piece describes as an unofficial official royal engagement, with barriers, pooled press, cheering crowds and a commentator logging the origin of a belt from Marks and Spencer. A constitutional expert needs three cups of tea and an aspirin to explain the arrangement.
What makes this funny to a historian is that the walkabout was introduced, in 1970, to make royals seem closer and more ordinary. Fifty-six years later, the most ordinary-looking thing a royal can do is still a walkabout, and it now requires barriers, pooled press and a balloon to look natural. The informal has become so formal that it needs a security plan. That is how all British traditions work. They start as a spontaneous gesture and end as a ceremony with a dress code.
The Unicorn Balloon, A Historical Footnote
One of the pieces mentions a child in the Nottingham crowd holding a unicorn balloon. I want that balloon in a museum. Future historians will need it. When students in 2126 ask what royal walkabouts were like in the early twenty-first century, the curator will point to a deflated unicorn in a glass case and say, this was the spirit of the age. Hopeful, slightly ridiculous and full of hot air from the start.
Last Night, Briefly
I went out in Camden last night with Priya and Tom, and we ended up debating the Sussexes at two in the morning outside a chicken shop on Parkway. Tom said they should just be left alone. Priya said they should be left alone if they stop inviting photographers. I said both of those were the same sentence in different accents. A man waiting for his chicken said they should all be sent to Australia, which I pointed out is where the walkabout started, so it would at least be historically appropriate. He said he did not want a history lesson. He wanted chicken. Fair.
The chicken man, to be fair, then told us about the time his mum met Princess Diana outside a hospital in Kilburn in 1993, and how Diana asked about his little sister’s cast and signed it. His mum still has the cast. It is in a carrier bag in her loft. That, I said, is another contingency plan. He said it was not a plan, it was a cast. Then he got his chicken and left, and we all stood there in silence, quietly moved by a stranger’s mother’s loft.
Why I Like Both Pieces
What I like about the pair of reports is that they hold two true things at once. Real charity happens without palaces, and that matters. And modern celebrity has made privacy into a kind of performance that needs as much organising as a royal tour. Both can be true. History is almost always two things being true at the same time, with someone selling souvenirs in between.
The banana bread is finished. The flat white has gone cold while I wrote this. Somewhere in Croydon, a Silver Jubilee tea towel waits in a drawer for a visit that is never coming. Somewhere in Nottingham, a framed photograph has finally been used. I think both of those count as royal history. Nobody will ever put either in a textbook. Which is exactly why I wrote them down.