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Britain’s about to street party like it’s 1959 — why do we love them so much?

Next weekend the Big Lunch continues a tradition that goes back centuries — from claret fountains to coronation chicken

Two children in costume at Queen Elizabeth II's Silver Jubilee street party.
Karen Davies and Bradley Luxon dressed as Little Bo Peep and Elton John for Queen Elizabeth’s Silver Jubilee in 1977
SPORT AND GENERAL/EMPICS
The Sunday Times

Angie Fairbrother has been organising a street party come rain or shine on the Riverside Estate in Colchester, Essex, for 15 years. Each June, she borrows gazebos and bunting and neighbours pitch in with tables and chairs. Children hopscotch along the pavement, there’s face-painting, dominoes, coronation chicken sandwiches, of course — and, one year, a Hawaiian shirt competition.

“Our best — seven or eight years ago — was when it rained all day,” says Fairbrother, 58, a retired police officer. “We sat in the marquees, battened down the hatches, and played that game where you pass the balloon between your knees — it was lovely.”

Two women putting up bunting at a street party.
Angie Fairbrother, left, is expecting 300 people to turn out for the Big Lunch on the Riverside Estate in Colchester
TINA WING PHOTOGRAPHY/THE BIG LUNCH

Her event, which started with 60 people, now attracts more than 300. “Everyone brings food and drinks to share and I put a free tea urn on,” she says. “Honest to God, we’re having to get bigger and bigger tables, everyone’s so generous.”

Next weekend, on June 7 and 8, you might spot a few street parties in your neighbourhood. The Big Lunch, an initiative dreamt up by the Eden Project in Cornwall in 2009, is encouraging people up and down the country to apply to their local council for permission to pedestrianise their street so they can whip out the bunting and raise money for charity.

So what’s the allure of the British street party? And are they a nostalgic harking back to the 1950s, or just a bit naff?

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Street parties have a long history in Britain. George III held the first widespread golden jubilee celebration in 1809, encouraging the rich to give food to the poor to toast his health after 50 years on the throne. Records of more localised festivities go back further — according to a court chronicler who was in London in 1533 for Anne Boleyn’s coronation, “at the great conduit in Cheap [Street], a fountain ran continuously, at one end white wine, the other claret, all the afternoon”.

Street party celebrating the coronation of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
A street party for George VI’s coronation in 1937 in Rising Hill Street, north London
POPPERFOTO/GETTY IMAGES
London street party celebrating Queen Elizabeth II's coronation in 1953.
In the capital 16 years later, for Queen Elizabeth’s coronation
ALAMY

Street parties were further imprinted on the national psyche when the new government “peace committee” decreed that Peace Day after the First World War would be celebrated on July 19, 1919, with sit-down “peace teas” to support children orphaned by the war and Spanish flu.

Street party celebrating the end of WWI in London's East End.
Peace Day in the East End, 1919
CENTRAL PRESS/HULTON ARCHIVE

There has been a lot to celebrate in the past five years. There were socially distanced gatherings in May 2020 for the 75th anniversary of VE Day. Towns and villages decked lampposts in Union Jacks for the Platinum Jubilee in 2022 and did the same just a year later for King Charles’s coronation.

But it’s no longer about those one-off big events: smaller street parties are more popular than ever. Ten million people attended a Big Lunch party in the UK last year, and the same number is expected this year. There were a record 13 million at street parties in 2023 to toast the coronation.

People enjoying a street party.
The 2022 Big Lunch in Kidlington, Oxfordshire
THE BIG LUNCH

In April Prince William caused consternation when he told residents of the Isle of Mull, off Scotland’s west coast, that city dwellers had “lost their ability to come together and know their neighbours”.

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Someone who couldn’t agree less is Jo Benson, 53, who has been holding a party on his street in Brixton, south London, for many years. Benson says he has found there’s a refreshing conveyor belt of new faces. “Cities now have this young, mobile population who don’t stay in one place for a long time,” he says. That’s what makes city street parties all the more important. His events are “an extremely nice opportunity to get people to socialise where they live”, Benson says. Last time, “Pete down the road produced a vast sound system out of nowhere, it was carnivalesque.”

Street parties are also instrumental in fostering a sense of community all year round. Before Steve Wilkinson, 67, put on a street party for VE Day in 2020 in Gateshead, northeast England, he barely knew his neighbours. “It was during lockdown so we all sat out in our own gardens, 50 yards apart, and I played music out of my speaker. “Bob and Liz up the road, he’s very into alternative music so we bonded over that.”

Families celebrating VE Day, socially distanced on their front porch.
A socially distanced street party in Swansea for VE Day 2020
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Wilkinson describes the party as a spark that lit the fuse of community. After another party a year later the neighbours now go on holiday together: “We’ve had a trip to Palma and seven of us are off to Portugal very shortly.” He says that, being in the northeast, “of course the weather’s a bit of a concern”, but, he adds matter-of-factly: “We just move indoors if it rains.”

Some believe there’s a “keep calm and carry on” attitude that binds neighbours closer in times of adversity. Marilyn Kendall, 64, based in Finchley, north London, attended her first street party in 2009. Shortly afterwards, she says, “we had a spate of house break-ins. We got a WhatsApp group as a result, and I think the break-ins, then the pandemic, really brought us together.” At her street’s annual party, British diversity is showcased at its best with Japanese, Iranian, Italian, Indian, Chinese and Hungarian food side by side on the table.

Street parties are not exclusive to England, however. Selwyn Johnson, 54, who lives in Enniskillen in Northern Ireland, says that although street parties historically “have been seen as more of an English thing”, residents have riffed on the model. “We’ve made it work for us,” he says. Rather than a formal set-up of tables and chairs, the town holds parades, picnics and a “Big Paddle” around the island town on kayaks and canoes. They have taken to the concept so much that in 2022 they held a four-day Platinum Jubilee event.

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He believes Britain’s mental health crisis is especially driving the need for community events like these. He says: “In a busy world, where we’re working from home, tied to our phones, we have an innate need to connect. These events have been so instrumental, the glue to hold our communities together once again.”

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