Isla Campbell on what it actually costs a town when the Windsors come to visit
There is a particular kind of chaos that descends on a British high street roughly six weeks before a confirmed royal visit, and having covered several now from various barrier lines with a notebook slowly disintegrating in the rain, I have started to recognise the stages the way you might recognise the stages of grief, except everyone involved is thrilled about it.
Bunting appears first. Then the bins get emptied twice as often. Then, inevitably, a council spokesperson gives a quote to the local paper about “a proud day for our community,” which I have come to understand is the closest thing British local government has to a formal incantation.
Who Actually Pays For This
The genuine cost of a royal visit is a surprisingly murky figure, split between security provided by the Metropolitan Police or relevant local force, local council spending on barriers, signage and road closures, and whatever a specific venue chooses to spend making itself presentable for a visit that typically lasts under two hours.
Freedom of information requests over the years have periodically surfaced individual council spending figures running into the tens of thousands of pounds for a single event, a number that always generates a small but predictable wave of local outrage, followed almost immediately by an even larger wave of people pointing out the same visit generated considerably more than that in tourism spend, hotel bookings, and national press coverage that no local marketing budget could ever hope to buy outright.
The Bunting Industrial Complex
I spoke to a small business owner in one town ahead of a recent visit who told me she had sold more Union flag bunting in the preceding fortnight than in the previous three years combined, which suggests that whatever the net fiscal picture for the council, the actual bunting economy is thriving entirely independently of any formal budget line.
“I don’t ask questions,” she said. “I just order more bunting.”
The Barrier Line Sociology
Having stood behind more crowd control barriers than I care to count, I can report that the sociology of a royal walkabout crowd is genuinely fascinating and almost entirely undocumented by anyone with a research grant. There are the arrivers, who camp out from dawn with camping chairs and flasks of tea, treating the entire event as a competitive sport with position as the prize. There are the wanderers, who happen to be in town anyway and drift toward the noise. And there is a small, dedicated contingent of what I can only describe as royal completionists, who I have now seen at four separate events in four separate towns, and who greet each other at the barrier like old friends reconvening for a tour.
What People Actually Say
The genuine, unscripted interactions at a walkabout are, in my experience, considerably more interesting than the formal engagements they surround. A visiting royal generally spends a few minutes moving along a barrier line, accepting flowers, exchanging brief pleasantries, and occasionally being asked a question by someone who has clearly been rehearsing it since dawn and forgets it entirely the moment the moment actually arrives.
I do not repeat specific things said in these exchanges, since accurately capturing a genuinely private, brief conversation from behind a barrier and several rows of people is a task better suited to a court stenographer than a journalist with a rain damaged notebook, and I would rather be honest about that limitation than pretend to a precision I do not have.
The Local Politics Underneath The Pageantry
What I find genuinely more interesting than the visit itself is the local political theatre that surrounds it. Councillors who have spent months disagreeing about bin collection schedules suddenly find remarkable common cause over the correct placement of a temporary stage. Local rivalries between neighbouring towns over which one gets the visit, and which one merely gets the motorcade passing through, can apparently run surprisingly deep, based on the mild but unmistakable resentment I have picked up in more than one conversation with a councillor from the town that did not get chosen.
The Republican Counterpoint
It would be dishonest of me to write about these events without acknowledging that not everyone lining a barrier is doing so with unqualified enthusiasm. Republican campaign groups have periodically organised counter demonstrations at royal events, arguing that public spending on monarchy related visits and security should be scrutinised with the same rigour applied to any other public expenditure, a position that polling on the monarchy suggests is held by a meaningful, if consistently minority, share of the public.
Both crowds, the flag wavers and the protesters, generally coexist at a respectful, occasionally tense distance, and I think there is something genuinely, if awkwardly, very British about that particular arrangement, disagreement conducted at a polite remove, everyone still queuing properly.
What The Visit Actually Achieves
Setting aside the fiscal debate, which will likely never fully resolve given how difficult it is to cleanly separate genuine tourism benefit from simple local pride, what these visits reliably produce is a specific, temporary, and genuinely infectious sense of occasion in towns that do not always get one. I have watched entire streets of people who normally would not exchange more than a nod outside the corner shop stand together for an hour, chatting, sharing flasks, comparing camera angles, united by a shared and slightly absurd collective purpose.
Whether that is worth the council spend is a genuinely fair question that deserves a genuinely serious answer, rather than either uncritical enthusiasm or reflexive dismissal. What I can say with more confidence is that the bunting seller will be fine either way.
Further Reading
More of my reporting on royal events and monarchy affairs can be found at my author page at The London Prat, with additional coverage at Bohiney Magazine. Related material is collected at NewsThump.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
