High emotion amid coronation cake and cutouts in Britain’s most royalist spot

‘We’re very patriotic’: Charles’s loyalist subjects party like it’s 1953, although some admit they’re there ‘for the booze’

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.