How Windsor rises to royal occasions

The Queen’s intention to remain in Windsor more or less permanently, following the death of Prince Philip, and use Buckingham Palace like an office, will make sense to her fellow Windsorians.

With two train routes into London from the Berkshire town, it has long been commutable, although most people tend to give up the slog to the capital well before their nineties

Her Majesty has reportedly said that she wants to be close to her husband, who will be interred in St George’s Chapel, within the castle grounds, after his funeral there today. According to reports this week, she has told sources she is now “most comfortable” living at the 950-year-old castle.

But Windsor has always been her favourite residence and it’s easy to see why. Just 20 miles west of London (or a day’s march), it is neither rural backwater nor seething metropolis. It has its castle, the Thames, and Eton’s playing fields to the north, as well as the sumptuous Great Park on the crown estate, and Frogmore House, not to be confused with the much less grand Frogmore Cottage.

For horse lovers it’s a stone’s throw from Ascot and for international jet setters it is almost too convenient for Heathrow (the ‘Windsor pause’ is what locals call the enforced break in conversations held outdoors beneath the flight path).

Windsor is also where I grew up and seeing it once again in the news this week reminded me how it rises to the occasion when royal drama demands.

We lived at first on crown land that backed on to the Long Walk and our house faced Victoria Barracks, whose guardsmen marched by our front gate at eleven o’clock every morning en route to the castle. Like the monarch today, my father chose to live in Windsor and work in London because it was comfortable, but also because of its two train lines. As a recent exile from apartheid South Africa, he suspected he was still being watched by BOSS (Bureau of State Security) agents and thought he could give them the slip by alternating his departures from Windsor and Eton Riverside and Windsor Central, which went via the nearby but far less salubrious Slough.

Windsor is famous for many reasons; for trying, unsuccessfully, to ditch its SL (Slough) postcode, and for its Theatre Royal, where Sir Ian McKellen, aged 83, will soon reprise Hamlet, the boyish prince. It is also the home of Sir Elton John, though strictly speaking that’s in Old Windsor.

It is mostly a place of tradition and although the Liberal Democrats managed to seize control of the council for golden periods in the 1990s and early 2000s, the Conservatives have not lost a parliamentary constituency since 1868.

But what Windsor is really famous for, of course, is the royals and its role as suburban ceremonial backdrop.

Most of the time, the town goes about its business, tolerates its tourists and wears its privileged associations, and its high property prices, lightly. But on pageant days, it can be counted on to bring out the bunting and line the pavements as the nation’s royal cheerleader in chief.

The floral tributes for Prince Philip have mounted up outside the walls at the top of Castle Hill and the Covid muted funeral will still draw its, perhaps smaller than usual, crowds of town criers. Even when Charles and Camilla opted for a subdued Windsor wedding in 2005, the townspeople rallied round. 

It is hard to live in Windsor and not feel the pull of royalty. I have tried to be a republican but despite persuasive arguments, and many years away, have always returned to base, metaphorically if not literally (see property prices above).

In Windsor, the royals are all around you and feature like family, if at a distance, throughout the stages of life; those formative years being lined up in the Long Walk in school blazers and white gloves to wave at the open carriages heading to Ascot; holiday jobs in the Queen’s glass houses, planting mushrooms and signing the Official Secrets Act in case she stopped for a chat on her morning ride.

The Queen Mother was a (fleeting) presence at my brother’s wedding as her limo took the back road through Datchet; and Philip was often a guest of honour at Windsor and Eton Operatic Society performances, once showing great interest in my sister-in-law’s Turandot wig.

Windsor folk wept when the castle caught fire in 1992 and St George’s Hall was destroyed, as if it was their own landmark, much like Parisians in the wake of the Notre Dame disaster, and only slightly more parochial. In the middle of the night, my father took pictures, others brought buckets of water.

More recently, Windsor pulled out all the stops for Harry and Meghan’s wedding, for all the thanks it got later. 

Philip’s farewell to Windsor, orchestrated by himself, is a fitting tribute to the town that enveloped him and the Queen during lockdown and provided a peaceful retreat in his final days. No wonder he wanted to die there.

His resting place, St George’s Chapel, is a royal peculiar, one of just a handful of Church of England churches, including Westminster Abbey, that come under the direct jurisdiction of the monarch, not a diocese.

I don’t think Windsor would mind if I suggested that it, too, is a royal peculiar, lovely enough but lifted into the realms of extra special by virtue of its regal inhabitants.