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The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Will Include a Carnival-Themed Party and a Bus-Sized Dragon

“Never has the ambition for an event like this been higher,” said one of the event’s organizers on Tuesday. 

The highlight of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations next June will be a carnival-themed party that will take place along the Mall and through the streets of Westminster and include around 6,000 people, as revealed by the event’s organizers on Tuesday.

In what has been described as the most ambitious event ever staged in the capital, London will play host to a spectacular pageant which will tell the story of the Queen’s remarkable seventy-year long reign.

“It is set to be the nation’s biggest celebratory event on the nation’s grandest street for a long, long time,” said co-chair Nicholas Coleridge, who is orchestrating the event along with Sir Michael Lockett. Lockett also directed the Queen’s Golden Jubilee concerts at Buckingham Palace and the Diamond Jubilee Pageant.

Adrian Evans, who was Pageant Master of the Diamond Jubilee River Pageant in 2012, will also overseeing the Platinum Jubilee Pageant along with CEO Rosanna Machado, who directed the Diamond Jubilee River Pageant, and Phoebe Reith, director of Development and Partnerships. It is understood that the Queen’s most senior aides have been made aware of all the plans to date, and the pageant has Her Majesty’s blessing.

Despite having been involved in the previous two jubilees Lockett said, “Never has the ambition for an event like this been higher. Because we are marking an occasion the like of which our nation has never seen before. A platinum jubilee. Seventy whole years of service. It is a remarkable achievement and the Queen continues to have a remarkable reign.”

Described by the organizers as a spectacle of theatre, dance, music, and carnival, there will also be plenty of pomp and pageantry courtesy of the Armed Services who will be involved in the ceremonial contingent which features marching bands, serving troops, and people across the U.K. and the Commonwealth. Highlights of the pageant, which marks the final day of the Jubilee celebrations, will include a dragon bigger than a London bus and whose wing span is the width of the Mall. The Coronation will be captured in dance and theatre, and there will be an African animal themed performance to mark the fact that Queen ascended the throne while on safari in Kenya.

A giant oak tree, which will serve as a May Pole, will also be part of the procession. Coleridge said that organizers are anticipating some of the highest viewing figures in royal history because the Pageant will be streamed across every possible platform.

“The Pageant is the high point of the four-day Jubilee weekend—conceived to engender intense national happiness and celebration,” he said, adding that the Jubilee will be a moment for Britain and the rest of the world to move on from a challenging year. “It will in a sense be a reopening ceremony for the UK—a catalyzing moment of national purpose—and most importantly fun, joyful and entertaining.”

Speaking to Vanity Fair after Tuesday’s press conference, Coleridge said that the celebrations would be fitting of our “record breaking monarch” whose remarkable life story will be captured in a children’s story about the Jubilee written by Sir Michael Morpurgo, author of War Horse.

Having surpassed Queen Victoria as the world’s longest reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II is the only monarch to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee. The celebrations will be a moment to remember and celebrate some of the milestones of her reign and the many changes that have taken place during the second Elizabethan age. From man’s first steps of the moon to Concorde’s first ever flight, to the digital revolution, the Queen—who has her own Twitter and Instagram accounts—has witnessed more global change than any other public figure.

“Throughout it all, Her Majesty has been our strength and our constant guardian, in good times and in bad,” Lockett said. “The golden thread connecting us all across generations, communities and nations.”

Evans, who oversaw the ambitious Diamond Jubilee river pageant in which a flotilla of boats and vessels sailed down the Thames in 2012, said the pageant will form three parts—ceremonial, celebration, and finale. The finale is being kept a closely guarded secret until closer to the event.

Joking that he hoped Sunday June 5, 2022 will be a “gloriously sunny day” in contrast to the wet and windy weather in June 2012, Evans said, “We expect a joyous atmosphere, a bobbing sea of Union Jacks and rousing cheers, as hundreds of thousands of people come together to witness this moment in history.”

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