On the morning of 2 June 2022, ceremonial London looked less like a finished stage than a theatre waiting for the audience. Barriers were in place, temporary grandstands surrounded Horse Guards Parade, Union flags ran towards Buckingham Palace and construction crews were still working around the Victoria Memorial.

This Roberts London archive film records that moment at the opening of Queen Elizabeth II’s Platinum Jubilee weekend. It is not a retrospective assembled from official images, nor a guide to what these streets look like today. It is an eight-minute walk through London while the machinery of a once-only national occasion was still visible.

The Queen had acceded to the throne on 6 February 1952. Seventy years later, she became the first British monarch to celebrate a Platinum Jubilee. The central weekend ran from Thursday 2 to Sunday 5 June 2022, beginning with Trooping the Colour at Horse Guards Parade and continuing through services, concerts, community celebrations and the Platinum Jubilee Pageant.

Filmed on 2 June and first published that day, the walk preserves something slightly different from the broadcast spectacle: the spaces between the events.

Horse Guards before the ceremony

The film begins around Horse Guards, where the ceremonial landscape was already transformed. Temporary seating wrapped around the parade ground. Sections of the route were controlled by barriers and stewards, but the surrounding streets remained open enough to reveal the scale of the preparation.

The Royal Naval Division War Memorial stands near the edge of Horse Guards Parade, its bronze figures set against a heavy grey sky. It is an appropriately sober introduction. Before the flags, crowds and television coverage, this part of London is a landscape of military memory as much as royal ceremony.

The eighteenth-century Horse Guards building, designed by William Kent, remains one of London’s great ceremonial thresholds. Its clock tower and central arch form the official entrance between Whitehall, St James’s Park and the approach to Buckingham Palace. The parade ground behind it is the traditional setting for Trooping the Colour, the annual ceremony marking the Sovereign’s official birthday.

For the 2022 parade, the colour was trooped by the 1st Battalion, Irish Guards. The event opened the central Jubilee weekend with the familiar combination of Household Division precision, military music, mounted troops and the long processional route between Buckingham Palace and Horse Guards.

What the camera catches is the site just before that public image takes over. The red grandstands are ready, the gravel parade ground is comparatively empty and individual workers and early visitors still have room to move. It is London in rehearsal mode.

A route dressed for history

From Horse Guards, the walk moves along the edge of St James’s Park towards The Mall. Flags appear in sequence between the trees, and ordinary road signs, temporary fencing and work vehicles share the frame with one of the capital’s most formal ceremonial routes.

The contrast matters. Great state occasions can look inevitable once they appear on television. On the ground, they depend on a dense temporary infrastructure: road closures, security positions, barriers, platforms, lighting, sound, transport and hundreds of people finishing practical jobs.

The Platinum Jubilee was unprecedented in British royal history, but its London setting was deliberately familiar. Horse Guards Parade, St James’s Park, The Mall, the Victoria Memorial and Buckingham Palace create a connected ceremonial landscape. Generations of processions have used these spaces to turn constitutional events into public theatre.

The Mall before the crowds

The strongest image in the film is also one of the quietest: The Mall almost empty beneath repeated Union flags. The red roadway runs into the distance between mature trees, with only scattered pedestrians and vehicles interrupting the symmetry.

The Mall is often described as London’s great processional route, and it performs that role visually even without a procession. Its broad axis makes Buckingham Palace the destination; the flags create rhythm; the red surface reads like a ceremonial carpet through the park.

In June 2022, this route linked several events across the long weekend. Troops travelled between the Palace and Horse Guards for the Birthday Parade. The Platinum Party at the Palace was staged around the Palace and Victoria Memorial on Saturday evening. On Sunday, the Platinum Jubilee Pageant culminated in the same ceremonial quarter.

The film’s quietness therefore feels temporary. These are not empty streets in the ordinary sense. They are streets being held in readiness.

Buckingham Palace under construction

At the western end of the route, Buckingham Palace comes into view behind the Victoria Memorial. Cranes, barriers, lighting structures and temporary stages alter the familiar postcard composition. The Palace is present, but the foreground belongs to production crews.

This was preparation for the Platinum Party at the Palace on 4 June. The concert would turn the memorial and Palace frontage into a broadcast stage, with performances, projections and a large public audience. Seen earlier in the weekend, however, the setting is still visibly under construction.

That unfinished quality gives the archive its value. A polished official photograph records the spectacle. A walking film records how London made the spectacle possible.

The Victoria Memorial is isolated behind layers of temporary fencing, with equipment and work areas spread around it. Queen Victoria’s gilded figure catches the light above a scene of modern event production. Two Jubilees and two very different periods of monarchy seem to occupy the same frame.

Looking back from a changed London

Queen Elizabeth II died on 8 September 2022, three months after the Jubilee. That knowledge changes the emotional register of this ordinary morning walk. At the time, London was preparing to celebrate an unprecedented seventy-year reign. Seen now, the film also records the final great public celebration of that reign.

It would be easy to make the memory neater than the footage allows. The morning is cloudy. Traffic management is intrusive. Some views are blocked by barriers and temporary structures. Much of the route is strangely quiet. Yet those details are precisely what make it useful.

Roberts London is concerned with the city as it is lived and worked in, not only as it is presented. Here, ceremonial London is both magnificent and practical. Its symbols are historic, but its public occasions are built by contemporary workers using cranes, road closures, cable runs and crowd-control barriers.

An archive, not a current visitor guide

This article and film document 2 June 2022. Event structures, access arrangements, traffic restrictions and the appearance of the route were temporary. Horse Guards Parade, St James’s Park, The Mall and Buckingham Palace remain central London landmarks, but anyone planning a present-day visit should use current official information rather than the arrangements visible here.

For another Roberts London view of the capital transformed for a public season, see Christmas in London After Dark: Covent Garden, South Bank and Battersea. The later film Christmas in London 2023 From Trafalgar Square to Soho records a different ceremonial London: crowded, illuminated and built around the city’s winter streets.

The Jubilee walk belongs to a narrower moment. The crowds were coming, the cameras were being positioned and the national celebration had begun. London, for a few minutes, was still waiting.