What has happened to the community spirit that manifested itself in the street parties of the 1953 coronation? - David Behrens

In that context, any comparison with what is happening today rings hollow. But the pageantry of 1953 stood as a gleaming oasis in a desert of depression and austerity, and that’s a backdrop we can all still recognise.

In a kingdom less united than it was then, today’s ceremony is as much a marketing opportunity as a constitutional formality – both for the King and his feuding family and for the shops trying to sell us expensive sausages for our celebration barbecues and union jack paper plates to eat them off.

And ironically, this commercialism can be traced directly to the earlier coronation, when footage from the Abbey, rushed to America by Pan-Am because no-one had invented satellites, was interrupted on NBC by tea commercials starring a live chimpanzee called J Fred Muggs.

There was outrage in the Commons several days later when news of this travesty reached MPs. They were debating whether to allow commercial TV in Britain at the time and the incident played into the hands of those – including the Prime Minister – who thought it akin to sacrilege. A tuppenny Punch and Judy show, Churchill called it.

We are no longer the nation he would recognise, yet there remain parts of England where time has all but stood still since 1953.

I was struck by this last week on a trip to visit relatives in the south. The motorway journey down was a snapshot of all that is dislikeable about our country today – endless roadworks punctuated by ridiculously priced food and fuel at grubby service stations – but as we took the scenic route back on winding old trunk roads, a different landscape opened out before us.

The countryside, the green and pleasant land of William Blake, was little changed, of course, but so were some of the places we stopped at; communities that had embraced modern life while managing to keep one foot entrenched in the past.

I’ve heard it said that if you want to see what England was like in the 1950s you should take the ferry to the Isle of Man – but rural Lincolnshire also retains traces of the world I remember from the end of that decade.

In Horncastle, a stationers’ shop still advertises fountain pens. The charity shop next door has kept its former signboard as the local farmers’ club. It’s not retro chic; there has been no gentrification here. It’s just too far off the beaten track to have attracted many developers. So while you can pay for goods on your mobile phone, the spiritual currency remains ha’pennies and two bob bits.

Communities like this remind us how much we’ve moved on since 1953 and what we have lost. We take for granted having phones in our pockets as well as our homes, inside toilets and kitchens with fridges. We no longer envy America for having consumer goods that are denied to us. There’s plenty of everything now; probably too much. Yet while supermarkets are stuffed, families still go hungry.

But what has happened to the community spirit that manifested itself in those street parties of 1953?

It was still alive and well in even the poorest parts of Yorkshire when we marked the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, because every adult remembered what her coronation had meant to them. Today it has evaporated in a cloud of mistrust – as researchers reported this week when they measured community cohesion and the failure to level up deprived areas. Social fabric, unlike plastic coronation bunting, can’t be rolled out by the yard.

Yet despite the disunity, Britain remains a significant player on the world stage – a role that has not diminished with the loss of Empire.

We have the monarchy to thank for that. Politicians come and go and few have the gravitas or personality to be noticed further offshore than the Isle of Man. But the late Queen was a constant presence who not only sustained but elevated our influence abroad. Now her son is our biggest asset in presenting Britain to the world.

His coronation today will be beamed live to American viewers via satellite and there will be no chimpanzee to interrupt it. The ceremony may be arcane to them but its symbolism is admired and even envied.

In 1953 they took that as a compliment – and so may we.