Ahead of the Lord Mayor's Show we speak to its very experienced Pageantmaster, Dominic Reid.
They say you should never work with children or animals. Dominic Reid OBE must round-up both contingents in great number, along with military bands, dozens of floats, a couple of wickerwork giants, and some 7,000 other participants. He's the Pageantmaster of the Lord Mayor's Show, the annual parade to welcome the latest incumbent of the mayoral chains and tricorne hat. It is his job to make sure it all runs smoothly.
"I'm now in a phase where I'm waking up at three o'clock in the morning, all sorts of things in my mind that I want to make sure I get right," Reid tells us a week before the 2024 show. "To do the job successfully, you've got to be into the detail."
And there is a lot of detail. The parade, held on the second Saturday each November, stretches out over three miles and unfolds over several hours. This is a spectacle whose origins go back to medieval times. It has plenty of traditions and repetitions baked in: the gold coach, the blessing at St Paul's, the march of the livery companies through the streets of the Square Mile. Yet every year brings changes. New participants, novelty floats, and the vagaries of the British weather are just a few. The Pageantmaster has to juggle all of the variables while also overseeing security arrangements, broadcasting needs, road closures and a thousand other important tasks.
Decades of experience
Happily, it's anything but a one-man show. "We bring together a big team," says Reid, "and that team is well rehearsed and knows what it's doing. A lot of it is actually about creating an environment, creating a culture where everybody wants to do something brilliantly, and that's a lovely thing to be involved with." Reid is assisted on the day by a team of liveried Marshalls, most of whom have many years' experience superintending the Show. They even get special ties, with Roman numeral "X" motifs to show the number or decades' service. 13 Marshalls have earned the triple-X.
So has Reid. He's the most experienced Pageantmaster in the Show's history, with 32 parades under his belt (and on his tie). This follows on from his father's 20-year tenure in the role. Between them, the Reids have overseen half a century of mayoral progressions. Achievement enough, you might think, but the current Pageantmaster also presided over the Queen's Golden Jubilee celebrations, has worked on the London Marathon and Boat Races, and is the Chief Executive of the Invictus Games. He has quite the LinkedIn page.
Anything can come around the corner
A particularly rewarding part of the Pageantmaster's job is to work out how diverse organisations can fit into the parade. "I take them through the design process and make sure that they're comfortable with what they're doing," Reid explains. "I also help them express themselves, you know, with a float — which is a fairly niche method of expression in the modern world."
The Show has witnessed any number of creative floats over the years, from a bus full of anthropomorphic cats, to a huge inflatable rugby player, to an AA van towing the Starbug from Red Dwarf. You never know what's coming around the corner next.
One fixture every year is the representations of the giants Gog and Magog, fabled protectors of the City of London. The current duo were made of wicker by the Worshipful Company of Basketmakers. Their predecessors, though, were inflatable and supplied by the same company who created the flying pig for Pink Floyd. "There was outrage from from certain members of the church that we were using pagan imagery," reveals Reid. "There was an exchange of letters in the Telegraph."
The word "float", incidentally, is thought to derive from the Lord Mayor's Show, which traditionally took place on the Thames. Even the word "show" itself, in the sense of a staged spectacle, may have originally been coined for this mayoral extravaganza.
Handling the unexpected
With the best planning in the world, things will occasionally go wrong. An elephant stampede on the Embankment, say, or a tube-themed float getting stuck in a tight corner. In recent years, the biggest calamity came in 2012 when the Lord Mayor's golden carriage refused to budge. A stone got wedged into a wheel axle, bringing it to a grinding halt. Lord Mayor Roger Gifford had to finish his return journey in another vehicle.
The parade takes place come rain or shine. It has persisted through wars, plagues and fires. In 2020, Reid was in charge when the event had to be called off — a vanishingly rare occurrence — because of the pandemic. "There were a lot of unknowns, reflects Reid. "Because it was an open-air event, it wasn't necessarily subject to some of the issues that indoor events had. [But] how many people can you have? How dense could your audience be? We worked on the basis of trying to produce something that was contained, really, within Guildhall Yard... a televised event. We got into very detailed planning for that, and then things started to look worse, and we actually cancelled it."
But even during a global pandemic constitutional duties must be fulfilled. The Lord Mayor Sir William Russell still swore his oath of allegiance on the second Saturday of November. The only difference was that he turned up to the Royal Courts of Justice in a motor vehicle and suit, rather than a gold coach and mayoral chains. Unusually for modern times, Russell served two terms as Lord Mayor, another consequence of the pandemic.
Where to watch the Lord Mayor's Show
Finally, we ask Dominic if he has any tips, as the ultimate insider, on the best place to watch the show. "Probably Mansion House, where most of the action is. Or St Paul's, for the blessing. At the Royal Courts of Justice there'll be a fanfare. This time it will be sounded by the by the Pipes and Drums of the Royal Regiment of Scotland." For a less crowded view, you might also consider the return procession, when the new Lord Mayor heads back to Mansion House having sworn his oath. "We've done the business. We've got in there, we've done our thing, and everybody's in a good mood."
That's the thing about the Lord Mayor's Show. It reveals the City, its institutions and its wider community in their finest spirits. And they're all conducted in merriment by the ultimate cat-herder, London's long-serving Pageantmaster Dominic Reid.
The Lord Mayor's Show takes place on the second Saturday of every November and is free to watch anywhere along the route. See our guide for all the details.
For more on the history of the Lord Mayor's Show, Dominic Reid recommends Pageantry and Power by Tracey Hill. You can also watch Reid deliver a Gresham College lecture on the Show's 800 year history here.
