Volunteers

I’d booked a morning shift to volunteer for Operation London Bridge. I’d picked The Green Park where crowds were being asked to lay floral tributes to The Queen. The flowers that people had already placed infant of Buckingham Palace have also been moved to the park.

I was on a train before 6am which would give me plenty of time to walk from Waterloo to the briefing and welfare centre in a church near the park. The city was very empty at that time of the morning. As I walked up Haymarket there was a very visible police presence and some roped off areas. I assumed it was part of the crowd control but it turned out that there had been an incident on Shaftesbury Avenue shortly before I was in the area.

The Welfare Centre was the base for a number of different teams, including the Team London Group. We met at 7am and waited gathering our uniforms and then, just before 8am, we were escorted to the park. Initially, we were walked around the route people will be asked to take if they want to look at the Palace and the location of the tributes.

When we arrived back in the park we were split into groups. I was paired with a lovely man named David and we spent the next 5 hours or so directing people where to lay their flowers. I am very happy that I could be of help. As the day went on there were lots of people but all were in a very respectful mood and it was lovely to be able to talk to people who had travelled from afar. There were also a lot of people who had spent the night queuing to see the lying-in-state and it was their stories of how the people in the queue helped each other through the night makes me realise that most people are decent.

After my shift had finished I decided to take a look at the floral tributes myself. I’d been based a little away from the main area with the goal of directing people to the right place. There was a plan to keep the messages that people had brought to the park so asking people to place them centrally seemed sensible but nobody was being forced to. But I really wanted to see what people had brought so I told a trip around the walking route we’d done as a team this morning but it had been lengthened so took me much longer than expected. The floral tributes, however, were lovely to see. There are a lot of Paddington Bears.

I hope I’ve been helpful. I certainly met some lovely people. But I was exhausted when I got home.