Anniversary: The Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II — June 2, 1953

Queen Elizabeth II was crowned at Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953, in the first coronation ever televised. She had pushed for the cameras herself, against her own prime minister’s advice, and the gamble paid off in numbers nobody in the Abbey could have imagined: 27 million people in Britain alone watched at home, many on a borrowed set in a neighbour’s front room, for a ceremony that had never before let anyone outside the building see it happen.