A UK Market Town Is Mourning Its McDonald's Like a Dead Relative

On Sunday, July 27, people passed under the golden arches of Horsham's McDonald's for the final time. Mere days had passed since the branch celebrated its silver jubilee for remaining on the same corner of Worthing Road for 25 years. Overnight scaffolding sealed it away from the hungry maws of the locals forever. The end.

It's probably around this time that this Sussex market town (and, by proxy, us) should consider the benefits of no longer having a McDonald's in the area, but the people of Horsham are far less predictable than that. On Wednesday morning, a card and bouquet of flowers appeared at the base of the defunct restaurant. As first reported by the West Sussex Gazette, the card reads:

You were there for me when I needed you most and now I'm here for you. You stood high above the rest with golden arches. You were the king of fast food, but to me you're my queen. Lots of love, Callum, Sam + Jonny. XXX

Taking a moment to just thank Callum, Sam and Jonny for their quite wonderful show of comedic timing, the card and flowers alerts me to the wider point of McDonald's as a concept. McDonald's as an entity—something that lives, breathes and shares our lives.

There will be very few people on the planet who have not found themselves stumbling through the grey streets of their home town at 3 AM in search for food, only for one of your mates—the tall one, normally—spotting the ethereal golden glow of a luminous M in the distance; fewer still who haven't chosen to dine their sober; fewer again who have lived a life uncoloured by its narrative.

While people rightly lament the loss of their beloved Big Mac, it's the absence of the chain's spiritual presence that will be missed the most. Fuck the food, it's the experience—take me down in a Shinjuku branch, slap me up in a booth by the Bronx, I don't care. At least I'll be dying somewhere I know, somewhere that smells and feels the same, no matter where I am on Earth.

The actions in Horsham, specifically, show that McDonald's has transcended beyond mere patty-flippers and has, Obi-Wan Kenobi-style, been made stronger in the hearts of Horshamites for the very fact its been struck down. I hope that whenever Callum, Sam, and Jonny are next together in a branch a spectral Ronald McDonald appears before them to nod his appreciation. Use the force.

McDonald's is impeachable in the eye of the masses because, while their food can contribute to making you really unhealthy, it provides a flexible service of restaurant, café and meeting point, all tied up beneath a golden bow. Yes, it's scientifically proven to be addictive, and, okay, a lady in Queensland did stumble across a maggot writhing within her wrap, and, yeah, yeah, fine, the company itself urges its employees not to eat the food, but where else on the planet is so reliable, so cheap, so goddamn nutritious?

Through yearly reinventions, McDonald's has also managed to transcend boundaries of class and taste. On the one hand you've got the fabled Danny Dyer grabbing some fries over in Hemel Hempstead and, on the other, the 24/7 branch on High Street Kensington, which presumably ships Filet-O-Fish by the bucketload to ravenous rahs at all hours of the day. Socialism at work, right there.

Back in 1992, when Benjamin R. Barber first coined the now idiomatic word "McWorld", there were only 14,000 branches worldwide. Now there's upwards of 35,000. It's easy to call this worrying, even cancerous, but if Horsham has shown us anything, it's that people can develop emotional attachments to brands and buildings in much the same way they do with other people. Things can be just as important to us as each other. A restaurant is not just a place that serves food.

The video entitled "End of Horsham's McDonald's" serves as a fitting dirge to their branch. It's miserable. There's no voiceover, no information, nothing but the deafening silence of unused deep-fat fryers and faded childhood laughter. There will be no more McFlurries here. The walls will never again be adorned with advertisements for seasonally approved, relevantly themed burgers. Future generations have been robbed of a crucial bedrock of contemporary existence.

Callum, Sam, and Jonny called McDonald's their Queen, and just as a person grieves for their dead spouse, trying but incapable of ever truly moving on, Horsham is doomed to trundle forward, forever emptier, lonelier, and, maybe, healthier.