It's Friday night, the Queen is dead, and I'm about to do something ludicrous for money. At least, I'm telling people it's for money, texting my friends explanations as I arrive at Southwark Park to join what is already being called the longest queue in history.
“It sounds a bit excessive,” says a friend I once saw snort a whole bag of unidentified powder they found in a club toilet. “Why would you walk all night just to look at a box?” The truth is I’m not here for the Queen; I’m here for the Queue. I heard it calling – the way bad ideas call to any broken heart, saying, This will hurt, but you want it. Come and find out why.
I shoulder my backpack full of wet wipes and protein bars and shuffle towards the railings, where hundreds of thousands of people have come to pay their last respects to the late Queen Elizabeth II, whose coffin is lying in state in Westminster Hall. That’s more than five miles away. This is technically a free country, and I already need the loo. I could turn around right now. Instead, I join the Queue.
The British are not the only nation on Earth that knows how to queue, but we’re the only ones to make it part of our personal brand. How like us to romanticise a phenomenon that is fundamentally a response to scarcity and privation. This queue, The Queue, looks like a feat of civic organisation that only the British would think to pull off. There are portaloos and police barriers and stewards staged with a precision that speaks of years of planning. The Queue is ridiculous. It is magnificent. It runs from Bermondsey by way of Waterloo until it staggers over Lambeth bridge towards the dreaded ‘snakes’, the airport-style holding pens that we’re already hearing stories about.
It already dwarfs at least one previous record for a queue, when thousands of people waited in line for French fries at the opening of the first McDonald’s in Red Square. No sane person wants stale French fries that much; they queued to make a statement. The Queue is not just about the Queen. You join the Queue to pay your respects the same way that you go to a gay bar to drink – If that was all you wanted, you could have had box wine at home. It's a reason to show up – but it's not the whole reason anyone's here.
From the outside, the Queue looks like an exercise in deference that happens to be visible from space. It looks like tens of thousands of people meekly receiving their wristbands with their precise place in line and walking where the police tell them to walk for the chance to shuffle politely past the Royal coffin and tug a submissive forelock. This story makes perfect sense from the outside, and it’s almost entirely wrong.
Let’s start with the wristbands. By the time my group makes it to the first checkpoint at Tower Bridge, the stewards are just handing them out in random fistfuls. The numbers don’t matter. The Queue is so massive that the stewards now have to check wristbands by colour, which changes every thousand people.
By the time we get our wristbands, we've been organising ourselves for hours: people settle into groups of around seven or 10, and we take turns keeping each other's place if anyone needs to run for the bathrooms or to grab a round of coffee. The Queue is a self-assembling monster. Or, if you like your Hobbes, a Leviathan.
I notice how few people are on their phones. It feels easy and necessary to be present, in the same way that pilgrims probably don’t play much Candy Crush on the way to Mecca. And this is a pilgrimage – we are all hoping to pick up some sort of transcendence on the way, and possibly a souvenir. This is ritual. It is theatre. It is deeply, madly, silly, and it is special because it is silly, and it makes perfect sense in a nation that will put up with any amount of appalling behaviour from rich fools in ridiculous hats as long as everyone knows their place.
In the Queue, everyone knows their place. My place is about 10 paces behind the mum and daughter in accidentally matching outfits, 12 metres ahead of the two teens in badly-fitting black suits keeping a quiet social distance from their unsmiling father. He is a small man decked in medals who can somehow clench his whole body at once and clearly disapproves of anyone visibly having fun. This must be exhausting. I ask him what the medals are for. “General stuff,” he says, which could be an answer, or it could be his name.
It’s all jolly enough at the start, as strangers begin to form little groups to trade snacks and rumours. We have nothing in common except the fact that we turned up at the same time and have to put up with each other. By daybreak we will be ready to carry one another over the finish line if we have to, which is as good a definition of family as any. John, a retired engineer, is 84, and is frail enough that he really should be in the Accessible Queue, but it’s been closed. John was 14 when the Queen was crowned. “I was just born that year,” says Mary, his wife, who grins as she watches me do the maths in my head. “He’s a cradle-snatcher.”
Pam flew here from Wisconsin this morning. She is almost 60 and over six feet tall, with a blonde crop and a strong jaw and no indoor voice. “A few hours of me is too much for most people,” she warns, with a laugh that doesn’t reach her eyes. She needn’t have worried. Everyone indulges her because she is foreign and her excitement is flattering – although her mother loved the Queen more. “She told me, ‘Think about it, Pam – think about what she had to accomplish. As a female.’”
Hour four
By sunset, we’re filing under the pitiless neon glare of the London Eye, and my feet are cramping. John is visibly struggling – but not as much as Steve, a delivery driver from Bristol who turns 60 this year. “It won’t beat me,’ he says. “I’m beat now, I’m regretting it now, but it’s like my brother said this morning - he said, you have to follow your heart.”
Steve, like many others, came down on the train and has no idea where he’ll sleep tonight. He has to get back to Bristol for a doctor’s appointment. It’s the NHS. He’s been waiting for months. “We’re nearly there,” he says, pointing across the river. “Isn’t that the Palace?” It is not. And that’s how I find out that Steve has never been to London before in his life, although he has been to Belfast to see the dock that once held the Titanic, which he knows everything about. His partner was the one who was into the Royal Family. In 2016, they were both diagnosed with cancer. He recovered, she didn’t.
Maybe it’s a coincidence, but almost everyone I speak to turns out to have recently lost someone, or something important. Pam nursed her mother for five years of Alzheimers, but could not be with her when she died at the start of the Pandemic. She never got to say goodbye. Nor Jason and Carson, who buried their father two years ago. Jason has a ponytail, John Lennon glasses and a musical Scouse accent. In a previous life, before the Queue, he managed software that coordinates timetables and ticketing between different train lines. They came here today “Because why not? It’s amazing. You just have to be part of it.” He downs his beer. Then he remembers to add. “And, um, obviously. The Queen.”
There’s Joe, who is tall and thin and quiet and lives in Devon and was born in Hong Kong and fled with his family and will never go back. He associates the Queen, and the idea of British rule, with a place he remembers, a place that has changed forever. He explains this shyly to Hillary, the fish wholesaler, who seems consumed by an urge to protect everyone she knows from anyone she doesn’t, which includes most foreigners. Hillary decides we’ve got to look after Joe. She knows what it’s like to arrive at a funeral too late. We are all here to mourn, and to have that mourning matter. Eventually, I tell Pam what happened to me this year, and what was lost, and what’s left. “I’m sorry, honey,” she says. Thanks, I say, and I rush to get more coffees before the line moves on, because Pam has been awake for 40 hours and is swaying, and we all want her to make it.
At hour eight, something unexpected happens. Something that, for some reason, none of the news coverage has mentioned. What happens is that the Queue shuffles slowly and painfully by the National Covid Memorial near Westminster Bridge. The police presence is stronger here than ever. They try to stop people from getting close enough to the wall to read the names of those who died of Covid-19. Most of us know someone on this wall. The police keep us moving. I have a pen in my pocket, but for some reason nobody’s allowed to add to the hundreds of thousands of names painted in hearts as far as the eye can see.
I watch my Queue family as I do the maths in my head. I’d guess that about as many people queued past that wall as there are names on it. How could you even begin to comprehend loss on that scale?
But then, grief has been thick in the air in this country for years. We’ve been through two years of collective trauma that we haven’t processed. In the last month alone, energy bills have risen 80 percent, inflation has hit 13 percent, and we began careering into a recession. After more than a decade of Conservative rule, an entire generation has seen its prospects for a liveable future chewed up and spat out by rich, entitled fools who mistake cruelty for competence. Our infrastructure is so broken that raw sewage is pouring onto the beaches. I can’t remember the last time this country didn’t feel flattened. It has felt like some cosmic bailiff was taking away all the furniture of ordinary life piece by piece.
That pain and loss and hurt have to go somewhere. And the ailing Queen seemed to represent everything that was slowly slipping away and could not yet be grieved. It’s hard enough losing a person. There aren’t even words for what we have lost, and knowing that others have it far worse makes none of it better. How do you mourn an era? An empire?
Hour ten
The end is in sight. Everything hurts. I am not considering giving up. I’m going all the way to the end. I am dehydrated and tired and vaguely embarrassed, but I am also part of a vast organism inching towards sentience. We are no longer in the Queue; we are the Queue. You may remember a time before, when you had individual hopes and dreams and people you loved. But that’s gone, and for once it’s okay, because maybe it was never real. Maybe, all along, we were just a Queue dreaming itself into being.
It feels like we have been walking forever. A question I hear my companions ask the police and stewards, again and again is, How long have you been here for? If the answer is more than eight hours, the Queuers will comply with a smile. If not, they’ll mutter under their breath about how, It’s alright for some. Carol, a driving instructor and mum of four who I met this morning, gives a young officer a withering look – Home Counties for, Fuck you. It is obvious that the police don't trust us to behave, even though that's literally what we came here to do. Something about that feels wrong, just like it felt wrong when a handful of protesters this week were arrested for holding anti-monarchist placards. Maybe it's inappropriate to protest right now, but the police are not supposed to enforce manners. Are they?
It took me a while to realise why all these police are here: because they have mistaken a huge, weird living monument to civic decency for a threat to public order. There are far, far too many police for a queue this aggressively self-managing. But there would not be enough police to stop the Queue if it ever decided to become an army. I have no doubt that if it wanted to, the Queue could take the city.
As we stagger along the South Bank, the Queue grinds to a halt. Rumours fly around the cold and hungry crowd that it was Charles: the new monarch has held up the queue while he pays his respects to the Queen. Hillary, who has always been a royalist, is outraged by this, and she’s not the only one. We’re all waiting to see the Queen. We’re all cold and we’re all hungry, and Charles just gets to jump to the front? In fairness, I point out, she was his mother. Apparently this is only a partial excuse.
“We won’t see anything like this again,” says Mary. “People won’t come out like this for Charles.” The late Queen was how Britain wanted to see itself. Now the entire country has to see itself in this slightly embarrassing, jug-eared chap who has lived to old age defined by what he, until now, was not. The problem is not that an elevated biscuit salesman forever trying to salvage some dignity out of the grubby public narrative of his past cannot reflect the nation, but that he reflects it uncomfortably well.
Hour twelve
We’re almost at the end of the line, and this is where it starts to get grim. We learn that we’re not allowed to bring anything into the catafalque – no food, no liquids, not even travel-sized toiletries. Cold floodlights usher us into an airport security zone on nightmare mode, as people try to give away whatever snacks they haven’t finished rather than waste food, which has become very expensive this year. Slowly, we start to abandon the things we were carrying, stacking them along the railings like the strangest funeral offerings: tubes of hand cream. Half an apple. Lighters. Cheap mascara and Chanel lipstick and cheese sandwiches. Carol baptises us all with an almost-full bottle of perfume before placing it regretfully on the pile. “Goodbye, Miss Dior!” she sighs. “Ah, well, you can’t take it with you.” In this case, that’s because someone will take it off you.
We can either keep calm or carry on. Some of us can barely do either. Originally there was an Accessible Queue, so that the very old, sick or disabled could pay their respects without having to walk for 14 hours in the cold. But there were limited, staggered time slots, and those were gone by lunchtime. So what did those people do? What did 84-year-old John and Mary in our group do? What do you think?
They queued. They had already made a huge effort to get there. Given that the Queue demographic skews older anyway, that means that you have tens of thousands of old and sick people doing a brutal march for hours with no breaks. We look after John as much as we can, but John looks ready to collapse, and just before the security gates, with an hour still to go, the stewards try to make him leave the line. Not so he can skip ahead – they try to make him go home.
Some of the women in our group plead with the stewards to make an exception. People around us who had had very strong feelings about Queue jumpers earlier are totally okay with this – he is so close, of course he has to finish. Eventually they let him and his wife leave, and we see them ushered ahead. I don't know if they made it.
Have you ever walked for 12 hours without stopping? I mean really without stopping, not even to eat or drink water or sit down for 30 seconds. Now imagine it's cold, and you are not walking fast enough to get your blood pumping but the line never stops. If you fall too far behind you'll lose your place. If you even think about trying to cut ahead, you have badly misunderstood not only the sheer size of the Queue, but the point of the exercise, in a nation where right-wing politicians call immigrants ‘queue jumpers’, because here that’s among the worst things a person can be.
Since Wednesday, hundreds of people have collapsed and fainted in this line, and dozens have been taken to hospital. This is why it matters when the machinery of the state forgets that it is supposed to be there to look after people. A nation, a state, is about more than feelings and figureheads and walking in line. It’s about infrastructure. And when infrastructure breaks down, there are consequences. I worry that people have suffered serious or permanent damage because more thought went into making sure the mourners didn't leave supermarket flowers somewhere inappropriate than went into showing basic respect to everyone who came to pay theirs.
Suddenly, we’re at the security gates and everything is happening very fast. People are getting separated. Where's Jeanette? Where's Pam? A man in a tailcoat who looks like he's walked here from 1899 is shushing me and rushing me under an immense archway. And there is no turning back. Here we are. At the end of the Queue is a hall, and in the hall is a box, and in the box is an idea of something immense and important and almost over that used to be a person. And everything goes quiet.
This is the part where, if you were watching on the live stream, you might have thought there was something wrong with your sound. I've never known a silence so sudden and eerie. Nobody even whispers. The box is there, in the centre, with soldiers in desperately stupid hats. And the crown is there, catching the light, everything bright and cold and cavernous under a ribcage of rafters. This is no time for subtle symbolism. The Leviathan just swallows us whole.
A soldier raps softly on the stone. The guards are changing. This is a ritual so old and alien it seems to be happening far away, across 12 metres of flagstones into a cold, parasite universe no normal person could survive. I lived in the United States and reported on Republican rallies, and the only useful part of constitutional monarchy is to keep the theatre of power as far as possible from the actual mechanisms of government. Sue is at the front of the line while the ceremony happens. Sue is a special needs teacher from Hackney whose whole life is about avoiding meat and rescuing cats. She isn’t a royalist, but she respected the Queen “for her service,” and she walked with us all night. I watch her watching the soldiers. She looks very small.
And suddenly it's our turn. Nobody cries. Nobody makes a fuss in front of the box. They bow their heads or they cross themselves. I cross myself, because my grandma would have wanted me to, even though I mess it up by forgetting the directions and it probably looks weird. But this whole place is weird, and haunted, and you can’t help but remember how many temples are also tombs.
And then we’re out, and it’s over. I give Pam a hug and direct her to the train, and I tell her good luck, and I know we’ll never see each other again. But I will miss the Queue. It’s already hurting, but it’s worth it. Because for one beautiful, stupid day and night there was certainty. There was solidarity. We all knew where we were going, and we all knew what we stood for. We stood for about 14 hours.
