How will you remember The Queue?

When they come to retell the story of the last ten days, people across Britain will remember certain events more than others.

For some it will be the moment the news broke, phone alerts pinging and TV channels changed across the nation. For others it could be the sight of King Charles and his siblings, along with Prince William and Prince Harry walking behind the Queen’s coffin as it made its way to Westminster Hall.

I suspect for the people in the flat-roofed Moreton House and Gataker House blocks in the Slipper’s Place Estate in Bermondsey, it will be the sight and sound of tens of thousands of people filing past their front windows morning, noon and night in the last five days. No matter what time, or how cold it has been, they have come in their droves, old and young, families, friends and people on their own, getting off at Bermondsey Station, turning right and starting the most famous pilgrimage in Britain since Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.

It was a bright but cold start on Sunday, as there was less than 24 hours to walk the five miles to see the Queen’s coffin lying in state at the Palace of Westminster. Even from the aptly-named Jubilee Line in Swiss Cottage, the Tube was unusually busy for a Sunday morning, but people had come determined, rucksacks full of sweets, thick socks on their feet and a goal in mind — to be a small part of history.

There are signs that the park has seen its fair share of footfall in the last few days. A felt tip notice from a house just inside Southwark Park urged people to “shush” between 10pm and 8am as its occupants were sleeping. The stewards were jovial, chivvying along the bright-eyed walkers. One father took to running a sweepstake with his daughters, putting an ambitious bid in of eight hours to see the late-monarch’s coffin, compared to his girls’ more pessimistic predictions. They decided whoever was right would get a prize, and as they filed in to the queue ahead of me when we reached Westminster Hall, he should be celebrating this evening.

People had grown used to following the government’s queue tracker in recent days, the September 2022 version of Big Jet TV during Storm Eunice, or Priti Patel’s return flight from Kenya ready to get sacked. It soared as high as 26 hours at one point, but there was cause for optimism as people entered the first “snake” of security lines at 8am, as it topped 12 hours.

There was a bubble of nervous anticipation. What could lie ahead? Apart from lots of standing around, the cold, and blisters. Wristbands were handed out and jovial encouragement given from stewards with a knowing look, as if they knew we didn’t know what we were getting in for. Suckers.

It began. Straight across the road out of Southwark Park and up the road. The first sight of the Thames was glimpsed next to a wonderful Victorian pub the Angel. ‘This must have taken hours to get to on Friday, we’re flying’, was the vibe. The man behind me had timed that it had taken him 21 minutes to get through the first snake. Straight on, and a few dog legs led us to Shad Thames, part of the old docks and wharfs that led London to become one of the world’s trade centres.

Like the rest of the capital’s nautical history gentrification, redevelopment and regeneration has since rendered large parts of it unrecognisible, but with its tight streets, lofty crossings between buildings you could get a sense of how tightly interconnected they all were, and how once apart a time the area hummed with activity.

We slowed to a crawl, and then, finally, a halt. I dug out the crossword from my bag, which contained enough reading materials to see me through the twelve hours. Part of the experience in The Queue has been the opportunity to bump into and meet people. Channel 4 even picked up on two people who had piqued each others romantic interests. It was at this point, just as I realised that yet again, completing the Sunday Times General Knowledge puzzle was out of my reach, that I got talking to the family in front, who kindly adopted me and took me under their wing.

Part of the fascination with The Queue (which will surely become both a Channel 4 reality show and inspiration for stage and screen in the next few years, the latter where we project whatever we want on to it), has been who is in it. Queue-xpert Stephen Reicher has written for the Guardian about the different groups that made it up, and my interest has largely been as something that will go down in history, as well as something that marks a major change in this country’s narrative. But who would I inevitably end up stood in front of, or behind?

As ever, people were far more complex than you would think. This group were neither raving royalists or republicans, just four people with a keen sense of what it meant for the country, its history, and who had a urge to pay their respects to the Queen after 70 years on the throne. Much to my luck, they were an interesting bunch who were happy to talk about everything and anything, from the history of London, to motorcycling across Europe, the Tattershall Castle bar across the river and when smoking on aeroplanes was banned in the UK. All stuff that literally passed the time of day.

Landmarks came and went. Tower Bridge looked resplendent in the early-autumn sunshine as we entered another of the seemingly endless snakes of queues to try and introduce a buffer between people. Me and one of the group popped in to the pub, the Old Tameside Inn for a swift drink. From strangers to having a pint within an hour or so. In Britain. Who would have thought it.

Shortly afterwards, the boy, one of the group’s sons, at one point asked me how old I was. Fearing the worst, but also wondering how old I looked without a decent shave in days, I asked him what he reckoned, and in response he said in my 30s. To be fair, with less than six months to go, he wasn’t far off.

He asked what I did for a living, so I did a dreadful job of making journalism sound interesting, before he said he preferred fantasy worlds and fiction, escapism, and proceeded to display one of the best imaginations I’ve heard of, the sort of thing that would make good episodes for Game of Thrones or a Netflix TV drama. Otherwise what do you tell someone in Year 7? It instinctively feels like it can’t be that long ago, you were only a teenager recently after all, but it’s only when you try and look back that you realise that yes, it is nearly two decades ago and you haven’t been a teenager for nearly a decade. Next you’ll be telling me that they all have the latest camera phones with polyphonic ring tones.

On we went, ticking off landmarks. London Bridge, Borough Market, that weird tunnel bit near London Bridge, the Tate, the Millennium Bridge and the Southbank. If you had plonked someone in London for the first time and called this a guided tour, they wouldn’t have gone away disappointed. Like a commuter pulling clear of gridlock traffic, we were flying along at a great pace. The National Theatre came and went with a blink of the eye, in previous days you could have nipped in for a matinee, chocolate brownie beforehand and grabbed a KFC from opposite Waterloo Station afterwards before returning to exactly where you were in The Queue. Now you would have missed your group completely.

There were elements of disbelief. Illuminated boards said we had 4–5 hours ahead, but that surely couldn’t be possible, were we about to get into more traffic? A hop, skip, jump and quick whirl around Jubilee Gardens and we were crossing Westminster Bridge. Parliament was in sight. Parliament, and the coffin. It had only been six hours. How was this possible?

The game of A-Z of animals was wrapped up, and attempts increased to try and eat all the food before it had to be thrown away (foodbank donations were available, but a half-eaten bag of fruit gums is hardly the most appetising). We had a quick chat with Humberside Police, who seemed to have landed the job looking after Lambeth Bridge and the embankment. “Everyone’s been so nice to us here,” said one constable. “Nobody likes us when we’re in Hull and Grimsby.” If only they knew Londoners, if only they knew.

The mood started to change. We knew yet another, painful, winding snake lay ahead, 75 rows of queue, like the boss level that had to be defeated first, all while stuffing Cadbury Eclairs into your mouth in a weird low-budget Takeshi’s Castle style challenge. But as each row went by, even though we never seemed to be getting any closer to our destination in some sort of fever dream-style scenario, everything became more serious. The reason why we were there, the reason why we had got out of bed in the small hours of a Sunday morning, was just up ahead.

Security was cleared, phones were switched off and silence descended. Like a dense fog, a solemn, respectful, purposeful atmosphere fell. After two flights of padded stairs we were in; Westminster Hall unfolding in front of us, with the yeomen, police officers, hundreds of people, the now-famous catafalque and of course, the Queen’s coffin.

Every step soon becomes part of the pagentry, no matter how much you resist. The slow steps, one foot softly placed at a time, brings back memories of King Charles and his siblings in the hall two days ago, of seeing Prince William and the Queen’s other grandchildren there on Saturday night. MPs and foreign leaders have spoken there, Charles I was tried within its walls, Henry VIII infamously played tennis — but the events of the last few days are stronger and more vivid, more relatable, more real. It’s easy to try and resist, but suddenly you are part of another ceremony, another procession, one that is into its fifth and final day.

Slowly the queue in front of you decreases. This is the end of The Queue. At a time where Britain is at its most secular in modern times, most irrelegious, it has become a pilgrimage for people across the country. These are the final few steps, padding your way down, and across, passing the police officer at the rear, the candle in the corner, and then the coffin emerges.

In that moment, it’s hard to know what to do. One woman a few people in front blew a kiss to the coffin and gave the “peace” sign. A man in a wheelchair on the row behind did not move, just glad to be able to make it. Others curtseyed. The moment benefitted hugely from the ban on phones.I worried briefly about forgetting myself and just carrying on walking.

Instead I removed my glasses, stopped, bowed my head and said a few silent words. I then looked up and tried to take it all in briefly. Inevitably, I failed, because there is no way of taking it all in, because it is so unlike anything else before, or likely, ever again. How can you possibly absorb that moment? You can’t, not because of who it is, not because of its significance, but because it’s just surreal— even those who attended the Queen Mother’s lying in state won’t have seen anything else on this stage.

Then you walk out into the early evening. Just under nine hours, far less than the 12 or 13 predicted, a time I ended up repeating to friends like I’m a marathon runner talking about how my training paid off.

A lot will be projected on to The Queue, it will launch 1,000 opinion pieces about how it is the Best of Britain. About how it was the ultimate way the British public thanked its longest monarch for her ultimate service.

But if I may be given licence for a projection of my own, it’s a rare moment of a shared physical experience.

No matter on what day you went, or how long it took, the experience will have been largely the same. The encouraging stewards, the cameraderie in The Queue, meeting lovely people along the way, seeing groups from all walks of life taking part, ticking off landmarks, nipping to the portaloos, wondering if your snacks will last and then trying to shift them quickly before you have to throw them away. If you did it on Thursday or Sunday, your experience will have been about the same, but unlike a concert, a play or a football match, unlike anything else others have done.

In a society now as fractured, with so little agreed common ground, it felt that there was finally something most people could agree on, no matter how ardent republican or royalist, that this was a significant moment of history worth recognising.

That, I suspect, is the myth of the queue that will endure and the story that will be retold. Perfectly like all caricatures, it has the essential strand of truth in there.

The Queue is dead. Long live the Queue.