So two weeks ago I went to join a queue...
Not just any old queue but The Queue: a five-mile-long line of people waiting to see the Queen lying in state.
I don’t normally join such long queues voluntarily, but my Mum was keen to go and pay her respects to the Queen – and I said I’d go with her because it felt like quite a historical occasion and I realised I’d like to pay my own respects too.
And so that’s how I found myself on a train heading into King’s Cross at nearly midnight on Thursday 15th September.
Even by the time we set off, the Queue had already become a thing of legend. It’d become several miles long almost as soon as it had opened, snaking its way though central London from Southwark Park to Westminster Hall. You had to have a wristband to join The Queue and it had a whole dedicated YouTube channel charting its length and how long it was estimated to take to get to the front. Satellite images showed that that The Queue could be seen from space.
Mum and I joined the initial queue-to-get-in-the-queue in Southward Park at 1am. It took a long time to get out of the park, but there followed an enthusiastic stride through the deserted streets of London in the early hours of the morning, with cool streetlights and long shadows making London look magical. It felt like London belonged to us and us alone.
Things took a slight turn when we came to a complete standstill at the Tate Modern at around 4.30am. No one knew what was happening, other than that we were a huge crowd of people and we weren't allowed to move anywhere. We inched along the Thames for more than two hours, feeling freezing and exhausted, then just as we were losing all hope the sun came up over the Thames and the sky turned into a blazing fire of light. This coincided neatly with cafes opening, which meant we could have a cup of tea – and it might just have been the nicest cup of tea I’ve ever drunk.
Mercifully it all got going again at around 7am and progress was brisk (although we were still queue-bound for a further nine hours). We shuffled along the Thames, past the London Eye, along the river across from the Houses of Parliament, then we crossed Lambeth Bridge to reach the final snaking queue outside the Westminster Hall.
This bit took bloomin’ ages, but it was made infinitely more jolly by the news that David Beckham was in the line slightly behind us. Until this point, The Queue had just been a line, whereas now it was snaking back and forth so it was easy to see who'd been behind you – and the amount of people craning their necks to see ol’ Golden Balls was quite hilarious. Here he is right in the middle of the photo, wearing a flat cap (a photo taken by our Queue Friend, Olly, and since stolen by most of the world's media):
The final bit of The Queue was spent chatting to everyone around us and having the lovliest time in the blazing sun - in stark contrast to the freezing misery of the 5am standstill. In fact we were having such a lovely time that when finally - after 14 long hours - we reached Westminster Hall, it was all a bit of a handbrake turn to enter such a solomn environment full of reverence and magnificence.
But magnificent it was. The bowed guards, the flag draped over the coffin, the sense of peace. Mum cried. And even I was really moved by it all - it was wonderful.
I decided to live-tweet the our time in The Queue – mainly to keep myself awake, but also because my young children couldn’t quite get their heads around the fact that I was staying up all night to be in a queue and they wanted to know what was involved. I also thought it’d make a lovely documentation of my Mum’s and my mad midnight adventure in London...
Well, the tweets went a bit mad and by morning they’d gone all around the world, being read by everyone from musicians to authors to actual movie stars. I received thousands of retweets, hundreds of lovely comments from strangers and multiple media requests from radio stations. Since then I’ve been on LBC, BBC Radio 5 Live, Radio Leeds and I even got a shout-out from author Frank Cottrell-Boyce in his reflections of The Queue on BBC Radio 4.
It was all a bit bonkers.
And there I was thinking that the most interesting thing I’d do in September was to paint a mural on the school library wall!
You can read more about The Queue, starring my lovely Mum in my Twitter thread here.
I’m Jules and I don’t normally document queues for a living. In fact, I’m an artist and calligrapher who makes bright, colourful greetings cards and fun wall art – take a look at my shop here!