British Spirit: Queue to Pay Respects to Queen Approaches Five Miles

The queue of well-wishers waiting to pay their final respects to Queen Elizabeth II in London is now over four and a half miles, with a ribbon of people flanking the River Thames.

The vast queue of people who wish to have the opportunity to pay their final respects to Queen Elizabeth II, filing past her coffin in the ancient Westminster Hall in the final days before Monday’s Royal funeral, continues to grow in length.

While the queue had already hit two and a half miles by the time the public lying-in-state commenced on Wednesday afternoon, it has continued to grow — which some fluctuations accounting for time of day and night — since. Westminster Hall is open to mourners 24 hours a day until Monday morning.

The queue lengthened considerably Wednesday night, reaching 2.9 miles by the early hours of Thursday morning, the surge in people appearing to coincide with pub closing time in London. Falling overnight, the numbers started to grow again in the early hours, reaching 2.8 miles long by 0900 (0400EST) Thursday.

The queue’s historic size increased over Thursday, hitting 4.5 miles in the day and rising to 4.8 miles by the time of writing as the evening begins in London. According to the UK Department of Culture, Media and Sport — the government department managing this aspect of the Royal funeral arrangements — the wait time from the end of the queue to entering Westminster Hall is “at least eight hours”.

Yet these waits to pay respects are essentially weekday work-time numbers, and the queue is widely anticipated to considerably increase in size over the weekend. With much of the public off work for a three-day-weekend as of Friday evening, hundreds of thousands at the least are expected to travel to London in the coming days.

Estimates of a queue time of up to 30 hours at absolute peak times — likely over the weekend when the most possible people will have time to pay their final respects — have been claimed.

Given the nature of the lying-in-state — the Queen died very suddenly, and the opportunity to enter Parliament to pay respects is not ticketed — it is difficult to truly predict how many will actually come. The Queen Mother, who died in 2002, lay in state for three days — compared to nearly five full days for Elizabeth II now — and received 200,000 mourners.

Extra infrasturcture has been put in place to help support those in the queue. Extra loos have been provided along the route, along with water fountains and first aid posts. Volunteer stewards, medics, and priests are all present along the route to assist the public.

The Archibishop of York, who visited the queue to speak with people waiting there, said — per the BBC — that: “[the queue is] completely astonishing, but perhaps not surprising… We are rediscovering our togetherness, our belonging to each other across our regions and nations.

“The Queen obviously represented that to us with incredible devotion and faithfulness over a long period of time.”

That the end of the Queen’s reign — perhaps the greatest global symbol of Britishness — should be marked by the biggest queue on earth, another mighty symbol of Britain, was not lost on the world’s media.