Over the course of this week, the UK public has honoured the late Queen in perhaps the most British way it possibly could - by forming a five-mile long queue to pay their respects.
The queue to see the Queen's coffin lying in state, affectionately now known simply as 'The Queue', is no ordinary queue. The line of mourners that snakes from Westminster Hall, over Lambeth Bridge the along the Thames, all the way to Southwark Park, features hundreds of stewards, a wristband system, a team of multi-faith pastors and chaplains, water fountains, refreshments and a grand total of 500 portaloos.
In the lead up to Queen Elizabeth II's funeral, hundreds of thousands of people will line up to see the Queen's coffin, give the late monarch a brief prayer, bow or curtsey, and then file through the hall and out the other side. It's a tradition that has been observed following Royal deaths for centuries, and an experience that thousands of moved mourners have travelled far and wide to be part of.
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The first people to join the queue arrived on Monday, two whole days before the hall even opened to the public. They were thought to be the first of around 750,000 people attempting to see the Queen's coffin before her state funeral on Monday, September 19.
In anticipation of the streams of people turning up to central London, the government launched a live tracker on YouTube, which has being updated with the current queue length (4.8 miles as of Thursday evening) and the estimated queuing time (at least 8 hours). Since then, a Wikipedia article dedicated to 'The Queue' has emerged and the hashtag #TheQueue has risen to the top of trending Twitter topics in the UK.
The sheer volume of people joining, the hours of waiting that queuers are enduring and the mind-boggling organisational aspects involved have earned this particular queue a place in history. And it's only right that people are marking the occasion with some quintessentially British humour on social media.
Below, we've compiled some of the best British tweets about the best British queue to ever form.
'The final boss'
The queue to get to the queuers
A gift for queuers
An impassioned speech
Coming soon to Netflix...
Just in case
Q... ueue
'Sacre bleu'
Missed a trick
Calling Richard Curtis
On Wednesday, MEN reporter Stephen Topping headed to London to check out 'The Queue' for himself. You can read about his experience of the 8-hour wait here.
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