London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead. Story time. History time.
And today, summer solstice plus one.
The sun well and truly lording it over us.
Darkness down to a meagre six hours, skulking off like a defeated French army.
Summer has taken the field.
And that seems the perfect moment to launch a brand new series.
A series devoted to the great British institutions.
First up…
Not Parliament.
Not the monarchy.
Not the BBC.
Not warm beer.
No.
Something bigger.
Something older.
Something more sacred.
The queue.
Ah yes.
The queue.
That great, solemn, invisible line that stretches through British life like a national nervous system.
The queue.
That strange and beautiful human centipede of patience.
The queue.
That thing we form instinctively, as naturally as ducks form V-shapes in flight.
Drop three Britons into an empty field, tell them nothing, walk away, come back five minutes later and I guarantee you they’ll be standing one behind the other, mildly apologising.
Nobody knows why.
It’s in the blood.
Like tea.
Or apologising to lamp posts.
And here’s the thing.
Other countries have lines.
But only Britain has the queue.
Capital Q.
Almost a constitutional principle.
A thing of moral weight.
You jump a queue in Britain and you have not merely committed an inconvenience.
You have breached the social contract.
You have kicked the beehive.
You have insulted Magna Carta.
You have, in a small but meaningful way, declared war.
And everybody in the queue will know it.
Nobody will say anything, of course.
That’s the British genius.
We won’t tackle you.
We won’t shout.
We’ll simply perform the national ritual of disapproval.
The sharp intake of breath.
The raised eyebrow.
The glance.
The glance is lethal.
The British glance can peel paint.
Queue-jumping is one of the few things that can turn a mild-mannered vicar into a revolutionary.
There’s a reason for this.
Queues are fairness made visible.
First come, first served.
Simple.
Beautiful.
Civilisation in single file.
And it goes back a long way.
Not medieval. Medieval England was mostly elbows and plague.
But the modern queue? That’s Victorian.
Railway stations.
Ticket offices.
Post offices.
Industrial life.
Masses of people needing order.
Britain, being Britain, turned waiting into a system.
And then into an ethic.
Then came the Second World War.
And rationing.
Now there was queueing with purpose.
Queueing as patriotic duty.
Queueing for eggs.
Queueing for sugar.
Queueing for a glimpse of a banana.
A banana!
Children born during the war reportedly stared at them as if they were tropical dragons.
And you queued for everything.
Food.
Coal.
News.
Rumours.
Hope.
That, I think, sealed it.
Queueing got stitched into the national soul.
And nowhere more than London.
London is the world capital of queueing.
Bus stops.
Tube stations.
Theatre tickets.
Pubs.
Though not at the bar.
That’s one of the few places where British civilisation reverts briefly to Viking law.
But otherwise, order.
Rank.
Sequence.
A choreography of waiting.
And London’s greatest queue of all?
The Lying-in-State for Elizabeth II.
September 2022.
Five miles long.
Five miles.
A queue so vast it needed its own government website.
Its own weather reports.
Its own live tracker.
People queued for twenty-four hours.
Thirty hours.
More.
Nobody complained.
Well, not much.
Because this was Britain at its most British.
Standing quietly.
Shuffling forward.
Talking to strangers.
Sharing biscuits.
Becoming, for a brief glorious moment, one long national sausage of stoicism.
Foreigners find this baffling.
The Italians, bless them, do not queue.
They swarm.
A bus arrives in Rome and everybody attacks it like seagulls on chips.
The French?
They have the file d’attente but it’s argumentative.
It’s a queue with philosophy.
The Americans?
They queue, but aggressively.
There’s a competitive edge.
A feeling that waiting itself is somehow un-American.
And in parts of the world there isn’t so much a queue as a sort of democratic scrum.
A free-for-all.
A mêlée.
An anthropological experiment.
But Britain?
Britain queues.
Exquisitely.
Instinctively.
Beautifully.
We queue because we believe the universe ought to have order.
Even if everything else is collapsing.
Government in chaos.
Railways on strike.
Weather ridiculous.
Economy wibbling.
Still.
The queue remains.
The queue says:
“We may be doomed, but we shall be doomed in the correct order.”
And there’s something noble in that.
Something daft.
Something deeply touching.
Because a queue is hope.
A queue says there is something worth waiting for.
Fish and chips.
A bus.
A concert.
A better future.
Or at least a sandwich.
And perhaps that’s the secret.
The British queue isn’t just waiting.
It’s faith.
Faith in fairness.
Faith in sequence.
Faith that your turn will come.
Eventually.
Probably.
Unless the person at the front is asking for twelve lottery tickets, three scratch cards and wants to pay in coppers.
Which is, of course, another great British institution.
But that’s for another day.
See you tomorrow.
The Call of the London will be right here. London’s going to come calling again. It’s already queued up.