None of those waiting along the South Bank were traditional royalists, but we all felt a shared sense of respect for Her late Majesty

We’d been waiting in line for around seven hours before there was even a hint of movement in the queue. Around four o’clock a cry went up from a steward “we’re moving!” We all looked at each other, unsure if it was really happening, having been sitting so long we’d grown used to this stretch of pavement where we’d been waiting since 9am. 

There were whoops of joy as we crossed Westminster Bridge and rushed down Lambeth Walk, opposite the Houses of Parliament. There was excitement, a nervous energy, and no one quite sure what to expect when we got there. 

There were fears that the behemoth queue to see Her late Majesty lying in state would be a 30-hour-long waking nightmare, people trudging ceaselessly forward through the night from London Bridge, two and a half miles down the South Bank to the Palace of Westminster. Yet, the thing I’ll remember is the raucous camaraderie. 

It struck me continually, as we stood in that queue, from nine in the morning to six in the evening, that we were members of the British public who’d never have crossed paths otherwise, and suddenly we were getting along like a house on fire. We compared notes on what snacks we’d brought to eat, shared stories about times we’d crossed paths with various royals, and engaged in the Chinese whispers going up and down about exactly how long we’d be there for. It was a kind of great British comradeship the likes of which I haven’t experienced before. 

Having heard the worst-case scenarios bandied about on the news, of 30 hours of standing, and queuing through the night, I have to admit I felt some trepidation as I got off the tube at London Bridge station this morning and made my way to the South Bank. There was a sense of the calm settling before the storm; stewards in high-vis jackets lined the Thames Path, one every sixty feet from Southwark Cathedral punctuated by occasional clusters of armed police officers. 

Yet the queue itself was nowhere to be found. I passed the Globe, the Tate Modern, the British Film Institute, Royal Festival Hall, the London Eye and Shrek’s Adventure and couldn’t spot it. 

As I climbed up the steps to Westminster Bridge, I approached a knot of stewards who were directing a woman in front of me. “That way, down there,” a man told her gruffly, pointing down Belvedere Road, behind the Sea Life Centre. I followed her and we joined the queue together. 

This is the face of a man who has been queuing for seven hours but is very nearly there pic.twitter.com/DwIgdrpHdN

“I’m glad they told us, I thought I’d never find it,” the woman said to me, introducing herself as Haley Rowell, a former civil servant who got up at 5am this morning to get a train from her native Peterborough. Today was her 20th anniversary, she eventually confessed, but she and her husband agreed they’d have plenty more - this was a once-in-a-lifetime event. 

To be entirely frank, when I got up first thing in the morning to come and report on this queue, which wouldn’t even start moving until 5pm, I was expecting… royal enthusiasts, shall we say. I had almost resigned myself to the fact that I was going to get an earful about Harry and Meghan or a point-by-point takedown of Lady Diana no matter what I said or did. Yet here before me was a bubbly, friendly woman who I warmed to immediately. 

Preparing for the British weather, we’d both thought long and hard about our outfits. For my part, I wore waterproof hiking boots, jeans, a long-sleeved t-shirt as a base layer, and a mournfully black t-shirt over it, as well as my puffy black raincoat, the only waterproof one I own. As the morning sun rose higher, it did start to feel slightly excessive. 

Haley and I were joined in the queue by Rachel and her nine-year-old daughter Emily who’d come that morning from Guildford to take advantage of the shorter queues by getting in early. “I have wanted to come for a very long time and that I wanted to come with Emily,” Rachel told me, explaining that the advice not to bring children almost put her off, but when she heard the queues were shorter in the morning, she took Emily out of school to come down and wait. 

None of my queue-mates were traditional royalists, though all felt a shared sense of respect for Her late Majesty. “My respect is for the Queen and her personal example,” Rachel explained. “She made vows on her 26th birthday and kept them for 70 years. She set an example of leadership as a service. It felt important to share that with Emily though it’s hard to put my finger on why. The Queen connects us right here and now to the Second World War, my grandparents, our country’s history and the history of the world. 

“There’s no one quite like the Queen, no one who has given a public service like that for such a period of time. She is unique. Honestly, I felt called to come and pay my respects to her.”

There were a number of chancers who’d arrived late and attempted to barge in at the front of the queue. “Would you mind if I just hopped in front of you?” asked an awfully proper woman, awfully politely. “Yes, actually, we’ve been here for four hours already, we’re not just going to let you go in ahead of us, it wouldn’t be British,” we informed her. 

Behind us, a scuffle did break out. A very sweary chap has been in the queue “since five o’clock this morning” or so he claimed (spuriously, I might add, given he was in the queue behind me and I got here at 9.30am) and a woman called a pair of police officers to move him along. 

Housewife Andreea Ursu, 40, who arrived at 10.30pm the night before and became number 118 in the queue (for context, arriving at 9.30am the next morning, I was number 956) told The Telegraph queue jumpers were quickly dealt with. 

“People had the courage to say ‘don’t do that’ and they understood.” Not that it was a comfortable evening for Ursu who stood through the rain to say her farewells to the late Queen. “She was our Queen, she was our mother, our grandmother, our mentor. Any suffering you do for her is not enough.”

It wasn’t suffering really though. It was all quite lovely. As the procession moved down the Mall, strangers clustered around each other’s phones to live-stream it. I wondered if that might be what it would have felt like for all the communities who clustered around the one television on the street to view the late Queen’s coronation in 1953. “It’s our nation’s history, happening right in front of us,” I’ve just heard a mother telling her small daughter, wiping a tear from her eyes. 

Crossing over Lambeth Bridge and heading into the grounds of Westminster Palace, it did begin to feel curiously like we were queuing for a ride at Disneyland as we trooped through the concertinaed ropes outside Westminster, emptying our bags into trays through the airport security system, a few people who’d missed the bag drop saying farewell to the camp chairs which had supported them all day. And then phones off, buttons done up, into Westminster Hall. 

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