The British have at all times had a popularity as a nation of queuers, however even by our requirements these previous few days have been rather a lot. As the late Queen Elizabeth II’s coffin sits in London’s Westminster Hall, 1000’s of individuals have queued as much as pay their respects to the nation’s longest serving monarch. To handle this miles-long line, which many have taken to easily calling The Queue, the British authorities has turned to platforms together with Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram to offer as much as the minute updates.

Although The Queue is at present at capability, with the federal government advising new folks to not be part of it, as of 9AM UK time this morning DCMS reported that it was 4.9 miles (practically 8km) lengthy , with an estimated queuing time of 14 hours. That’s over half a day of gradual shuffling to spend, at most, a couple of temporary moments in the identical room because the late Queen’s coffin.

Multiple instances a day, the UK’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) has been tweeting out updates about The Queue, noting the size of the road, in addition to how lengthy new joiners ought to count on to attend earlier than reaching Westminster Hall. The Twitter account has additionally been utilizing the geolocation service What3Words (a service that assigns three brief phrases to establish particular GPS places) to level folks in the direction of the precise location of The Queue’s finish. 

But for anybody that wants much more up-to-date Queue info, there’s additionally a DCMS YouTube livestream, which accommodates up-to-the minute details about the road of mourners snaking their method over Westminster Bridge and alongside the south financial institution of the River Thames. As of this writing, just a little underneath 9 thousand individuals are watching.

There have been hiccups with the expertise used to tame The Queue. Gizmodo reports that a number of of the What3Words places tweeted out by DCMS have pointed to incorrect places as far afield as California because of minor typos within the geolocation phrases. For instance, what ought to have been outlets.view.paths (a sq. simply north of the Tate Modern, London) was by chance tweeted as outlets.views.paths (which factors to Charlotte, NC).

But what does all of it imply? I like this take from Twitter user @curiousguana, who asks whether or not The Queue could possibly be “the greatest bit of British performance art that has ever happened?”

“It is the motherlode of queues. It is art. It is poetry. It is the queue to end all queues,” they write. “It opened earlier today and is already 2.2 miles long. They will close it if it gets to five miles. That’s a queue that would take two hours to walk at a brisk pace… You cannot have a chair and a sleeping bag. There is no sleeping in The Queue, for The Queue moves constantly and steadily, day and night.”

Writing in The New Statesman, Marie Le Conte muses whether or not “the Queue is, in its own British way, a textbook example of the ways in which people deal with grief. Something big and terrible has happened and you don’t know what to do with yourself, so you throw your whole being into something a bit absurd instead.” 

Queen Elizabeth II’s demise is a kind of odd nationwide moments that’s exhausting to correctly interact with. It’s not an occasion you bodily have to point out up for like an election or a significant sports activities match, it’s simply… within the air. In this second, The Queue is without doubt one of the few tangible issues you possibly can really work together with and get a way that you just’re collaborating in a second in historical past.

When Elizabeth II’s father King George VI died in 1952, a similarly lengthy line of mourners fashioned to pay their respects. In a chunk printed that 12 months concerning the so-called Great Queue, Time noted that “no one could measure or plot precisely the serpentine columns of human beings that formed and reformed, doubled, branched and coiled back again along London’s streets and across chilly Thames bridges, to get a last glimpse of the dead King’s coffin.” 70 years later, as the net and GPS expertise enable us to trace the undulations of The Queue on-line in minute element, the state of affairs couldn’t be extra totally different.