The Queue
Wimbledon Tennis, for all its grace & strawberries, is the spiritual home of sleep-deprived optimism, where thousands line up in the night like it’s a Taylor Swift presale, only wetter & with more Tupperware. This is the story of how one writer armed with a sandwich & a Lime bike, joined the most civilised and ridiculous queue in British sport.
By Sid Stanley-Hughes
At Glorious, we’re no strangers to sport’s great pilgrimages. But few are as famously absurd or meticulously British as the Wimbledon Queue. It’s not just well known, it’s a cultural monument – complete with an official guide, a live tracking website, and its own rules of engagement.
Naturally, we wanted in. So we did what any sensible publication would do: we sent someone to the back of it. Armed with a toasted sandwich, blind optimism, and no sense of urgency, Sid joined the ranks in the early hours of the morning, blissfully unaware of what lay ahead. What followed was a test of endurance, etiquette, and whether two people can survive a full day on passive-aggressive glances and one raincoat between them. Welcome to the most British sporting ritual in existence. No ticket guaranteed. Just time, snacks, and a deep belief that the system will reward you.
04:20 – Up. Twenty minutes lost to the snooze button.
05:10 – Out the door. Disorientated and slow, a painstaking sandwich preparation costs chunks of time. It did not need the George Foreman treatment either. This will prove to be rookie timekeeping by two Wimbledon queue novices. Mantas, my queue crony, is needing early morning encouragement, and so I hide my need for him to encourage me. There cannot be two stragglers in a queue couple.
05:20 – A peaceful Lime bike along Wimbledon Common is quiet, but not eerily so. There is, what will transpire to be, a naive sense that the emptiness of Wimbledon roads could only mean the same for the ticket queue. As we cycle past the Buddhapadipa Temple, down Marryat Road, nearing the All England Lawn Tennis Club, this irony is yet to ding us on the head.
05:32 – The bliss of ignorance lasts a little longer. As we cross onto the iconic Church Road just after 05:30, there is still very little movement. A few hi-vis jackets guard unopened car park gates. We head straight for a designated bike depot and get ready to make way by foot. Centre Court is across from us, the queue can’t be further than beyond the next bend in the road.
05:35 – A few bends later, both childish optimism and the acquired cynicism of adulthood are evenly balanced. There is still the chance that we are the only punters to have heard our alarms, that no Emma Raducanu / Jack Draper / Sonay Kartal means no point coming, that strawberries and cream have no motherland. There is also the chance that the queue started a kilometre away, that everyone set off three months ago on their pilgrimage to Centre Court, and that the reason we can’t see the green of the Wimbledon Park grass is not because of a yellowing heatwave but because there’s a sea of queuers already queuing up this f*****g queue.
05:45 – The next five minutes, as we are caringly shepherded to the back of the queue by the stewards, is a gentle daze. We’ve got this quite wrong. We will take a minute. We will pretend that “it is what it is” is a suitable philosophy for this kind of disaster. We are handed a queue card, on which is a large number of digits indicating our ‘back of the pack’ position. The trance-like state of a sleepless early morning does, however, temper what would be genuine anger and frustration found in the evening-time. This seems to be a queue-long collective experience, perfectly understood by the stewards who are comforting and helpful guides. Aware of our helplessness, they gently pass us on our way, reminding us that we are allowed to sit, because we won’t be going anywhere soon.
08:30 – Despite a lack of suitable clothing to face the early morning breeze, and a queuing partner unwilling to share either jumper or raincoat, a nap is possible. The queue only moves periodically, which means plenty of time to lie and rest, unmoving compared to the steady shuffle of conventional queues. Once a person settles into the disappointment of their inability to wake at 02:00, there is a calm that sets in, knowing the queuing will stop, and the play will start. ‘When’ is out of your control – ‘it is what it is’.
10:00 – First big move of the queue. It’s been over three hours in one spot and we are finally shifted. Though we know it is only the first of a few such shifts, we are relieved to see progress. There is also the reassurance now of a few hundred people queuing behind us. It is undeniably a comforting feeling. So much of the queue, in fact, offers up comfort.
10:05 – Even with environmental factors like bum-numbing summer-hardened soil and unexpected flashes of rain, there is nothing nauseating about what should be an intimidatingly long, physically unmissable list of people getting in before me. That is all because of the constant reminders of how well-oiled the operation and organisation of Wimbledon truly is. It is noticeable in those small details: the ease and experience of the stewards, the lack of disorientating or excessive signage; even those queue cards are a thoughtful recognition that yes, though you are ‘a number’, you are not ‘just a number’. You are a number that will steadily make your way down from 009171 to 0. Wimbledon wouldn’t give you this number if they couldn’t get you in, or better still, didn’t think you would make it. This piece of paper is a commitment to getting you in – a promise from Wimbledon meant no acts of faith from us. There is no better formula for queue confidence than this, and I am unsurprised that it is Wimbledon who have mastered it.
MARCHING
11:10 – I witness the essence of Wimbledon’s duty of care when on the hunt for a coffee stand. I notice a gentleman at the back of the queue, now 1,000 or so places behind us. Standing behind those last alarm snoozers to enter the queue, his role is to let anyone wanting to join know that “It’s too late now // we wouldn’t want you to join and not get in // there is always tomorrow and there are many days left after tomorrow // there is always next year, and there will always be another queue”. Counselling those potentially disgruntled late-arrivers shouldn’t be done with such ease. We all know how a tennis player can barter with an umpire for a line call, quibbling before pleading, shouting before thrashing. But there are no such quabbles here. McEnroe would not stand a chance against Jonathan and his big green flag, “I’m being quite serious, Mr McEnroe, we’ve been over this, set your alarm earlier next time.”
12:30 – The winding of the queue was brief, a steady march is now in play. We’ve in fact been on a sort of home stretch for the last two hours – straight-line speed 0.05 mph – and now nearing an unassuming gate that tells us “There is only ONE Wimbledon”. This is true. There is only one tennis major that allows for its fans to queue in order to gain a chance at entry. This entry offers fans a chance not just at the £30 Grounds Pass (lowering to £20 by the end of the second week), but guaranteed for each day are a limited number of Court 1, 2, 3 and Centre Court tickets for followers of the sport and its stars.
12:54 – As we edge towards the ticket purchase, we may be a significant 8,000 places shy of a pop at those coveted courts, but the fairness of it all is not lost on us – the early birds have caught their worm and it’s for us to beat them to it next year – game on! As we are handed two Grounds Passes for £60 all in, there is a celebration in having made the hard yards to the finish line.
14:10 – Entry now long secured, the queue is a lifetime ago, forgotten. Surely we will never queue again. How could we? We manage to enter Court 12 without so much as a stutter. Breezing straight through this time, however, there isn’t the time for friendly interaction with smart-looking stewards. Neither is there the steady audio-induced anticipation from being held just below the sightline of the court. Every tennis-going fan the world over has been the queuer, late to the break in play, who is perched beneath the steps entering the stands, waiting, listening, peering, tiptoeing even – an almost universal sports fan experience. Even when deprived of a seat and sight, the fan is somehow able to exactly visualise the point, feeling it without seeing. It is the queue, and all that which it deprives your senses of, that builds so much of the day’s excitement.
16:01 – Maybe there are exceptions within this newfound fandom for the queue. The unmissable strawberries and cream station is rammed. The retractable belt barriers here are hijacking fond memories of that free-flowing and softly enforced queue of early morning, mid-morning, late morning and early afternoon. It’s only natural to have competition for a £2.70 inflation-busting British classic, but the spirit of this procession makes it a journey to forget. All eight minutes of it.
17:08 – After more tennis – a doubles-heavy afternoon – we head for top-ups at the Pimm’s bar. High up beyond Henman Hill, the calves are put to work in this line. A smaller queue this time, though the Pimm’s waiting game feels inflated by the day’s effects on hydration levels. Not that this intermission will do much for those, but the queue does once again highlight a queue’s influence on the senses, everything elevated by a pauseful walk towards a desired destination.
20:03 – Regardless of which ticket we secured, the atmosphere and excitement of the day would turn out to be more than enough. Along with Court 5 doubles match action – too good in quality for us to believe we could secure front row seats – the day was packed with interaction for tennis fans and queuing fans alike. Both groups were united by our mutual affection for on-court play and off-court waddling. Packed to the rafters, but in the freedom of the world’s most beautifully designed, leafy, green and open-air tennis club, Wimbledon once again provided a very full day to remember. Only at a select few sports events and exhibitions around the world do spectators leave whilst damning the shortness of the day. Those fans often exit wishing they could look back in years to come on just a few more minutes of time spent with close company. Perhaps for an extra round of Serrano vs Taylor; finally split the difference. Or even back here at SW19 in 2008 – a few minutes more of Federer and Nadal’s final for the ages wouldn’t have gone amiss. Yet we hardly had the chance to squeeze more into ours, thanks to the zags on a line that runs each year for two, sometimes summery, weeks through Wimbledon Park.
21:20 – As we queued to leave alongside our more-than-satisfied fellow day-trippers, the clocks at the gate showed our exit time, 21:20 – a full day indeed. Nineteen hours deep into a day of Wimbledon that ranged from dazed to directed, trembling to bonded to charmed and entertained and dazed once again, we’d lived it all. And had I the chance to live a little more of it by not missing the prompt from that 04:00 alarm, I’d have hit snooze one more time, and rested for another glorious 10 minutes… but not a minute more.
Have you ever braved the Wimbledon Queue? Camped out for tickets, merch or a glimpse of greatness? We want to hear your best (and worst) queuing tales — tell us over on social @glorioussport.
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