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City & Village Tours: 0845 812 5000 info@cityandvillagetours.com
everything ordered online has to be sent out to the
customer and, quite often, the customer has to parcel
it up and send it back. I even stood in the queue at
the post office in Greenwich not so long ago behind
a young woman who was putting a package onto the
slow boat to China!
Elsewhere queues are forming in unlikely places.
In 1952 Sir Edmund Hillary made history when he
achieved the seemingly impossible feat of scaling
the world’s highest mountain. Just 60 years later at
busy times up to 300 climbers might queue up for
their turn to climb to the top of Mount Everest as
captured in this remarkable photograph taken by
Ralf Dujmovits for Outside Magazine.
Queuing For Fun
In today’s Britain it is in our leisure time that we
face some of the longest queues. The long theatre
and cinema queues of old that led to their own queue
industries from the providers of little canvas stools
to rent in the West End’s Theatreland to the variety
acts, sand-dancers, jugglers, magicians and the like
who worked cinema queues all around the country,
have by and large been consigned to history by the
advent of online booking. But queues persist for a
number of tourist and leisure attractions.
On 30 March 1972 H.M. Queen Elizabeth II opened
the exhibition
Treasures of Tutankhamun
at
The British Museum. Public reaction to the
exhibition was overwhelming and although
originally scheduled to run for six months, the
exhibition was extended until gone Christmas that
year opening six and a half days per week for up to
eleven hours a day. In total 1,694,117 people came at
a rate of 7,000 per day. Long queues stretched from
the heart of the museum out into the streets.
Aged nine I’d never seen so many people crammed
inside a building and all it seemed wearing big dark
and damp, slightly whiffy overcoats. In Proustian
fashion to this day the smell of damp coat takes me
right back and I see shiny blue and gold things and
hear once again the muffled hubbub of massed
whispering and the clacking echo of heels on
marbled floors. For some reason, the smell maybe,
this memory always returns hand-in-hand with the
image of the first tramp I ever saw - a ghost of a man
the colour of cobwebs and rain huddled beneath a
railway bridge on Brick Lane.
Today there are timed tickets for the big blockbuster
exhibitions such as the 2007/2008 Tutankhamun
exhibition at The O
2
in Greenwich, or for next year’s
Pompeii exhibition at The British Museum so here the
long queues of old are no more. Timed tickets!
Why didn’t they think of that in 1972? It can’t all be
about computers, you could do it with raffle tickets
for heaven’s sake. Well maybe not, I’m thinking of
that scene in the 1974 film
The Day of The Jackal
when the policeman on the tail of Edward Fox as the
assassin figures out that he’s probably using the
identity of a dead man and they’ll soon have him and
then the camera pans to tens of police constables
licking their thumbs as they work their way through
leather bound ledgers the size of steamer trunks in the
vaults at Somerset House.