Unveiling the Untold Secrets of Wimbledon: The 100-Year-Old Tail that Shaped the Essence of All Things British – Prepare to Be Amazed!

This article is part of a tennis guide by F.T. Globetrotter

Arriving at Wimbledon Park at the start of the tournament, you wonder if you’ve somehow died and gone to British purgatory. There are thousands of people gathered here, some lounging on camping chairs, others parking on picnic blankets framed by a double line of tents that stretches along the north side of the field. People nap like drowned insects. Although it’s impossible to tell where it starts, somehow everyone is part of the same queue and no one is guaranteed what they came for.

Other major sporting events typically use online ticketing, but Wimbledon maintains a more traditional approach. Tennis fans have been lining up here for more than 100 years, hoping to claim one of the few tickets not given to unsecured bonds or wealthy corporate clients. A man tells me he’s been coming here since 1970. Conservatively, that’s a total of six hundred hours of waiting.

Most of those who queue are only here to get a field pass, which allows spectators entry to all but courts 1, 2 and center. According to the official guide, if you arrive at The Queue at 9am, you should be fine. However, Center Court, Court #1 and Court #2 tickets will involve staying overnight, sometimes days in advance. Only 500 of each are available each day, on a first-come, first-served basis.

It’s the first Monday of the tournament and some, like Catherine Keutgen, who travels here every year from Belgium to see Andy Murray, have been gleefully experiencing the passage of time since Saturday morning. “We met at The Queue years ago,” she says, gesturing to a group of friends in camping chairs, “and every year we meet up here again.”

Like many, Keutgen enjoys the autonomy Wimbledon gives its most dedicated fans to choose exactly where they want to sit, right down to whether or not they’ll be in the shade. Although, post-pandemic, things have begun to change: “It was perfectly fine until after the Covid and now it is a disaster. . . Last year they tried to force us to buy any ticket that was on sale at the turnstile, but that’s not why we queue for days, we want to sit in a precise place, in a precise corner.

Much has been written about the British character of the Wimbledon queue and queues in general. It’s supposedly something we love to do and although this isn’t really the case, Brits buy into the myth as it helps them see the rest of the world as disorganized and impatient. Yet there is a quintessentially British character here, explained primarily in the following key distinctions.

The first is blind deference to a neatly uniformed administrative power. People here are eager for a promised land of strawberries and cream, but that dream depends on obeying certain rules. No drinking binges, ball games, or takeout deliveries after 10 p.m. a fancy hat, the Brits will roll around like obedient terriers.

The second indicator of Britishness is The Queue’s fundamental dedication to maintaining a strict and rigid social structure based on where and when you arrived. To avoid jumping the queue, everyone is given a number that becomes more important than their own name. From time to time, the intensity of this depersonalization becomes too much for some. “What do these numbers mean!” asks a queuer in a scene straight out of Terry Gilliam. Brazil.

Finally, there is the ability to complain silently and helplessly, a well-honed British skill, and one that the Wimbledon queue gracefully allows. Today, due to improved security, the All England Lawn Tennis Club is experiencing a delay. Many are realizing that, having arrived at 6am, they may not see tennis until the evening. “We haven’t moved one bit,” a soul tells me after politely rounding up a butler. “I came to The Queue last year and got in just before 11 o’clock. This year, it’s almost 1 pm and we’re nowhere near it.”

Further up The Queue, past smaller meta-queues for £14 pizzas and a sort of Barclays chill-out area (Wimbledon must have ignored recent celebrity calls to drop the bank as a sponsor due to its record-breaking weather), you arrive the lucky minority with display wristbands, distributed to those at the front of the line. These people are all overnight. Most are tourists, retirees, or work the kind of job where it’s acceptable to take the day off to attend a sporting event.

Even if you spend more than 12 hours on The Queue, it’s still unclear until the final moment if you’ll be close enough to secure your desired ticket. Ophelia Parker came all the way from Seattle just to watch Venus Williams play in what could be her last Wimbledon. “Venus is here,” she says, “and all the big ones are retiring and I thought, ‘I’ve got to go.’ Parker watched helplessly as the pile of wristbands on Center Court slowly began to dwindle. When she got to the penultimate one, she cried.

Aside from the suspense, another thing that unifies the overnighters is their shared experience of a terrible night’s sleep: most bring tents, others prefer to shiver under blankets. “Awful” is Parker’s fairly standard response to the question “How was your night?” Apparently, the snoring is rampant and a brutal cold takes over the park at dawn. The best sleeper I came across had barely entered REM when the marshals arrived at 5am to move everyone.

A group of Australians who have been waiting 18 hours seem excited to vent their frustration. “We have 100,000 people every year at CGM [Melbourne Cricket Ground] for the AFL Grand Final, and we got them there in an hour,” says one of them. “This is a hoax, dude, just archaic crap they hide with lore. . . He feels like Ashton Kutcher is about to jump out of one of those bushes because we’re being Punk’d.”

By the time I leave mid-afternoon, strawberries and cream is fast becoming an abstract concept, just a mantra people here repeat endlessly. I had never seen so many people behaving so well before. There’s something almost malevolent about it, I think to myself as I turn to look at the park one last time and see rain clouds overhead.

Have you done The Queue at Wimbledon? Share your experiences in the comments below. And follow FT Globetrotter on Instagram at @FTGlobetrotter