Poignant footage shows thousands queuing for King George VI's coffin in 1952

Hundreds of thousands of people have been patiently lining up this week to see the Queen’s coffin lying-in-state in Westminster Hall.

Yesterday the queue through central London reached nearly five miles, with mourners waiting more than nine hours to say goodbye to Britain’s longest reigning monarch.

It has been estimated that 350,000 fans of the Royal Family will come to see the late head of state before her state funeral at Westminster Abbey on Monday.

The line to view the Queen’s casket starts at Westminster, stretches back to the South Bank of the River Thames, and even reached Southwark Park in Bermondsey on Friday morning.

This morning the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport warned that the queue had reached capacity and entry had been halted for six hours to let numbers die down.

Images of long lines of people snaking through the capital’s streets are reminiscent of the scenes following the death of Queen Elizabeth II’s father, King George VI.

Black and white photographs from February, 1952, show thousands of people waiting to pay their last respects to the king, who died in his sleep, aged 56, after a battle with lung cancer.

While much about Britain has changed over the past seven decades, one thing that has remained the same is the nation’s enthusiasm for maintaining orderly queues.

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An estimated 305,806 people filed past the king’s coffin over the space of three days, with the queue peaking at around four miles long.

Britons waited in the rain and freezing temperatures in what was nicknamed by Londoners as ‘The Great Queue’, stretching from Westminster well beyond Lambeth Bridge.

In an address to the nation following the king’s death, prime minister Winston Churchill said: ‘We cannot at this moment do more than record the spontaneous expression of grief.’

Here’s a look back at how people waited to pay their respects all those years ago.

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