AN ACADEMIC spent four years and thousands of pounds before concluding that Britons do not like queues. In pursuit of his studies, David Stewart-David spent 92 days standing in 2,000 queues.

His work, funded initially by a £2,000 grant from Northumbria University, Newcastle, intended to discover why the British are so ready to stand in line. But instead he found that Britons are becoming more reluctant to wait our turn. Attitudes to queueing change according to the season, the time of day and the weather.

Mr Stewart-David said yesterday: “I stood in queues at stations, airports and supermarkets for four years to ask people how they feel about waiting. I once stood in a queue at the Passport Office for a full 26 hours.”

His report, The Stressful Queue, found that people are more likely to abandon a queue if they are there as a couple. This is because, rather than keeping each other company, a couple are more liable to argue.

“Different social groups behave differently in queues,” Mr Stewart-David said. “Older people don’t mind it because they like the sociablility of it.”

Mr Stewart-David says that queue anxiety can make a few minutes seem like for ever. He said: “People always overestimate how long they’ve spent waiting. Three to four minutes is our tolerance level for buying a train ticket — at which point people begin to look stressed or choose to walk off.”

He says that his research has done nothing to make him more patient: “No one likes waiting a long time.”

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