What to Bring to the Wimbledon Queue: A Practical Checklist

Everything you carry into Wimbledon Park has to survive one bottleneck: a security check in the morning that will not let a bag larger than a shoebox and a half through it. Plan backwards from that and the packing list writes itself. Plan forwards from a normal camping trip and you will arrive at dawn holding a rucksack you cannot take anywhere and a tent nobody will look after for free.

This is a kit list rather than an explanation of the system. How the numbered cards work, when the line moves and what is actually on sale at the end of it are covered in our guide to the Wimbledon Queue. What follows assumes you have decided to go and are standing in front of an open bag at home, wondering how much of this is a mistake.

The bag rule that decides everything else

One bag per person, and the published maximum size is 40cm by 30cm by 30cm. That is the constraint that governs the whole list, because it applies at the search point between the Queue and the turnstiles, and because there is nowhere on the far side of it to leave what does not fit.

Measure the bag rather than eyeballing it. The limit is applied to the bag's dimensions, not to how much you have packed into it, so a half-empty 60-litre rucksack fails and a stuffed daypack passes. A soft bag that can be squashed is more forgiving than a framed one, and a tote with a flat base packs to the dimensions more efficiently than a round-bottomed holdall.

• 40Length
• 30Width
• 30Depth

The published maximum dimensions of a single bag per person. Measure the bag itself rather than its contents.

The important consequence is that you are packing two loads, not one. There is the overnight load, which lives in Wimbledon Park and includes everything bulky, and there is the day load, which fits in the compliant bag and comes into the grounds with you. Separate them at home, put the day load inside the compliant bag from the start, and you will not be repacking on wet grass at six in the morning with a queue forming behind you.

What is refused at the search is refused rather than stored. The security operation has no cloakroom function, and the club's list of prohibited items runs beyond the obvious — our guide to the Wimbledon bag policy and security sets out the categories and the items that surprise people. Read it before you pack a camera bag or a folding stool.

Sorting the two loads at home

Item	Which load	Why
Tent, sleeping bag, mat	Overnight	Goes to left luggage in the morning and never enters the grounds
Camping chair	Overnight	Useful in the park, not permitted through the turnstiles
Waterproof, hat, sunscreen	Day bag	You need all three on the same day, several hours apart
Power bank and cable	Day bag	The battery drain is worst overnight and the ticket is on the phone
Food for the morning	Day bag	There is a long gap with no access to stored luggage
Refillable bottle	Day bag	Water points exist on both sides of the road
Queue card, cards, cash	On you	Never in a bag that is being packed or handed over

The last row is the one to take seriously. The card that records your place, your payment cards and your phone should be in a pocket on your person from the moment you join, not in a bag that gets rolled up in the dark and handed to a stranger at a storage tent.

1. 1SizeThe bag is assessed against the published maximum dimensions before anything else
2. 2ContentsBags are opened and searched, so pack so that things can be seen without unpacking
3. 3Prohibited itemsAnything on the club's list is refused entry and is not stored for you
4. 4PersonA personal search follows, in the same way as at any large sporting venue
5. 5ThroughYou emerge with one bag and everything else already in left luggage

The order of the search between the Queue and the turnstiles. What is refused is turned away rather than held for collection.

Tents, and the size restriction that applies

Tents are permitted in the overnight section and they are restricted. The code of conduct limits them to a two-person size, and gazebos, awnings, marquees and anything with a frame that stands taller than a person are not allowed. The restriction exists for a reason that becomes obvious the first time you see the camping area: a few thousand small tents fit on the available ground and a few hundred large ones do not.

A cheap two-person pop-up is the right tool. It is light enough to carry from the station, it goes up in a minute on ground you cannot peg properly, and losing it would not matter. A good three-season backpacking tent is a waste of money in this context and a family tent is not getting past the stewards.

Pegs are less useful than you expect and more useful than nothing. The ground in the park is compacted by thousands of feet and can be baked hard in a dry June, so take a few sturdy pegs rather than the wire ones in the bag and do not rely on a taut pitch. Guy lines strung across a walkway are a trip hazard in the dark and will be moved.

Pitch as instructed and not where you fancy. The stewards lay out the camping area in rows with access lanes, they are managing a large sleeping crowd on unlit ground, and a tent placed for the view rather than the plan gets relocated. Sleeping in the open with a bivvy bag or a tarp is an option, and in settled weather a perfectly reasonable one, though the dew makes it less romantic than it sounds.

Pop-up against pole tent

The two-person restriction still leaves a choice, and it matters more than it sounds. A pop-up throws itself into shape in seconds, which is a genuine advantage when you arrive at dusk on ground you have never seen, and it is a real nuisance to fold back into its disc at half past five the next morning in the dark with cold hands. Practise the fold at home once. Everybody who has not practised it can be identified at dawn from a hundred metres away.

A small pole tent takes a few minutes to pitch and packs down in a predictable, forgiving way, which is the better trade for anyone who values the morning over the evening. Either will do. What will not do is anything that needs guying out properly, anything with a porch large enough to sit in, or anything you would be upset to abandon, since the morning ends with your tent in a bag being handed across a counter.

The tent's fate in the morning is the part people fail to think about, and it has its own section at the end of this list.

Sleeping kit that works on damp English grass

Ground temperature is the problem, not air temperature. An English June night in a London park can sit in single figures, and the grass conducts heat out of you far faster than the air does. The single most valuable item in the whole list is a closed-cell foam mat or a decent inflatable pad, and people who bring a sleeping bag without one lie awake being cold from underneath.

A three-season sleeping bag is more than you need in a dry spell and about right in a cold one. A two-season bag plus a fleece layer is a reasonable compromise and packs smaller. If you are travelling light and the forecast is warm, a bag liner and a jumper have got plenty of people through the night, but that is a gamble rather than a plan.

A groundsheet under the tent is worth its weight several times over. The grass is often wet with dew by two in the morning even when it has not rained, and a thin plastic sheet is the difference between damp kit and soaked kit. Take a second one to sit on during the evening, when the ground is the only furniture available.

An inflatable pillow costs almost nothing and packs to the size of an apple. A rolled-up fleece does the job less well. Earplugs and an eye mask are the two items experienced queuers mention most often and newcomers never think of, because a field with several thousand people in it is neither quiet nor dark, and the wake-up comes early.

Everything in this paragraph is overnight kit. None of it enters the grounds, all of it goes to left luggage in the morning, and the more compactly it packs the less painful that handover is.

Layers for a cold night and a hot afternoon

The Queue asks you to dress for two climates twelve hours apart. It can be nine degrees and damp at four in the morning and twenty-six and cloudless by two in the afternoon, and you carry whatever you wore for the first into the second.

Layers solve it, and the layers should be chosen for how small they pack rather than how warm they are on their own. A base layer, a fleece or a light insulated jacket, and a waterproof shell will handle almost any June night in London. All three compress into a compliant bag once the sun is up. A single thick coat handles the night just as well and then becomes a fourteen-hour burden you cannot put down.

Footwear matters more than most people allow for. You will be standing on grass overnight, walking across a park in the morning, and then on your feet in the grounds for eight hours or more. Trainers you have already broken in, plus a second pair of socks in the bag, is the whole of the advice. Wet feet at seven in the morning make for a long day.

There is no dress code in the Queue, which is worth saying plainly because there is a persistent belief that Wimbledon expects spectators to arrive in linen. The all-white requirement applies to players, not to the crowd. Some hospitality areas and the Members' facilities do have their own standards, and our guide to the Wimbledon spectator dress code sets out where they apply. In the Queue, comfortable and warm beats presentable every time.

Food you can bring, and what you should

You can bring your own food into the Queue and into the grounds, within the one-bag limit, which makes Wimbledon considerably more generous than most large sporting venues in England. A personal allowance of alcohol has traditionally been permitted as well, along the lines of a bottle of wine or a small number of cans per person, but the wording is revised and it is not a rule to reconstruct from memory. Check the year's conditions of entry, which our guide to bringing food into Wimbledon tracks in more detail.

What to actually pack is a different question from what is allowed. Food that survives a warm night in a bag without refrigeration is the constraint: hard cheese rather than soft, cured meat rather than cooked chicken, flapjacks and nuts rather than anything with cream in it. Sandwiches made at home in the afternoon are fine for the evening and dubious by eleven the next morning.

Breakfast is the meal people forget and the one that matters. There is a long stretch between packing your tent and reaching the ticket office during which you cannot sit down, cannot get to your luggage and cannot easily buy anything. Something dense and edible on the move, packed where you can reach it, is worth more at seven in the morning than anything else in your bag.

Catering vans operate in the Queue through the evening and the morning, so nobody starves. They are also busy at exactly the times everyone wants them, and paying for a bacon roll in a queue when you are already in a queue is a particular kind of purgatory. Bring enough that the van is a choice rather than a necessity.

Take a bag for rubbish. The code of conduct expects the ground to be left as you found it, bins fill quickly, and carrying your own waste out is both good manners and a condition of being welcome.

Water, refills and staying hydrated

Bring an empty bottle and fill it. Drinking water is available in the Queue and there are water points around the grounds, so the sensible approach is a refillable bottle rather than carrying a day's supply from home and spending your bag allowance on the weight of it.

The heat risk at Wimbledon is not the night, it is the following afternoon. A dehydrated spectator who has slept badly, walked across a park, stood in a security queue and then sat in the sun on an unshaded outside court is the person the medical teams see most often. The tennis is being played in direct sun on unshaded courts and so, largely, are you.

Alcohol interacts with all of that badly. A drink or two in the evening is part of the Queue's atmosphere and nobody sensible objects to it. A heavy night immediately before fourteen hours in the sun is the reason some people spend their hard-won ground pass asleep on the slope. The stewards are also entitled to remove anyone whose drinking is a problem for the people around them, and they use that power.

Hot drinks are the other half of the equation. A vacuum flask of tea at five in the morning improves the whole experience out of proportion to what it costs, and a flask counts as part of your bag rather than as a prohibited item, subject to the current list. It is the one piece of luxury kit that experienced queuers reliably carry.

Salt matters too, in the unglamorous form of crisps or salted nuts, particularly on a hot day when you have been sweating through the morning and drinking plain water all afternoon.

Power, and the phone that holds your ticket

Your phone is your camera, your order of play, your contact with the people you came with, and increasingly the thing that holds your ticket. It also spends the night in a cold field hunting for a signal that several thousand other handsets are competing for, which is the fastest way to flatten a battery ever devised.

Take a power bank. One with enough capacity for two full charges is the right size, and a cable that actually fits your phone rather than the one you found in a drawer. There is no mains power in Wimbledon Park and none that you can rely on inside the grounds either.

Turn the screen brightness down, close what you are not using, and consider low power mode overnight. If you can bear it, airplane mode while you sleep saves more charge than anything else, since the drain comes from the search for signal rather than from anything you are doing.

The signal itself is the underrated problem. A digital ticket that will not load at a turnstile, or a card payment that will not authorise at a food van, are both signal failures rather than battery failures, and neither is solved by a power bank. Download or cache anything you will need before you leave home, screenshot what the club's terms permit you to screenshot, and do not assume you will be able to look anything up in the field.

Agree a physical meeting point with anyone you are travelling with as well. Phones fail, groups get separated across a dark park, and "by the third catering van" is a plan that works without a network.

Cash, cards and paying on both sides of the road

The grounds have moved towards card and contactless payment, in line with most large venues in Britain, and you can get through a day inside without touching a note. The Queue is the less predictable half.

Services around the park depend on mobile data to take card payments, and mobile data in a field containing several thousand people is not dependable. The left luggage service, the catering vans and anything else operating on the grass can all be affected. Twenty pounds in notes in a pocket is a hedge that costs you nothing to carry and occasionally saves the morning.

The ticket office itself is a card transaction, and the tickets are sold at face value. Know roughly what you are prepared to pay before you reach it, because the show court prices and the ground admission price are very different numbers and the decision comes at you quickly when you are tired.

Budget for the things that are easy to forget: the left luggage charge for a tent, transport at both ends, food if you did not bring enough, and the resale ticket that may be available in the afternoon and is one of the best value purchases at the whole Championships. Our guide to Wimbledon ticket resale explains how that works once you are inside.

Keep cards and cash somewhere that is not the outside pocket of a tent. A large sleeping crowd is overwhelmingly honest, and it is still a large crowd.

Sun, rain and an English summer that does both

Take both sets of kit, every time, whatever the forecast said on the Tuesday. A London June produces days that begin with a cold drizzle and end at twenty-eight degrees, and the Queue exposes you to the whole of it.

For sun: a hat with a brim, sunscreen you will actually reapply, and sunglasses. Wimbledon's outside courts and the slope have almost no shade, and the reflected glare off pale seating is worse than people expect. Sunburn acquired between eleven and three is the most common self-inflicted injury of a day at the Championships.

For rain: a proper waterproof rather than an optimistic jacket, and a lightweight one that packs small. Umbrellas are the awkward case. Their use in the grounds is restricted, since a raised umbrella blocks the view of everyone behind it, and stewards will ask for them to be lowered around the courts. A hooded shell solves the problem without the argument.

Rain also changes the day rather than ending it. Centre Court and No.1 Court have roofs and play continues under them, which does nothing for a ground pass holder except empty the outside courts and fill the covered areas. The consolation is that a wet forecast thins the Queue considerably, so the tickets are easier to get and the day is worse. Our guide to rain delays at Wimbledon covers what actually happens to the schedule.

A small towel earns its place in the bag under either forecast: for wet grass, for a wet seat, for a cold morning, or draped over your neck in the afternoon.

Passing the hours without a plug socket

The Queue is long and mostly uneventful, and the people who enjoy it are the ones who came prepared to be bored. A book is the classic answer and remains the right one, because it needs no battery and works in a field.

Cards are the sociable option and the Queue is a sociable place. The overnight section produces conversations with strangers that people remember longer than the tennis, and the reason is simple: everybody there has made the same slightly absurd decision and has hours to fill. Bringing something that can be played by four people on a groundsheet is a better investment than another charging cable.

A radio or headphones cover the evening, though noise is expected to stop at a reasonable hour and a speaker in a camping field is a good way to be spoken to by a steward. Keep it to headphones after dark.

Bring something to sit on. Camping chairs are useful in the park and do not come into the grounds, so a chair is a decision to hand another item to left luggage in the morning. A folded mat is the low-commitment alternative and doubles as your sleeping pad.

Children change this section entirely. The Queue is a long, cold, boring night for an adult who chose it and a considerably worse one for an eight-year-old who did not. Our guide to taking children to Wimbledon covers the ages at which it becomes reasonable and the day ticket options that avoid the overnight stage altogether.

What happens to your tent when the line moves

The morning is where unprepared packing becomes visible. Stewards come along the camping section early, the tents come down, and everything bulky has to go somewhere before the line walks across to the grounds. That somewhere is the left luggage service in the Queue area, which is a paid facility and exists precisely for this.

1. 1ArriveCarry both loads in, pitch the tent, and keep the small bag packed and separate
2. 2OvernightBulky kit stays in the tent, valuables and the queue card stay on you
3. 3WakeStewards move along the rows early and ask for tents to be packed away
4. 4RepackEverything that will not pass the bag policy goes into the overnight load
5. 5Left luggageThe overnight load is handed to the paid storage service in the Queue area
6. 6SearchYou cross with one compliant bag and pass through the security check
7. 7CollectThe overnight load is retrieved after the tennis, before you head for the station

The order in which your bags are handled across a night in the Queue. Timings are set by the club and vary by day.

Two things go wrong here and both are avoidable. The first is arriving at left luggage with an unpacked heap rather than a sealed bag, which is slow for you and slower for the several hundred people behind you. Pack it into one closed bag the night before and hand it over as a unit.

The second is forgetting that you have to come back for it. The storage is in the Queue area, not in the grounds, so the end of your day involves a return trip and a collection queue at the moment everyone else is also leaving. Anyone with a train to catch should build that into the plan. Our guide to left luggage and the cloakroom covers the facilities on both sides of Church Road and which is which.

Abandoning a tent is not an option, though a depressing number of them are left in the park each year. It breaches the code of conduct, it creates work for people who have already been up since four, and a cheap pop-up is cheap enough to take home. Carry it out.

If all of this reads as a lot of forethought for one day of tennis, that is a fair reading, and the alternative is a ballot entry that takes ten minutes in the autumn — the route our guide to the Wimbledon ballot explains. The Queue rewards preparation rather than luck, which is the whole of its appeal. Pack for the search point, pack for two climates, and the rest of it is a night in a park with several thousand people who all want the same thing you do. The wider England guides hub has the rest of the Wimbledon access pages, and the tennis section covers the grass-court season that leads into the fortnight.