A FAST food chain has been forced to rent a car park to accommodate the enormous queues of customers clamouring for its products.

McDonald’s restaurants across the UK have seen enormous demand as they reopened this week, with one Sussex site going to unusual lengths to cater for its clients.

Mid Sussex District Council revealed it had made a deal with the franchise to allow them to use one of its car parks as a space for queueing traffic.

A spokesman for the authority said: “It’s clear that people have been relishing the reopening of McDonald’s in Burgess Hill.

“To help Sussex Police maintain a safe flow of traffic, we have agreed a temporary licence with McDonald’s, where they will pay the council to use our Station Road car park until June 15.”

The restaurant, along with several others in Sussex, reopened as a drive-through only site on Wednesday.

As staff prepared to roll up the shutters at 11am, queues had already formed with some customers so keen to get their hands on their favourite takeaway that they had been waiting at the site since 8.30 that morning.

Police warned that “if the queues start blocking roads we will have to ask motorists to move on”.

But Mid Sussex prevention inspector Darren Taylor later said that teams had been able to cope well with the onslaught of hungry customers.

There were similarly controlled scenes at the McDonald’s restaurant at Brighton Marina, where site managers suspended the use of a bus stop at the site and created a spiralling queueing system using the newly gained space.

An initial line of 30 or so cars wound away from the drive-through’s entrance, but the Marina security team and McDonald’s staff worked quickly to reduce the queue to just four cars within 40 minutes.

“There was no disaster at Brighton Marina, we did it,” general manager Jim Lech joked, throwing his arms in the air.

However, this level of calm was not seen in Shoreham.

Following a day of traffic disruption in the area as a result of the reopening on Wednesday, with the McDonald’s faithful having been forced to endure seven weeks without the takeaway, Eastern Avenue was closed due to the queues.

It was reported that long queues were again seen in the area over the weekend due to demand.