VIDEO: HMS Queen Elizabeth arrives in home port of Portsmouth… but just how big is it?

THE UK’s £3 billion aircraft carrier has arrived at its home port for the first time.

The HMS Queen Elizabeth was greeted by tens of thousands of people in Portsmouth, and Prime Minister Theresa May has hailed the ship as a symbol of the UK being a “great global maritime nation”.

The vessel involved more than 10,000 people in its construction, including 3000 at Rosyth on the Firth of Forth, and is the newest and largest of the Royal Navy’s fleet – weighing 65,000 tonnes and stretching some 280m (919ft).

In length it’s like 5.4 Nelson’s Columns laid end-to-end.

It could also be equated to about 2.9 Elizabeth Towers (which of course houses Big Ben).

It’s also the equivalent size of all three of its Invincible class predecessors (HMS Illustrious, HMS Invincible and HMS Ark Royal)

But even this giant is small in comparison to the largest cruise liner in the world, Harmony of the Seas (362m)

And the 400m container ship MV Barzan

In terms of weight, the carrier is a real behemoth.

Using that age-old weight measurement the African elephant, it would take a whopping 10,833 typical adults of the mammal to balance the scales.

If you were to choose a more British animal however, you’d find the ship equates to roughly 108,333,333 healthy-weight hedgehogs in the UK.

The ship required 250,000km of electric cabling (that’s roughly ten times around the Earth at the equator).