I'm in awe of them. If I'm honest, I don't think I would have done the same, I imagine that i would have been scared and desperate to escape death and see light.
Thank you. We need to be reminded-too little coverage over the last 20 years. The humanity and heroism are affirming, and a stark contrast to the evil of that day.
I too remember the eye-rolls in the office in Ealing where I was working when we all assumed it was an electricity sub-station blowing up - 'we're in great shape to host the Olympics' was the general sentiment. And then the news began to change. Thank you so much for this Ed, it has brought tears to my eyes to hear of the heroism.
Thanks Ed, these are moving but desperately sad stories. I was also commuting that day, my route was Baker St to Moorgate. As far as I can recall I was already at work when the bombs went off, and I do remember having to walk home at the end of the day. Thanks to those four Islamists, we got a little taste of the Somme in central London.
I have a similar memory to you Ed. At the time I worked at the British Library- I was in charge of the evening shift ``below stairs ''So I started at 1130. If I had been more inclined to rise earlier, I think I would have been in that tunnel. I remember the dread of walking down Oxford street and thinking of all the glass that would be weaponized if a bomb went off I remember the fliers of desperate people looking for news about relatives and friends
I remember the day quite well. I was in London, the tail end of a six week backpacking trip between finishing a graduate degree and starting a first job. Went to a chilly Belgium, then a hot Italy, and up to Scotland for a very enjoyable wedding and then down to London for a few days before flying back to the US. Stayed with good family friends in Clerknenwell. On the last night we went to the theatre and I remember how glorious the evening weather was and the joyous mood following winning the Olympics.
My plan for the next day - the last day of the trip before flying back to the US on the subsequent day - was to head for the Tate for a large exhibition on Reynolds portraits. My hostess normally volunteered at the Victorian Society in Bedford Park. Typically she'd be heading out during the rush hour but because she had a guest, she'd rearranged her schedule, and so we lingered over coffee and breakfast while through the large Georgian kitchen windows shone a truly lovely English summer day. Finally I said I should make my start, knowing how long it takes to get to the Tate, and we cleared up the table and I left the house. But the Angel was strangely closed, and I noticed buses were ignoring all the stops and heading rapidly somewhere with nary a passenger. Not just one or two but all of them. Thinking that maybe I'd just walk all the way to the Tate (when you are 25 and fit, all of central London is easy walking distance), I stopped by the house en-route just to say something was odd about the transport and was there an unexpected strike. We turned on the little TV and first came out the reports of some kind of mechanical delay, and then it was conceded a bomb had gone off. On the same line I could have been on had I rushed out sooner, on the same line she'd be on if I hadn't been visiting.
All very surreal. Will never quite forget it. And such a beautiful day it was.
My friend KP went to get on the carriage with the bomber in it at Edgware Road (I think) but it was quite full, so he moved one or two down, saving his life.
Of course, being a devout Muslim, and this looking “suspicious” he got questioned by the police.
He was still injured, and in a carriage with people who fared far worse.
That's very kind, but really no need. I don't think any reasonable people hold Muslims in general responsible, most of whom were clearly horrified. Of course, there were a minority we had (and have) a problem with, but that's another issue.
I remember the event well not due to proximity but because it was at one of life's great turning points: I had finished my A levels a few months early. I had turned 18 and got pretty hammered a few days earlier. For some reason I had been back at school the previous day - the ex-Royal Engineer officer headmaster at the Grammar school where I had just finished had put up a display of the scene in London opposed by the desolation in Paris; almost certainly this would have been considered in bad taste the following day. My dad and other parents of siblings' friends were in London and working there and were forced to evacuate from various glass buildings to other locations, from what I recall. I myself being in Kent mainly saw it as an internet spectacle at a time when the internet mainly consisted of grainy photos. A slightly ghostly transition period that I can only hazily invoke in my mind where WiFi was just coming in but was still unusual, but equally where broadband connections had largely displaced modems, so a fair amount of imagery was shared. Mobiles were not 90s levels of primitive but were largely used for SMS still. There may have even been live feeds on news websites. 24 hour news was the principle noisy, somewhat hyperactive and distracting medium of the error. I distinctly remember seeing the macabre image of a bus with the top blown off on the day. I also remember the M20 being shut and the strange sense of quiet that prevailed in our village as a consequence. It was all kind of somewhat abstract though, like much of what you experience through the media. But now I think about it: how rare to have a sense of the course of a week 20 years later.
In August 2017 I was working in an office in Plaza Cataluya overlooking the attack there. Several of my collegues saw the incident from their window 5 floors up. I remember some security system triggering, the doors being locked and we all had to stay in the building avoiding the windows until quite late when we were escorted out of the perimeter set up by police. Luckily no one in our office was affected, had it been closer to lunch time it probably would have beem a different story. That day I certainly do remember on a more visceral level: It was not uncommon for me to go down to the bottom of the building and cross the road to grab a snack. A random decision that day could have been it.
Also this reminds me, first aid training sounds kind of boring and a little bit like something you do in the Scouts like putting up a tent. But it is one of those skills that has a massive reward to effort ratio in those rare events it is needed.
While 7/7 was the beginning of this wave of Islamist extremist attacks, it feels like we’ve since moved into a different era, defined more by random, nihilistic violence. Islamist ideology is sometimes cited, but often these attacks are carried out by alienated young men, sometimes recent arrivals, with no clear cause or direction, often on our most vunrable, (see Germany and its high level of random knife attacks on children), Chris Byliss writes well on this.
I’ll be fascinated to see whether the UK experiences another large-scale terror attack this decade. I’m not sure the country could repsond or cope in the same way as it did in 2005, gone would be the ‘don’t look back in anger’ spirit. Instead, we might likley would see serious unrest, in our most deprived and diverse areas, what we saw in Ballymena is a microcosm of what is to come and not a pleasant one. The large proportion of suspects on the terror watch list will be home grown but wont be seen as such by many commontators and instigators, all police must be public order trained as a minimum and cross our fingers that the worst of these barbaric acts are behind us.. im not so sure they are
The deracinated second generation immigrants - separated from their traditional culture but not forming part of the culture in which they had been grafted - of that era whose purposelessness in life led them to the arms of those who sought traditional interpretations of Islam were I feel only ever superficially understood. The intellectual pedigree of what they ended up believing and the fact that modern society didn't really provide convincing answers for their questions was never examined, especially by the left who saw them as agentless anti-colonial victims and who had no inclination to understand why they thought what they did. Those that emphasised a radically martial propogation of the faith akin to that which saw it conquer vast swathes of the globe in relatively short time. Not the mealy mouthed versions that supporters of multiculturalism would hope they would embraced, some kind of insipid pap watered down by secular liberalism. Ideas which were only even really embraced in the Islamic world by elites hoping either to take advantage of Western colonialism or, as in Persia or the Ottoman Empire, forestall it. And now, I can't help but feel these aimless youths were the canary in the coalmine for a more general crisis of meaning in the West that particularly took off after 2008 when the sense of meaning that comes from materially improving the condition of your family began to collapse.
Well written and moving. This atrocity and others ought to have made Britain far pickier about immigration (which we ought to have been prior to that point) and far more aware of the risks – even if on an outlier basis. However, by a standard twist of progressive logic, it made objections to immigration far more difficult because subsequent objections could now framed as a misguided or hateful belief that “all immigrants are potential terrorists”. Is that what you are saying, racist? And the sub current to this (on the far and not so far left e.g. John Mcternan telling us that, “the concept of the ethnic English is truly evil”) is that evil England and evil "whiteness” once the coloniser must now be colonised/decolonised, y’all.
Thank you for this moving account of July 7th, telling us the stories of the “regular people” whose lives were ended or altered permanently by this terrorist attack.
I was 25 years old when it happened and far away (in Canada), but making plans to travel to the UK on a visa to work. A close friend had already been there for a couple of years, on the same visa. I don’t recall if I had bought my plane ticket yet, but I think not.
My friend was either on the buses or Tube when the terrorists attacked, but not on the targeted ones.
I had to make up my mind if I was still willing to embark on this personal adventure, knowing what had happened. The memory of 9/11 was still pretty recent too. I chose to travel, and I recall it as a key decision of my young life. If the worst happened, I would go down fighting, was how I thought of it. (What “fighting” meant was necessarily vague: at least it meant not giving up my plans).
Having said that, 20 years on, long gone from the UK (I only stayed a few months) I would 💯 cancel travel plans in response to something like this.
I can definitely relate. I have also become a more nervous flyer, especially since the Covid times.
In my case it isn’t a specific incident that caused it, but a general eroding of confidence in complex systems. If there’s ever a time your life is 100% dependent on other people’s competence in running complex systems, it’s in an airplane.
As I’ve gotten older, accumulated dependents and realized the fragility of life etc, I assess risk differently. I have pretty much resolved to never go to a crowded street event again, for example. Whatever fleeting amusement one might get from such a thing is not worth the risk of a crazy person driving a vehicle into it.
I lived in Baltimore 2008-2022, which has a appallingly high crime rate. I became so hyper-vigilant there! It's so different here in St Pete (FL) where *stuff* does happen, but you don't have to scan ahead for potential muggers anytime you go out the door.
The courage and compassion of those who stayed in the tunnels to comfort dying strangers is truly remarkable.
Can't have been easy to write this, Ed. Thank you.
I'm in awe of them. If I'm honest, I don't think I would have done the same, I imagine that i would have been scared and desperate to escape death and see light.
I'm in awe of them too, but like Finn, I want to say that writing this can't have been easy, and thank you.
Thank you. We need to be reminded-too little coverage over the last 20 years. The humanity and heroism are affirming, and a stark contrast to the evil of that day.
Full respect to you for writing this. Coward that I am, I skipped parts of it.
I did not know much about this. Horrifying. How moving that so many people immediately bravely responded to help the injured. I am stunned.
I too remember the eye-rolls in the office in Ealing where I was working when we all assumed it was an electricity sub-station blowing up - 'we're in great shape to host the Olympics' was the general sentiment. And then the news began to change. Thank you so much for this Ed, it has brought tears to my eyes to hear of the heroism.
Thanks Ed, these are moving but desperately sad stories. I was also commuting that day, my route was Baker St to Moorgate. As far as I can recall I was already at work when the bombs went off, and I do remember having to walk home at the end of the day. Thanks to those four Islamists, we got a little taste of the Somme in central London.
I remember getting a commuter train back to Putney and then walking the rest. Presumably these days they would also have been shut
Powerful. Thank you!
I have a similar memory to you Ed. At the time I worked at the British Library- I was in charge of the evening shift ``below stairs ''So I started at 1130. If I had been more inclined to rise earlier, I think I would have been in that tunnel. I remember the dread of walking down Oxford street and thinking of all the glass that would be weaponized if a bomb went off I remember the fliers of desperate people looking for news about relatives and friends
I remember the day quite well. I was in London, the tail end of a six week backpacking trip between finishing a graduate degree and starting a first job. Went to a chilly Belgium, then a hot Italy, and up to Scotland for a very enjoyable wedding and then down to London for a few days before flying back to the US. Stayed with good family friends in Clerknenwell. On the last night we went to the theatre and I remember how glorious the evening weather was and the joyous mood following winning the Olympics.
My plan for the next day - the last day of the trip before flying back to the US on the subsequent day - was to head for the Tate for a large exhibition on Reynolds portraits. My hostess normally volunteered at the Victorian Society in Bedford Park. Typically she'd be heading out during the rush hour but because she had a guest, she'd rearranged her schedule, and so we lingered over coffee and breakfast while through the large Georgian kitchen windows shone a truly lovely English summer day. Finally I said I should make my start, knowing how long it takes to get to the Tate, and we cleared up the table and I left the house. But the Angel was strangely closed, and I noticed buses were ignoring all the stops and heading rapidly somewhere with nary a passenger. Not just one or two but all of them. Thinking that maybe I'd just walk all the way to the Tate (when you are 25 and fit, all of central London is easy walking distance), I stopped by the house en-route just to say something was odd about the transport and was there an unexpected strike. We turned on the little TV and first came out the reports of some kind of mechanical delay, and then it was conceded a bomb had gone off. On the same line I could have been on had I rushed out sooner, on the same line she'd be on if I hadn't been visiting.
All very surreal. Will never quite forget it. And such a beautiful day it was.
My friend KP went to get on the carriage with the bomber in it at Edgware Road (I think) but it was quite full, so he moved one or two down, saving his life.
Of course, being a devout Muslim, and this looking “suspicious” he got questioned by the police.
He was still injured, and in a carriage with people who fared far worse.
I still remember that day, and I still feel a deep, deep sense of shame …
Sorry London, sorry Britain …
That's very kind, but really no need. I don't think any reasonable people hold Muslims in general responsible, most of whom were clearly horrified. Of course, there were a minority we had (and have) a problem with, but that's another issue.
This is kindness. Thanks Ed!
I remember the event well not due to proximity but because it was at one of life's great turning points: I had finished my A levels a few months early. I had turned 18 and got pretty hammered a few days earlier. For some reason I had been back at school the previous day - the ex-Royal Engineer officer headmaster at the Grammar school where I had just finished had put up a display of the scene in London opposed by the desolation in Paris; almost certainly this would have been considered in bad taste the following day. My dad and other parents of siblings' friends were in London and working there and were forced to evacuate from various glass buildings to other locations, from what I recall. I myself being in Kent mainly saw it as an internet spectacle at a time when the internet mainly consisted of grainy photos. A slightly ghostly transition period that I can only hazily invoke in my mind where WiFi was just coming in but was still unusual, but equally where broadband connections had largely displaced modems, so a fair amount of imagery was shared. Mobiles were not 90s levels of primitive but were largely used for SMS still. There may have even been live feeds on news websites. 24 hour news was the principle noisy, somewhat hyperactive and distracting medium of the error. I distinctly remember seeing the macabre image of a bus with the top blown off on the day. I also remember the M20 being shut and the strange sense of quiet that prevailed in our village as a consequence. It was all kind of somewhat abstract though, like much of what you experience through the media. But now I think about it: how rare to have a sense of the course of a week 20 years later.
In August 2017 I was working in an office in Plaza Cataluya overlooking the attack there. Several of my collegues saw the incident from their window 5 floors up. I remember some security system triggering, the doors being locked and we all had to stay in the building avoiding the windows until quite late when we were escorted out of the perimeter set up by police. Luckily no one in our office was affected, had it been closer to lunch time it probably would have beem a different story. That day I certainly do remember on a more visceral level: It was not uncommon for me to go down to the bottom of the building and cross the road to grab a snack. A random decision that day could have been it.
Also this reminds me, first aid training sounds kind of boring and a little bit like something you do in the Scouts like putting up a tent. But it is one of those skills that has a massive reward to effort ratio in those rare events it is needed.
While 7/7 was the beginning of this wave of Islamist extremist attacks, it feels like we’ve since moved into a different era, defined more by random, nihilistic violence. Islamist ideology is sometimes cited, but often these attacks are carried out by alienated young men, sometimes recent arrivals, with no clear cause or direction, often on our most vunrable, (see Germany and its high level of random knife attacks on children), Chris Byliss writes well on this.
I’ll be fascinated to see whether the UK experiences another large-scale terror attack this decade. I’m not sure the country could repsond or cope in the same way as it did in 2005, gone would be the ‘don’t look back in anger’ spirit. Instead, we might likley would see serious unrest, in our most deprived and diverse areas, what we saw in Ballymena is a microcosm of what is to come and not a pleasant one. The large proportion of suspects on the terror watch list will be home grown but wont be seen as such by many commontators and instigators, all police must be public order trained as a minimum and cross our fingers that the worst of these barbaric acts are behind us.. im not so sure they are
The deracinated second generation immigrants - separated from their traditional culture but not forming part of the culture in which they had been grafted - of that era whose purposelessness in life led them to the arms of those who sought traditional interpretations of Islam were I feel only ever superficially understood. The intellectual pedigree of what they ended up believing and the fact that modern society didn't really provide convincing answers for their questions was never examined, especially by the left who saw them as agentless anti-colonial victims and who had no inclination to understand why they thought what they did. Those that emphasised a radically martial propogation of the faith akin to that which saw it conquer vast swathes of the globe in relatively short time. Not the mealy mouthed versions that supporters of multiculturalism would hope they would embraced, some kind of insipid pap watered down by secular liberalism. Ideas which were only even really embraced in the Islamic world by elites hoping either to take advantage of Western colonialism or, as in Persia or the Ottoman Empire, forestall it. And now, I can't help but feel these aimless youths were the canary in the coalmine for a more general crisis of meaning in the West that particularly took off after 2008 when the sense of meaning that comes from materially improving the condition of your family began to collapse.
Well written and moving. This atrocity and others ought to have made Britain far pickier about immigration (which we ought to have been prior to that point) and far more aware of the risks – even if on an outlier basis. However, by a standard twist of progressive logic, it made objections to immigration far more difficult because subsequent objections could now framed as a misguided or hateful belief that “all immigrants are potential terrorists”. Is that what you are saying, racist? And the sub current to this (on the far and not so far left e.g. John Mcternan telling us that, “the concept of the ethnic English is truly evil”) is that evil England and evil "whiteness” once the coloniser must now be colonised/decolonised, y’all.
Thank you for this moving account of July 7th, telling us the stories of the “regular people” whose lives were ended or altered permanently by this terrorist attack.
I was 25 years old when it happened and far away (in Canada), but making plans to travel to the UK on a visa to work. A close friend had already been there for a couple of years, on the same visa. I don’t recall if I had bought my plane ticket yet, but I think not.
My friend was either on the buses or Tube when the terrorists attacked, but not on the targeted ones.
I had to make up my mind if I was still willing to embark on this personal adventure, knowing what had happened. The memory of 9/11 was still pretty recent too. I chose to travel, and I recall it as a key decision of my young life. If the worst happened, I would go down fighting, was how I thought of it. (What “fighting” meant was necessarily vague: at least it meant not giving up my plans).
Having said that, 20 years on, long gone from the UK (I only stayed a few months) I would 💯 cancel travel plans in response to something like this.
I remember the first time I flew after 9-11-- over a year later. I was still quite anxious about it (and I am not generically afraid of flying).
After the Pulse nightclub shooting I started noticing where the exits are anytime I'm in a public building, even small shops and church.
I can definitely relate. I have also become a more nervous flyer, especially since the Covid times.
In my case it isn’t a specific incident that caused it, but a general eroding of confidence in complex systems. If there’s ever a time your life is 100% dependent on other people’s competence in running complex systems, it’s in an airplane.
As I’ve gotten older, accumulated dependents and realized the fragility of life etc, I assess risk differently. I have pretty much resolved to never go to a crowded street event again, for example. Whatever fleeting amusement one might get from such a thing is not worth the risk of a crazy person driving a vehicle into it.
I lived in Baltimore 2008-2022, which has a appallingly high crime rate. I became so hyper-vigilant there! It's so different here in St Pete (FL) where *stuff* does happen, but you don't have to scan ahead for potential muggers anytime you go out the door.