Remembering the 2005 London Bombings & Confronting a New Challenge

As we remember the 2005 London bombings, let’s also talk of the rise of home-grown terror confronting the city.

(Fourteen years ago, the famous London Tube was rocked by suicide bombs. On the anniversary of the tragedy, The Quint is reposting this piece from its archives, originally published on 7 July 2017.)

One fine morning 14 years ago, three young lads decided to blow themselves up in crowded commuter carriages of the London Tube – the term that Londoners use for their sprawling underground train network. A fourth decided to blow himself up in a red double-decker bus – another London icon – on the doorstep of the British Medical Association in Bloomsbury.

That explosion shook the building of my office nearby, where my colleagues carried on working till the wailing sirens of the emergency services told them it was more than just construction noise. The 7/7 attack – as it has come to be known in the parlance of our times – killed 56 people and injured over 700.

London’s Been Attacked Many Times, But it Remains a Resilient City

London is a quintessential global city, where people have long come to celebrate all that life has to offer, but also to voice their grievances, real or imaginary. Londoners have long lived with terrorist attacks. It is easy to forget that London suffered over 200 IRA attacks during the Irish Troubles in the late 20th century.

I just about recall the audacious attack in 1991 when three mortar shells landed in the rear garden of 10 Downing Street, or the one in 1994 when four mortar shells landed on one of the runways at Heathrow.

I have a vivid recollection of the 1993 Bishopsgate blast in the heart of the financial district. The IRA had evolved into a brutally efficient regime that prioritised property over human life. The Bishopsgate blast cost over £350 million in property damage, but the sole human fatality involved a journalist who did not heed the police warning.

The IRA’s terrorist etiquette almost always alerted the Metropolitan Police before the blasts occurred, even having pre-agreed an entire directory of daily code words to distinguish themselves from prank callers. The IRA usually planted their explosives in rubbish bins at train stations. Visitors to London are still mystified why train stations in London lack rubbish bins.

Buildings Were Felled, Buildings Were Replaced

Phlegmatic Londoners, their upper lips stiffened by memories of survival through Nazi bombing during the Blitz of 1940-41, carried on regardless. The buildings that fell were replaced by taller, more defiant buildings. London’s new skyline is dominated by skyscrapers, such as the Gherkin, built on the site of the Baltic Exchange brought down by the Bishopsgate bomb. And daily life showed little signs of disruption. A Ring of Steel was created briefly to protect the financial district from vehicular attacks, but there are no metal detectors, still, at railway stations.

Recent Attacks Have a Strong Home-Grown Flavour

The more recent attacks of the 21st century have a strong home-grown flavour. Nursing a sense of misplaced alienation and emboldened by notions of global Jihad, a bunch of British-born youth have become budding chemists, using techniques gleaned from the internet to combine fertiliser and nails to deadly effect. And when that is not available, a rented truck will do, to plough down pedestrians on London Bridge – Londoners walk a lot – and kitchen knives can be used to hack down bystanders in Borough Market nearby.

London has evolved, open to ideas and people from around the world, but especially so in the period since the IRA packed their Semtex. Over a third of the nearly 9 million residents of London are foreign born. The city’s mayor Sadiq Khan is a Brit born of Pakistani parents. These new Londoners are as likely as any other Londoner to be victims of random terrorist outrage. Of the 52 who died in the 7/7 attack, 20 were not British citizens. Of the eight people who died in the recent London Bridge incident, there was just one Brit.

London Won’t Get Cowed Down by Terrorist Attacks

Have Londoners been cowed down by terrorist attacks? Not really. Every new outrage prompts a renewed sense of defiance, a cry of dismay that ‘our city’ has been attacked again, but equally a resolve that life must ‘carry on regardless’. Borough Market is up and running. London in the summer is a series of rituals to fill up the long days: Tennis at Wimbledon, cricket at Lords and the Oval, open-air theatre in Regent’s Park, children visiting the many free museums, and countless street fairs. Not everyone has the time to participate but all can soak in the atmosphere. Terrorism is an inconvenience, measured in delayed trains, rather than a hindrance to life. London still feels safe to Londoners.

If Londoners are worried, it is perhaps about another home-grown threat, that from the rise of Brexiteers. In the referendum, Londoners had voted overwhelmingly for the UK to remain in the EU, but the rest of the country tipped the vote in favour of exit. To many Londoners, who are reflexively more pro-European, these new political jihadis are a more serious threat to the cosmopolitan identity of London. As never-ending political chat shows lay bare the internal contradictions of cake-eating Brexiteers, there is that lingering question: will London survive? It will. It always has.

(Sandeep Kapur teaches economics at the University of London)