7/7, twenty years on: I missed the Edgware Road bomb by a few minutes.
We waited and waited. Impatiently. Looking at our watches. At the clock on the wall of the meeting room. Outside the window on to the street below. Down the corridor. No sign. We grumbled. We sighed. We were annoyed. We judged. This was typical of them. They were wasting our time. They were not serious about finding a solution to our disputes.
Then we found out why they weren’t on time. Why they hadn’t made it in. Why they had made us wait.
It wasn’t typical of them. It wasn’t a typical day in central London. It was a day we would never forget. It was 7 July, 2005. It was 7/7.
It was just after 9am and colleagues from another organisation, with whom we had some tensions and difficult discussions, had not arrived for an important meeting. It was made all the more annoying as we (those of us who had arrived at the meeting) had made it in on time despite a late night the previous evening.
As well as joining in with the celebrations in London after it was awarded the 2012 Olympics (much to mine and many others’ surprise and delight), several of us had attended a black tie awards dinner in a central London hotel, in which we had been recognised for some of our recent work at our company (KPMG). If we could get our arses into the offices for this meeting after a busy night, why couldn’t they? It turned out they had good reason.
Like me, some of the people attending the meeting traveled into the office (which was on the Euston Road, near Great Portland Street) via the Circle line through Edgware Road. This was my usual route to work in those days, where I would often change trains from/to the District and Hammersmith and City Lines. I had spent many, many a minute standing on the platforms at that station down the years, savouring the few minutes of mobile phone signal to read emails on my Blackberry (yes, that’s how long ago it was!). On this particular July morning I passed through the station at around 8:35am, making it into the office just before the 9am meeting was due to start.
What I didn’t know at the time - and would find out in the nightmarish hours that would follow - was that fifteen minutes after I passed through Edgware Road, a bomb was detonated and several people were killed and many more injured as part of the horrendous coordinated terrorist attacks on London’s transport system. This murderous carnage changed how safe we felt in London - and changed our relationship with the tube.
It took me weeks before getting back on the underground and even longer before I stopped examining every person and every piece of luggage for signs of danger with a heightened state of fear and scrutiny.
After around 15 minutes of waiting for these “lazy” colleagues to join us, we gave up and returned up the corridor to our desks to continue our complaining about their tardiness. It was then that the full horror of what had happened - and was still to happen that day - was becoming depressingly clear. The Tavistock Square bus bombing took place just a few roads away from the office, a ten minute or so walk over the next 45 minutes.
That day - and the subsequent second wave of attacks a fortnight later, which included an attack on Warren Street, which you could see from the meeting room we waited in on 7/7 - left me badly shaken. On 21/7, I was having lunch with a friend on Tottenham Court Road as the sirens and police vehicles zoomed past, attending the scene at Warren Street. The noise and level of emergency response activity was terrifying.
That second day of attacks - thankfully unsuccessful - left me questioning deeply whether London was somewhere I wanted to live any more. It didn’t feel safe. It didn’t feel like home. It didn’t feel normal.
The horror of 52 deaths and over 700 people injured were the tip of the iceberg of the impact it had on London, Londoners and adopted Londoners like me. Like so many people, I had the experience of not being able to contact friends and loved ones in the aftermath of the attacks and being unable to speak to family to reassure them I was ok and to make sure they were ok. The collapse of the mobile phone network under the strain of millions of calls and text messages on those days left many of us feeling isolated and drifting in a sea of stress, anxiety and deep sadness.
After several hours in the office on 7/7, huddled around one TV and our laptops trying to make sense of it all, I made the walk home. The walk took me two hours across to west London, with several stops in Hyde Park and then in my local church, Our Lady of Victories on High Street Ken. I remember lighting a candle and sitting for a few minutes in silent contemplation of what had happened. I remember too realising that tears were running down my face, even though I didn’t know I was crying.
It was a deeply traumatic day and yet I felt incredibly lucky. I was lucky to miss the bomb at Edgware Road; lucky that everyone I knew were safe; lucky that I had the luxury of being able to moan about the colleagues who didn’t make the meeting; lucky that every one of them were safe and just stuck en route and not lost to the evil that visited us that day. But others were not so lucky.
As the twentieth anniversary of 7/7 comes around, I will find another church to light a candle and remember the lives and the innocence we lost that day. A day I can never forget. A day that lives on. A day when all changed, changed utterly.