7/7 - a year on

One year ago yesterday morning I was at a conference of African Sufis at Goldsmiths College in south London to speak about the life of ?Abdu?l-Baha, the eldest son of the Baha’u'llah, Founder of the Bah??? Faith, renowned for his promotion of peace and work against racism in the years before and immediately after the First World War. People began to come in with news of something terrible that was happening in central London. Nobody was quite sure what, but bombs were mentioned.

I gave my presentation, the irony of whose subject on that particular day only later became apparent, and then set out on the journey back to central London, where public transport was not running, and the Bah??? Centre. At that stage I was almost completely unaware of the enormity of the events of that day. It was only as I walked from London Bridge station, along the Thames Path, towards Westminster and failed to get through to home on my mobile (because the system had crashed under the strain of the numbers trying to use it all at once) that I realized just how serious the events were. The streets were empty of traffic other than police cars; many more people were walking, rediscovering the pavements.

Yesterday London, along with the rest of the UK, remembered the events of 7 July 2005. Yesterday I was in London again. This time, unlike last year, I commuted into King’s Cross. Last year, one of the bombs went off on a Piccadilly Line train between King’s Cross and Russell Square at about 08:50. Now that I live in Welwyn I often use the Piccadilly Line to get from King’s Cross to the office. But yesterday I used the Northern Line to London Bridge, whence the Jubilee Line to a meeting at Canary Wharf.

The Tube was as hot and crowded as ever. I’m sure there were many travellers who, like me, wondered if any idiots would try a repeat event. I get a tad claustrophobic on hot and crowded Tube trains and the thought of being trapped deep underground severely injured and unable to move fills me with horror.

News programmes included pictures of the various commemorations that took place. There was one at King’s Cross at 08:50 (just about the time yesterday I was catching my train into London), and others at Aldgate and Edware Road Underground stations and at Tavistock Square, where the No. 30 bus was destroyed. There was a commemoration service in Regent’s Park. The Evening Standard was full of stories and pictures. The rhetoric has all been about the heroism of London and Londoners, praise for the heroes, sorrow for the dead, sympathy for their families and for the injured.

Last year, there was a two minutes’ silence in London one week after the bombings. On that day I had just come out of a meeting in Church House and was standing outside Westminster Abbey. On the stroke of noon, the whole of London came to a complete halt. The silence was eerie, powerful and deeply moving. Yesterday at noon I was on a No. 9 bus travelling along Piccadilly from Green Park towards Knightsbridge. The driver stopped the bus, turned the engine off and announced that there would be a two-minutes’ silence. A woman who was obviously a tourist from the Far East carried on chatting on her mobile phone. Traffic continued to flow along Piccadilly. A driver, clearly impatient that the bus, which had stopped at a road junction, part-way through a set of traffic lights, had blocked his path sounded his car horn several times.

The TV news last night showed that the silence had worked rather better around the places where the bombs had gone off a year ago, but I was sad that people where I was at noon yesterday couldn’t stop for two minutes to give thought to those who had died or suffered so greatly as a result of the most serious peace-time outrage in London.

Sir Ian Blair, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, has warned that another terrorist attack on London is inevitable. The events of 7/72005 (as, indeed, the events of 9/11/2001) make it impossible to avoid the public collision of religion and politics as an issue that required (and still requires) informed and reflective study and debate.

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