7/7 Remembering the day

[Pebbles16]

I'm not sure if this is being discussed elsewhere. And my heart goes out to all those affected. Those I know and those I don't.

I was then and still live in London.
It was such a strange day because - for the first few hours, until the bus bomb - it was just another weird day on the tube. The Northern line had a power surge was the first message - the Northern line was not affected by the bombs.
I remember it so clearly from personal and work-related circumstances and then the emerging horror. I had friends affected through loss, injury and death.
Then, I got on the tube on 8th July and went back to work.
Watching the BBC documentary and so much of it feels like it was yesterday.
What are other people's memories?

I didn’t know it at the time, but a colleague of mine was in London that day and changed plans meant he missed one of the affected tube trains. He also missed the Lockerbie flight in 1988. Talk about having nine lives. There but for the grace of god. Thinking of all those affected, directly and indirectly.

I was 18 and in Paris that day due to fly home and my dad was picking me up from the airport. I spent all day wandering around Paris sightseeing (on the metro) and obviously back then there was no news on smartphones so I had no idea.

My dad told me when we got back in the car back in the UK that he'd been terrified of it being a wider attack and affecting Paris as well. Weird when I got home and turned on the TV to find this huge event I'd had no knowledge of, stuff like that probably wouldn't happen today.

I'd been working overnight in central London and travelled home to my northern suburb by tube and bus. Came in to the house about nine am to hear radio reports of multiple 'power surges' which immediately sounded strange. Turned the telly on and saw my sister in law being interviewed at Stratford tube station. They'd been told to get off their Central Line train. The Olympics had been awarded to London just the day before and they'd sent a reporter out to do some vox pops with happy Londoners....

i can’t believe it was 20 years ago. I was at school sports day and several mums were frantically trying to call husbands in the city. The guardian have put out an article today focussing on the resulting Islamophobia which I feel is inappropriate on a day which should be about the innocent victims.

I remember the day before had been such a happy day - London had secured the Olympics and I recall seeing a red arrow flyover from my garden in East London, and being in a really positive mood. I was early 20s.

The next morning, I was in my office in London, only a couple of minutes away from Tavistock square, when it started to feel like something was up. My dad texted me to check I was ok and if I was aware of what was going on. That was the first hint that it was more sinister than usual delays.

It started out as tube issues but quickly became apparent it was more. Then the bus exploded and then we were told we weren’t allowed to leave. We had to move to one side of our office, and we all huddled around the office tv. Outside the office, the inhabitants of the near by police station were evacuated and a couple of people were chained to the railings. I can’t quite remember but I think we eventually went to the pub downstairs and watched events on the TV until we were cleared to leave. I walked home which took an hour or so. I remember getting a call from a friend in Australia checking I was ok and speaking to lots of people on the way.

I couldn’t get hold of my (ex but still entangled) boyfriend and remember being really freaked out. He was ok. One of our work contacts got caught up in it and ended up in hospital with two broken legs. If irc he had to get married on crutches 7 weeks later. No one else I knew got hurt but the following year I moved to an organization who had lost a colleague.

That evening, a huge group of us that lived in walking distance went to the pub. We all just hugged a lot and needed the closeness. We all lived and worked in the Kings x/Farringdon/Bloomsbury/Old Street area and it did really affect us for a while.

A couple of weeks later, 21 July, a bomb failed to go off at my local bus stop. I couldn’t get home that evening. It felt so frightening. Then Jean Charles de Menezes was killed the next day and it felt like the world had gone mad.

At school in North London, throughout the day there were lots of rumours going round and then in the afternoon we got taken into the assembly hall and told. Lots of girls worried about parents working in the City and teachers worried about how we'd all get home as the network was suspended

I will never forget this day. It was the day after London had won the Olympic bid and there was a celebratory cover on the free Metro newspaper. I was late to work and would have gone in on the Northern line but it was already closed so the bus bomber couldn’t detonate his bomb on that line and bombed the bus instead.

I ducked under emergency tape to go to my office but no smart phone then so I didn’t realise anything was amiss. Work was built over a tube station close to one of the affected ones and we all spent a lot of the morning huddling in an open plan area as it was thought there would be more blasts.

Sky was reporting bombs while the BBC didn’t report it for a long time as it wasn’t confirmed. Mobiles didn’t work so none of us could get through to home. It was an awful day reading about all the casualties on the news on the work computer.

I was on my way to work when the tube that was leaving the platform at Paddington, stopped and everyone was ordered off. I walked down Praed Street and there were firefighters on ladders looking over the wall to the tube cutting. I passed Edgware Road where one police car was just drawing up.

I walked to my office near Tavistock Square where we were locked in and basically just watched the events on TV. I knew my family were safe but others spent a while contacting loved ones or confirming they were safe.

Walked home at about 2:30pm. People were sitting outside the pubs and cafes as if nothing had happened.

Two weeks later, my kids were on the tube at Shepherds Bush which was one of the failed bombings.
I knew one of those charged by sight as he lived very near me.

I was at court waiting to give evidence when the reports started to come through, we were released by the judge so we could return to our borough
my team mates were first in the tunnel, all
of them young kids really in their early twenties
It changed them all

I worked for Metro papers at the time. Was just on my way back from a meeting with Nottingham Evening Post when I got a call saying what had happened. I was in charge of circulation for several areas and big news stories meant contacting all stations/ bus depots etc as would now have more pages and so heavier weights etc than we had stated.

My son had just started as a trainee in The City and phoned me to say he was walking along The Strand as everyone had to get off the tube due to a power failure. I'd had the TV news on and only half listening to major tube delays and power cuts. It was a nice sunny day so he thought he would walk towards the office but jump on a bus if he could work out which one to catch.

As soon as the call ended a newsflash came up about the exploding bus - I immediately tried to phone him back to tell him not to get on a bus but of course that's when the phone network went into meltdown/shut down and I couldn't get through. I had an anxious wait until he got to the office and phoned me.

Terrible day for London.

Samantha Lewthwaite?

At that time I worked almost opposite Liverpool Street station. On the day of the bombing I was actually away in the west country working so watched with horror from a distance as the news came in. Thank God none of my colleagues were injured.

The posters put up by people trying to find loved ones were heartbreaking.

A week later there was a minute's silence. Thousands of people came out of the cafes, shops and offices and lined both sides of Bishopsgate. The streets were packed several people deep. The traffic stopped and taxi and bus drivers got out of their cabs and stood besides them, people stood besides their cars and passengers stood in silence on buses. I've never known anything like the silence or the feeling of so many people drawn together in sadness.

I am so sorry for everyone who lost their lives that day or had their lives changed by such an act of indiscriminate violence and cruelty.

Yes

I can't believe it's been 20 years.

i was helping to run a kids camp in France, with British children. That weeks kids were from London. We were trying to 'carry on activities as normal' while also trying to get all the updates & frantically trying to get in touch with all the schools & parents. Quite a few if the parents had taken advantage of the childcare to go away themselves, so it was a nightmare.

some of the parents were injured, but only 2 seriously enough to need to go to hospital and thankfully none killed.

I was heavily pregnant with DS and had gone pram shopping with my parents in JL

i got a call from DH to say leave London now and come home asap

so we waited for a bus to take us to the station

no buses

so we walked to the train station and actually got what were the last trains to leave

I can’t remember if we knew what had happened in London or only when we got home

DH didn’t tell me what had happened because he didn’t want to scare the crap out of us

My overriding memory of that day was the quiet - I had to walk from the City to Waterloo to train home as there were no trains or buses, and seemed to be very few cars.

Everyone was walking, quietly, purposefully, to get to where they needed to be. All commuters, and a sense it could have been any one of us (and was in fact - one person from my company had been killed).

It was eerie.

I was outside of London at uni on the day, and was with my best friend whose family were in London. Bestie was very pragmatic when they couldn’t get through to family saying it was so unlikely as London so big. Turns out their mum was on one of the tubes. Ended up ok and uninjured but an awful experience to go through.

That convo with bestie plays in head a lot. I think it really hit home that something unlikely can still happen.

It was quiet but the phones went down so we had no idea WTF was going on

We just walked ages to the station, we know central London well and like I said got some of the last trains home then found out what happened on the way home