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July 07, 2005
London : horribly familiar times
I remember travelling in to Liverpool Street Station by train on Monday 26th April 1993, two days after the bomb in Bishopsgate.
As you approach Liverpool Street from around Stratford, you can clearly see the NatWest Tower (as it was then, now Tower42) silhouetted against the sky. That Monday, it looked odd from a distance, sort of fuzzy and indistinct. As the train got closer, everyone in the carriage fell quiet as we looked up and saw that not a pane of glass was left, and the curtains and blinds were waving in the wind out of the empty window frames up all 42 stories of the tower. The building looked like something alive and in pain. Until then I don't believe I had understood the reality of the bomb. There was chaos in the streets around Liverpool Street, with Bishopsgate totally devastated. The City of London itself was virtually windowless, with large sheets of plywood marking the previous existence of every window all the way out to London Wall to the West (about half a mile) and an equal radius out from Bishopsgate in every other direction.
It sounds as though the blasts in London today are nothing like the strength of the bomb that the IRA used then, which was about 1 ton but, unlike the IRA bomb, they were detonated in crowded surroundings with no warning.
Posted by daen at July 7, 2005 01:25 PM