‘Everything had changed’: How London reacted to the 7/7 bombing

Read time: 4 mins

In brief…

• Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel share their personal experiences of the 7/7 bombing in London, and how people in the UK capital reacted to the attack.
• They discuss how, as people in London returned to normality, anti-Muslim sentiment was growing, especially on public transport.
• They also say the incident raised questions about then-Prime Minister Tony Blair’s actions in the Middle East, with the suicide bombers blaming anti-Muslim actions in the region for the deadly attacks.

What’s the story?

On the morning of 7 July 2005, four men got onto London transport carrying homemade suicide bombs.

Three were detonated on the London Underground, while the fourth exploded on a double decker bus, during rush-hour, when public transport was at its busiest.

The four men, Islamic terrorists, killed themselves and 52 people that morning, in the UK's first suicide attack, and worst terror incident since the Lockerbie bombing in 1988.

Hundreds were hurt in the blasts, many losing limbs and suffering other devastating injuries.

At the time, Emily Maitlis was the lead presenter for BBC London News, while Jon Sopel was working on the BBC News Channel.

The night before the attack, Emily had been reporting from the celebrations in East London to mark London's successful Olympic bid.

"The next morning was like somebody just slamming the whole city into a wall. That's what it felt like," she says.

Jon, who had flown to Gleneagles to cover the year's G8 summit, was called back to London the moment he touched down at Edinburgh airport.

"It was a sense that everything had changed," he says.

"It was unimaginable, but yet imaginable because we had seen what happened with 9/11."

What happened after the attack

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, London all-but came to a standstill.

Transport was shut down, mobile networks were unusable, schools closed early, and many businesses sent their staff home.

"The whole of London was walking," Emily recalls.

"I remember walking an hour and 45 minutes to work – it was literally the first time I'd turned up in jeans and trainers.

"I remember being very tied to London, actually, and very tied to this sense that we all had to work this out together."

Jon adds there was a sense of the “hackneyed wartime phrase” of ‘keep calm and carry on’, as people returned to public transport the following day.

“They did return to traveling on buses, because, goodness sake, that was the only way we could get around the capital,” he says.

But in the days after the attack, London was also a place of uncertainty – with worry about further attacks and a hugely increased police presence on the streets and around tube stations.

"We didn't know if it was going to be four bombs or 40, or on trains and buses and planes," Emily says.

And this resulted in growing anti-Muslim sentiment in the UK, at ground level, with increased suspicion of others on public transport.

"In the immediate aftermath of the bombings, if you got on a tube train and you saw someone who was Muslim and had a backpack, you got into another carriage," Jon says.

"Was that a rational response, or is that a prejudiced response? Maybe it's both."

Emily says Muslim friends stopped taking backpacks with them on public transport for fear of being suspected by fellow commuters.

The political impact of the 7/7 bombings

Tony Blair, Prime Minister at the time, went from being the man who had "won London the Olympics" to the head of one that had been hit by a deadly terror attack in a matter of hours, Emily says.

She says the London bombs, and the notes left by the attackers, led to questions about his foreign policy – having been involved in wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The suicide bombers claimed they attacked London due to international persecution of Muslim people.

“It left a looming sense for many that it had been brought on,” Emily adds.

“They were murderous criminals who had been fed propaganda and an ideology, not least from some of the more extremist Muslim clerics in this country.

“But there was this sort of really uncomfortable sense of, how much had our government led us to that place?”

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