There was a lovely mood in London on the evening of 6 July 2005: like the heady fizz of a midsummer glass of champagne. The sun was out and the news was good. Earlier that day, the city had been announced as host of the 2012 Olympic Games. The streets and bars were buzzing. Martine Wright was among the people out celebrating. Accordingly, on the morning of 7 July, she was mildly hungover and making her way to work slightly later than usual.
She jumped on to a Circle Line train and remembers being surprised and delighted to get a seat. And then everything changed for ever. She has very few memories of the minutes and hours that followed the initial blast although she was, apparently, conscious for most of it. She seems to have blanked it out. She can only speculate: “Maybe my brain just decided I couldn’t take any more?”
Martine lost her legs that day. But she was one of the lucky ones: 52 people lost their lives in four separate suicide bomb attacks in London; three on tube trains, one on a double-decker bus. This meticulous four-part documentary explores the events of that day (and the weeks that followed) from every conceivable angle. We hear from survivors; from bereaved parents like Julie Nicholson, whose daughter Jenny was killed; from extraordinarily brave first responders like transport police officer Tony Silvestro, who, as one of the first into the tunnels, was faced with the battlefield dilemma – who can be saved, who is too badly injured? There is forensics officer Steve Keogh, who recalls seeing a man on television desperately walking the streets of London with a photo of his missing sister and realising that he had helped to move her body. Many details are unimaginably distressing and those who were involved remain visibly traumatised nearly two decades later. People are composed as they begin to tell their stories, but not for long. It is clearly a nightmare that most of them have packed away – and revisiting it is agony.
However, the series doesn’t stop on 7 July. A story with apparently clear moral outlines soon becomes more complex. The unfolding events were deeply political, with implications that continue to resonate. Shahid Malik was, at the time, the Labour MP for Dewsbury in West Yorkshire – home to one of the terrorists. “For Muslims, this was a disaster,” he says. The attack exposed a fault line in British society. Tony Blair, then the British prime minister, feels that ascribing the terrorists’ actions to grievances around the Iraq war would be to give credence to their brutality.
Malik, it’s clear, doesn’t quite agree – or at least doesn’t feel this position tells the whole story. It’s a fascinating (and fascinatingly edited) indirect exchange; full of deadly politesse, explaining so much but so mildly. “You can’t disentangle these things conveniently,” Malik says. “There’s no doubt that Iraq and Palestine were a rationale that they gave themselves. To pretend that didn’t exist is not the reality.”
London, meanwhile, was struggling with another reality: the knowledge that if this had happened once, it could happen again. The documentary does a fine job of evoking the fearful feverishness of that period. A fortnight later, a second series of terrorist attacks failed – due to malfunctioning bombs rather than police prevention measures. The bombers escaped and, in their desperation to prevent further loss of life, the police made a series of mistakes which led to the fatal shooting of an entirely innocent Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes. The obfuscation and evasion that followed did the Metropolitan police no credit. Brian Paddick, a senior officer who was heavily involved in the investigation into the shooting, doesn’t pull his punches. De Menezes wasn’t running away, nor did he refuse to stop when challenged by police, as initially claimed. “Unfortunately”, says Paddick, “the Met has had a policy of trying to besmirch the character of people they shoot.”
If parts of this series now look like intimations of trouble ahead – around Britain’s increasingly delicate community relations; around declining trust in politicians and self-serving institutions, it also offers moments of consolation. Officers slept in adjoining carriages while retrieving bodies from the stricken trains so the victims wouldn’t be left alone underground. Martine Wright made it to London 2012, representing Great Britain in the Paralympics volleyball tournament. Julie Nicholson recalls attending a memorial event for her daughter and, unable to face an underground train afterwards, she hailed a taxi. The driver took her home to Reading and refused to accept a fare. “Just remember,” he said, “there are more good people in the world than bad.” What redemption this series offers feels ambiguous and hard-earned. But eventually, that makes it all the more tangible.
7/7: The London Bombings aired on BBC Two and is on iPlayer now.
