In the immediate years that followed the bombing, I recall time after time being turfed off my train at Ilford because of terrorist alerts either somewhere on the line or at Liverpool Street. This was in the days long before mobile phones so there was always a long queue at the very few red telephone boxes located just outside Ilford station where hundreds of displaced commuters desperately tried to call home/work/anyone. On several occasions I had to give up trying to get into London and so returned home to Essex on the next train.

Roll on nearly 10 years, and I was still working in the Bishopsgate/Moorgate area for 2 clients – one client (ironically) located in the NatWest Tower (by this time renamed ‘Tower42’) and the other client nearby in the CityPoint building in Moorgate. Both buildings were, at that time, amongst the tallest buildings in the City. Like many people, I remember exactly where and what I was doing when the first airplane struck the first Twin Tower in New York. In my case, I had just returned to CityPoint from lunch (shortly before 2pm London time, 9am NY time). As soon as I reached my desk, my colleague showed me his computer screen where he was watching footage on his pc of the 1st plane hitting the 1st tower (I don’t think this was live footage at this stage but it was shown on news channels very shortly after the first attack). Like many people, I dismissed it as a terrible accident and returned to my desk. Almost immediately my colleague came over to me and told me of the 2nd plane. As awareness that this was not an accident took hold of myself and all my colleagues, our inboxes started to ‘ping’ and the first of several emails from our management team arrived. These emails appeared in very quick succession – no more than about 4 or 5 minutes apart. In hindsight, I now realise that our London management team must have been in direct contact with their NY office, which was then located in an area very near the Twin Towers. (Fortunately all personnel survived.) The first email stated that London management were aware of ‘events’ in New York. The second email told us to stay away from the windows. No sooner had we digested that email, then another appeared informing us to evacuate the building and leave London with immediate effect. By no later than about 2:20pm London time (9.20am NY) I, along with what appeared to be the entire population of all the buildings within the City of London, was racing towards Liverpool Street. I have never seen Liverpool Street concourse so busy (this was approx 2:30). This was worse than any rush-hour I’d ever seen. The chaos was more so because people were hopping onto any train in a frantic attempt to get out of London. Luckily, my arrival at Liverpool Street had fortuitously timed with the arrival of one of my very infrequent trains – so I was able to get on the correct train out of London. The Chinese-whispers on the train reported that there were more planes in the air still unaccounted for (at that time there was) and at least one was heading towards London (a false rumour, however at that moment, in all the chaos, it seemed very real). Like many other London workers, that night I returned home to my loved ones and wept at the fate of our equivalents in NY.

The next day, again with dogged-determination, I returned to London, this time to my client who was on the 39th Floor of Tower 42. The atmosphere with my colleges was sober and sad. At some point in the days after 9/11, Tower 42 held a 2 minutes silence. I was not the only one amongst my colleagues who observed this silence by standing next to the floor-to-ceiling windows and looking down to the hard ground 39 floors below and wondering ‘what would I have done’. In the immediate days and weeks after 9/11, Tower 42 was subjected to numerous terrorist/bomb alerts. Sometimes we had to evacuate the building (walking down 39 floors is incredibly exhausting), other times we were told to sit in the central area of the building were all the lift-shafts are located. During these nervous times and the many hastily-arranged temporary meetings by the lift-shifts, I started to get to know someone who I’d worked with for years – 15 months after 9/11, we married.

The 1993 attack on Bishopsgate was not the first time this street was a target for terrorists bombs. As I’ve now run out of space within this comment. I’ll tell you the story of the Victorian terrorist attack on Bishopsgate in a new comment. As a quirk of fate, the business that was located in the attacked building on Bishopsgate was owned by one of my ancestors.