The idea that city-dwellers are frightened by this act of cowardice is, frankly, absurd

Bridge the day after the attack, and found that nothing had changed: “Londoners still profoundly irritated by number of tourists on east side of bridge.”

I remember the day after the 7/7 attacks, everyone getting back on the Tube as if nothing had happened. At the time, I was living in Bethnal Green, where the platforms had been used as air-raid shelters during the Second World War, and 173 people had been crushed to death in 1943 trying to reach them. I remember getting on the Central Line and thinking that, probably, the city would pull through this, as it had done before. In London,