How London's bus drivers got the city home on 7/7
Plus: The capital misses out on transport funding again — and how to beat the queue for the Bayeux Tapestry.
Twenty years ago this week a devastating terror attack on London resulted in the deaths of 52 members of the public on tube and bus services, while leaving many more Londoners with life-changing physical and mental injuries.
We asked John Bull, one of the country’s leading transport writers, to tell the story of how Transport for London turned one of the worst days in its history into an unlikely moment of defiance and heroism.
Scroll to the end to read the story, based on talking to sources who were in the room, of how London’s transport network came back to life on 7/7.
As the hot weather resumes the London Centric team is beavering away on a number of investigations — subscribers will have them in their inbox soon.
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Funding for new transport projects? Possibly not if you’re in London.
It’s increasingly clear that having a Labour government and a vast number of elected Labour politicians in London isn’t going to result in the capital receiving large amounts of money for its infrastructure.
On Tuesday the central government cheerfully announced funding for “50 road and rail upgrades” across the UK. Some time after this upbeat press release landed in our inbox, the government published the underlying detail revealing that London is barely getting any of these upgrades — and some major projects involving the capital are actually going backwards.
Among other things, a major upgrade of Peckham Rye railway station in south London has been “paused” at the last minute after a decade of work, with the money due to be spent elsewhere in the country — meaning it will retain its status as the busiest interchange railway station in the country with no step-free access. (We were beaten to publication on this one by From The Murky Depths.)
London also gets a few quid to do preliminary studies on how to improve accessibility at Dalston Kingsland, Gunnersbury, Kew Bridge, Kidbrooke, Raynes Park, and South Croydon stations (but not the funding to actually do the works), some HS2-related upgrades at Euston and Old Oak Common, and a re-announcement of the already-under-construction rebuilding of the Gallows Corner road flyover in east London. That’s your lot.
There’s no doubt that government spending is currently being throttled and the rest of the country’s transport system urgently needs investment. But London’s opposition politicians are getting ready to exploit the fact that after years of promises that investment in the capital would flow under a Labour government, this doesn’t seem to be happening. There have been some improvements, especially when it comes to housing funding, but the big ticket infrastructure items aren’t being approved, much to the annoyance of Sadiq Khan as he tries to build his legacy during what is expected to be his final term in office.
Talking of political leaders taking one in the eye
The original Bayeux Tapestry is coming to the British Museum next year, on its first visit to the UK in almost a millennium. (Or, if you fancy avoiding the crowds, just get the Elizabeth Line to Reading today and see their replica.)
Reach for the stars
The weekend’s interview with Martin Lewis about the state of the British news industry received a lot of feedback from readers agreeing with the MoneySavingExpert founder — but also pushback from journalists at Reach, one of the local newspaper groups mentioned.
There was a fascinating response from a local reporter in the London Centric comments section plus a response on LinkedIn from the executive in charge of all their titles. Sources within the company accepted some of the criticism but complained our focus on their sometimes-misleading clickbait local journalism is unfair because corporate local news sites also do original reporting — it’s just that Google and Facebook now only put the clickbait in front of people.
“This really comes down to Facebook and Google,” said one former Reach employee who also downplayed the use of AI by most reporters. “Readers want things to passively come up but Facebook is not interested in sharing court stories or exclusive interviews.”
Which is one of the reasons London Centric has no click targets and is sticking to publishing original journalism via newsletters, with the support of our members.
How London’s transport network came back to life on 7/7: “The fuck-you bus.”
This piece is written by Gareth Edwards, better known by his pen name John Bull, an award-winning transport journalist, writer, and historian. He is the editor of London Reconnections and also writes on technology for Every.
When suicide bombers set off four explosions across London’s transport network just before 9am on 7th July 2005, it brought the city to a halt. What’s not been told before in this much detail is how, according to sources directly involved in the decisions, the capital’s transport system came back to life in an astonishingly short period of time.
It was clear to many at the top of Transport for London (TfL), within hours of the attack, that beyond the immediate crisis of responding to the bombings loomed another: millions of Londoners would need to get home. The capital’s commuters, the vast majority of whom had already travelled to work in the centre of the city before the blasts, would be stuck there if TfL couldn’t provide something to get them home by early evening.
As well as the devastation and loss of life they caused at four sites across the capital, the bombings left the entire London Underground network suspended and the capital’s rail infrastructure severely disrupted. The rail network would, by the evening, run some services but the early termination – and rerouting – of services during the terrorist attacks meant that many trains were in the wrong place.
In the immediate aftermath of the attack TfL also suspended all bus services. There was, essentially, no form of public transport in operation, and the city’s streets were full of confused, frightened people.
Peter Hendy, then TfL’s Head of Surface Transport, explained to the London Assembly’s 7th July Committee in June 2006: “We had collectively in the transport services brought several million people into central London and it seemed entirely reasonable to start to exercise one’s mind about how they might get home.”
It was quickly apparent to those in the room that there was only one form of transport that could meet that need: London’s still-suspended bus network.
The bus network itself had been targeted in the terrorist attacks. Thirteen people had died on a Number 30 bus in Tavistock square. While the driver of that bus, Greek-born George Psaradakis helped his wounded passengers, it was an unnamed driver of another bus just behind who radioed in one of the first definitive reports to TfL about what was happening. The pictures of Psaradakis’ bus, torn open by the blast, were already on TV screens around the world.
Despite this, London’s buses were needed now. And so were its drivers and staff.
By 11am, the crisis command and control setup that exists to respond to an unfolding national incident was in place. On a local, tactical level in London, responsibility for key decisions sat with ‘Gold Command’. Led by Commander Chris Allison of the Metropolitan Police, this pulled together all the key decisionmakers from police, fire, ambulance, local authorities and TfL into a single location to make sure the right decisions were made.
Bob Kiley, then Transport Commissioner for London, informed Gold Command just a couple of hours after one of the worst acts of terror the capital had ever seen, that to get Londoners home TfL needed authorisation to get its buses running again. To have any chance of that though, they needed to act quickly. Logistics were the enemy now.
“What I can tell you from our experience is that if you want to wind something up to happen, even with a service which is as dispersed in control terms as the bus service, you need a couple, or two and half, hours to make anything work.” Hendy later recalled in front of the London Assembly. “I knew that we had to decide what to do by about 2pm or 3pm, otherwise we would never have got the buses back running in time to do anything.”
To have a bus service in place by 5pm so Londoners could get out of the city centre, TfL needed to start preparing almost immediately. Most of all, it needed to alert London bus drivers scheduled to drive the afternoon and evening shifts that they still needed to come to work. Many of them would have been following the rolling coverage of the attacks on their city from home.
The scale and nature of the incident meant a COBR (“Cobra”) Committee had been convened to make strategic decisions, on behalf of Downing Street and the Security Services.
It was mayor of London Ken Livingstone, calling in remotely from Singapore where he was celebrating London winning the right to host the 2012 Olympics, who found himself pleading the case to Cobra on the part of TfL. The request for a fast decision on reactivating the bus network was rebuffed. Elements on the committee refused to accept the argument that a speedy decision was necessary.
When it was then crudely suggested by one Cobra representative that London’s bus drivers and staff would likely be too scared to turn up anyway at this stage, tempers on the London-side flared. No agreement on restarting the bus network was reached.
As a number of figures within TfL and on Gold Command noted though after the meeting, Cobra hadn’t explicitly said that they couldn’t start it again either. At least not yet.
According to sources present, it was at this point that Kiley took his then-Head of Surface Transport quietly aside and asked him if, should the call go out, he was confident that London’s bus drivers would respond as needed.
A former bus conductor himself, Hendy knew the service and its culture well. He had also already been contacted by Tom Scanlon, a key representative of the TGWU, the main bus driver’s union. Scanlon stressed that his members were ready to help in whatever way necessary.
Hendy’s answer to Kiley was thus simple: If their city needed them, the drivers would come.
Without Cobra’s explicit support, ordering the reactivation of the bus network was on legally shaky ground. The Mayor, Kiley and Hendy all agreed though that it was necessary. Kiley and Hendy decided they would take public responsibility for making that call. If blame needed to fall on someone, it would be them. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Iain Blair was informed at 1pm that TfL planned to reactivate the bus network. He agreed it was the right decision to make.
Calls were made. Emails were sent and pagers alerted. On TV, as part of a press conference on the attacks, Hendy himself broke the news to everyone watching: London’s buses would run that night, and they would be free to use.
And, while this was happening, from across London and the South East, the drivers and staff of London’s bus network received the call. Despite the uncertain situation, despite the fear and the images of one of their own vehicles ripped painfully apart, their city needed them, and they came.
“We started the bus service without any permission from anybody.” Hendy, now a Labour peer and transport minister, said in a London Reconnections interview in 2015. “I said to Kiley: ‘if we don’t start getting people home this city is going to be full of people at midnight’ because the Tube couldn’t run. And the fact that the staff came back in… well, it was a pretty good moment for this place.”
By early afternoon, on streets that had in some cases become unnervingly quiet for hours, buses started to appear. To stranded Londoners, many still trying to process what had happened, those buses quickly stopped being just a way to get home. They were a symbol of something else.
“I remember seeing that first triumphant, fuck-you bus, which would have been at about 4pm,” said one commuter this week, recalling the events of 7/7 from the distance of twenty years.
Despite being on the other side of the globe, a visibly emotional Ken Livingstone seemed to pick up on the city’s mood of resilience when he addressed the world on TV.
“Londoners will not be divided by this cowardly attack,” he said. “They will stand together in solidarity alongside those who have been injured and those who have been bereaved and that is why I’m proud to be the mayor of that city.
“[People] choose to come to London, as so many have come before, because they come to be free. They come to live the life they choose, they come to be able to be themselves.
“They flee you because you tell them how they should live. They don’t want that and nothing you do, however many of us you kill, will stop that flight to our city where freedom is strong and where people can live in harmony with one another. Whatever you do, however many you kill, you will fail.”
As he spoke, London’s red buses, the lifeblood of the city’s transport network, were already flowing again, proving him right.
Absolutely brilliant and genuinely moving piece on 7/7 and our wonderful red buses. Remember the day well and I teared up when heard in the distance a bus near Finsbury Park. TfL’s staff and leadership finest moment, that and Covid deaths of service staff.
Apologies for misnaming the union in the original version of this, it was the TGWU. Rather than the TWGA, who are the Tunbridge Wells Group of Anaesthetists and — as far as I can tell — had no reported involvement in the immediate 7/7 transport operation.
My fat fingers while editing, not John's mistake.