On Saturday, on a warm evening in London, there was a terrorist attack. Seven members of the public were killed, and forty-eight were injured. Two weeks ago, a suicide bomber blew himself up outside a concert in Manchester, killing twenty-two other people, among them many young women and girls. Yesterday’s plan was cruder, employing a vehicle and knives, and closer in method to the attack that took place on Westminster Bridge, in March. In that instance, however, one individual acted alone, whereas, last night, three men were involved. All three are now dead.
The frightening sequence of events, which unfolded in fits and starts on television and social media, has now become somewhat clearer. At eight minutes past ten at night, police were called to an incident on London Bridge. A white vehicle had been driven into pedestrians on the bridge. Eyewitnesses, including some who were driving past, initially thought that this might be a traffic accident. That possibility was soon dispelled. Bodies were seen lying not just on the sidewalk but on the road. The vehicle then crashed outside a pub at the southern end of the bridge, and three men got out, all carrying long blades. At least one of the men had a row of cannisters looped around his chest. The men started making their way toward a nearby area called Borough Market, entering restaurants and bars along the street and attacking people at random. One witness saw a woman stabbed ten to fifteen times. “She was going, ‘Help me, help me,’ ” he said. Reports told of the assailants crying, “This is for Allah,” as they ran toward their victims. The scene was described as “a rampage.”
Close to the foot of London Bridge is a pub called the Mudlark. On a Saturday night, it would have been packed. One person inside described what happened next. “A woman, probably in her early twenties, staggered into the pub, and she was bleeding heavily from the neck and from her mouth. It appeared to myself and to my friends that her throat had been cut.” One woman, who was dining not far away, in the Black & Blue restaurant, said, “We just saw three guys come into the restaurant, stab someone in the face and someone in the stomach. One of them had a big knife, then he came in and walked around the restaurant. I guess they just kind of stabbed anyone that they saw.” Video footage showed police entering Katzenjammers beer hall, around the corner from Black & Blue, and shouting at customers to get down on the floor and stay there.
If you survey the multiple accounts of chaos and confusion, the number of people attacked, and the range of locations involved, you might assume that last night’s incident was a lengthy one. In fact, it was soon over. Armed police, swiftly on the scene, confronted and killed the attackers. All three were dead by sixteen minutes past ten—eight minutes after the initial call to police. Those eight minutes, however, were more than enough time for a massacre of the innocents.
The immediate problem, for the authorities, was that they had no way of being sure that the rampage was over. The men responsible were dead, but could there be others on the loose? The entire zone around the killings had to be scoured and cleared. Hence the bewildering picture that emerged in the ensuing hours. There were accounts of incidents at Vauxhall, to the south, and Bank subway station, to the north, and it took a while for these to be discounted. It was strange to watch television images of scores of ordinary folk being herded away by police, down the streets and away from the action, with their hands placed on their heads—not because they were suspects, but, on the contrary, to indicate that they were harmless and unarmed.
The choice of a killing ground, in this case, is a significant one. London Bridge is a major thoroughfare, but even busier is London Bridge station, at the southern end of the bridge, which is a hub for both rail and subway connections; commuters pour through it on a weekday, and on weekends the surrounding area is crammed with visitors, residents, tourists, and anybody seeking a good night out. Since the turn of the millennium, the south bank of the Thames has undergone a rejuvenation, and you can stroll peacefully—until that peace is broken—from the foot of the bridge past Southwark Cathedral, Shakespeare’s Globe, Tate Modern, and on toward the National Theatre. Anybody who resents the way of life that is encouraged by these places, and the kinds of people who like to frequent them, could pick no better spot in which to wreak revenge.
Although I was out of town yesterday, I have come to know this patch of London well in the past few months, as I rent a family flat between Borough Market and the river. Historically, the district could hardly be more loaded with riches; Shakespeare dwelt close by, and Tabard Street, across the road, marks the point from which Chaucer’s pilgrims set off for Canterbury. The ruins of a twelfth-century bishop’s palace, including a majestic rose window, loom at the end of my street. I have often eaten at Black & Blue, a cheerful establishment, good for steaks and salads, which lies a few yards from my front door. (A door that may well have been broken down by police, last night, as they conducted house-to-house searches in the wake of the murders. I can’t be sure. As I write this, the entire area remains sealed off. One neighbor reports that, even to get out of your apartment, you have to call the police and then be guided out by an armed escort.) To read of what occurred in that restaurant last night, therefore, seems unreal.
A few steps on from Black & Blue is a pub named the Wheatsheaf, outside which drinkers—many in suits, having walked over London Bridge from the City, London’s main financial district—swarm and talk at the end of any working day. So, it was scarcely credible to turn on the television last night and see a photograph of one of the attackers lying on the ground outside the Wheatsheaf, bleeding, with his homemade belt of metal cannisters quite visible. These were plainly intended to resemble explosives, but are now said to have been a dummy device: a fine distinction, which an armed policeman is unlikely to appreciate. It is as though the murderers wanted not merely to strew fear—the essential purpose of terrorism—but to invite their own destruction at the hands of the law. If so, they had their wish.
Borough Market is an extraordinary place. Over the past decade, it has become a rebuke to the age-old idea that London food, and British habits of eating, are a lousy joke. Yards away from the Wheatsheaf, and extending over a sizable area to the base of Southwark Cathedral, is the market itself, where hundreds of stalls ply an often frantic and always delectable trade. They were closed last night, but a few hours earlier, at Saturday lunchtime, the alleyways would have been a seething mass of visitors, some on a mission to buy oysters, venison, French cheese, Ethiopian takeout, or Croatian white-truffle honey, others just to gawp. Many of those people would have stayed on into the evening, since the market is encircled by bars and restaurants. Among the busiest of these are two tapas bars, El Pastor and the Brindisa; reports have said that both were at the heart of last night’s horror. The point is this: Borough Market is almost a parody of the many-cultured, multisensory nerve center, open to global influence and welcoming to all comers, that London aspires to be. For every person who cherishes such profusion and liberality, there may be a quieter soul who finds it all a bit too much, and prefers to stay away; and, then, there will be a third type, one in a million, who wants to stop it dead.
The right to go out and have a drink with friends, on a Saturday night, is a small thing. It’s when the small things become a mortal risk, however, that citizens begin to lose their patience and their cool. That is why the Prime Minister, Theresa May, was at her most severe this morning. “It is time to say ‘Enough is enough,’ ” she declared. The United Kingdom, she added, “cannot and must not pretend that things can continue as they are.” What form that new honesty might take she has yet to clarify, and how the prospect of such changes will affect the general election, which takes place this Thursday, on June 8th, is equally hard to foresee. Campaigning, which paused after the Manchester bombing, has once again been suspended, but will probably resume tomorrow. Life will go on, as everyone, including political leaders, ritually insists that it must. As European countries suffer the gruesome brunt of one assault after another, however, and as the body count rises, how long can that life remain the same?
