Well the new job has been started and I’m now working up in London in an area that I used to visit quite a bit 10 years ago when I was a student.  Having now walked along the Charing Cross Road several times I’ve observed the following.

• A number of the book shops are missing having been replaced with clothes and shoe shops or eateries.  This includes Waterstone’s.
• There’s a great gap in the sky line where the Astoria theatre used to be.
• Orc’s nest, Foyles, Blackwell’s,, The Salsa restuarant and the musical instrument shops are still there.
• The Sainsbury’s at the bottom of Tottenham Court Road is actually quite a busy place as opposed to the place I used to get my lunch on a Saturday when going to the computer fair.

I’ve also discovered that the location of my job has a few fringe benefits that I hadn’t thought about.  Just round the corner from it are the British Museum, The Photographer’s Gallery, The National Portrait Gallery, Orc’s Nest, Forbidden Planet, Covent Garden and more places to eat than you can shake a stick at.

Back in the summer of 2001 I finished my degree at Imperial College having spent the best part of four years turning up on a campus squeezed in between the Science Museum and the Royal Albert Hall.  Having done that I abandoned London for the south coast and New Forest.  Early this year, after having found myself unexpectedly in need of a new job I’m heading back to London after an 11 year hiatus.

I’m sure that that I will find that London is different but the same.  People still work, live and fall in love there, they just have fancy smart phones to help them along the way.  There will still be continuity of cranes towering above the landscape dragging new ever taller buildings out of the ground but at the same time this is a London which I left before the events of 9/11 and 7/7.  Will these events have had a strong influence on people or were any potential effects of those events already ingrained in the psyches of those living there given the IRA bomb campaigns and David Copeland’s campaign culminating in the bombing of the Admiral Duncan pub in 1999.