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.