Image: The 911 skyline. Shutterstock.
This is a one-off, in memoriam of all those who died in the 9/11 atrocity, and Ken Short.
Ken was, for more than a decade, until his premature death from cancer, a writing partner and great personal friend. I had the privilege of working with and learning from this wonderful human being and superb copywriter.
9/11 came as a shock to all of us, and he and I discussed how we might write about it. We chose to try to put it in context with events that had affected the equivalent in our own small corner of the world, the City of London.
Here is the result …
It took less than two hours for September 11 to burn itself into a list of dates so apart from the continuum of history that they do not require a year numeral to identify them. In two distinct events, happening 56 minutes and 102 minutes after the initial 8.46 am EST strike on the World Trade Center, an unbelieving planet watched in real-time as 220 storeys, 9 million square feet of floor space, 430 company and institutional offices and 2,819 human beings collapsed with eerie orderliness, falling 1,302 feet through smoke and flame into a 1.6 million-tonne, 10-acre heap of fiery wreckage impacted 70 feet deep into the mud of Lower Manhattan’s Hudson river shore. Unseen by CNN cameras feeding the fearful images to seven continents, five other buildings on the 16-acre Trade Center site and a church and an office block beyond it had also collapsed or part collapsed, overwhelmed by two successive 10-second shockwaves of hurricane-force airborne and subterranean kinetic energy. Through the financial and administrative district around, blast, dust and flung debris left a five-block radius of diminishing secondary havoc. When the morning sun reappeared, a baleful orange disc through the pall, the New York skyline, and everything else, was different.
With the World Trade Center perished unquantifiable human hopes, innumerable corporate plans and $11 trillion dollars of the value of the US economy. In its star spangled manner, the American economy stood up from the rubble and dusted itself off. Milkweed butterflies rose, with symbolic indomitability, in red-and-yellow waves from the wreckage of Ground Zero days after the attack. The Dow, too, arose and continues to rise, fall and rise, as market indices ever have. But some of the companies whose people and offices fell that morning remain in the dust. 100,000 jobs have gone from Lower Manhattan’s finance district. 230,000 jobs have gone from the American travel industry. 1.8 million jobs have gone from America overall. 4 major airlines have gone from the sky. US insurers have lost $21 billion. The world insurance industry has lost $50 billion. New York City lost its two front teeth and found heroes. And those who watched the hypnotic and terrible events of that morning from the remote safety of Frankfurt, Hong Kong, London, Paris, Tokyo, Zurich and every other global business conurbation, amidst overwhelming feelings of horror, pity and anger, each asked themselves the same question. Could it happen here? It is a good question. And in London, we know the answer. It already has, twice.
Twice the City of London has suffered devastating assault, once by accident, in the Great Fire of 1666, and once by design, in the blitz of 1940. Neither was the kind of instantly or insidiously destructive terrorist attack that every major urban commercial centre must now bring within the bounds of contemplation. But the scale and effects of each in its time have lessons that we ought to consider in the context of 9/11. The philosopher George Santayana observed that those who cannot remember the past are condemned to fulfil it. The industrialist Henry Ford, whose opinion of history is commonly misrepresented, said that the farther you look back, the farther you can look forward. Here, we review the messages of three Septembers, three hundred years and three thousand miles apart, and consider their present and future importance to the densely packed square mile that is the headquarters of UK PLC.
On Thursday September 6th 1666, essayist John Evelyn walked through the ashes of the great city that, a hundred hours earlier, had been intact: “Through the late Fleet Street, Ludgate Hill, by St Paul’s, Cheap side, Exchange, Bishopsgate, Aldersgate – all gone.” An area one and a half miles by one mile from the Tower to the Temple Church had been utterly destroyed. Samuel Pepys, Surveyor of Victualling to the Navy, scurried back and forth through the burning City, sometimes wigless, sometimes in his nightshirt, the flames often at his heels during the three days of the conflagration, concerned for the survival of Admiralty House and for the contents of his own house in Seething Lane. Burying his wine and his Parmesan cheese. Evacuating his gold to Greenwich and his household goods to Bethnal Green. Working tirelessly to save the possessions of neighbours. Pausing to pity the pigeons, which would not leave their nests and fell burnt to the ground. Hurrying to Whitehall to gain audience with King Charles [King Charles II, that is]. Entreating him to order systematic felling of buildings to break the unquenchable progress of the fire.
Late on Sunday September 2nd, when the catastrophe was only hours old, Pepys surveyed the dreadful scene from Bankside, close to London Bridge. “One entire arch of fire from this to the other side of the bridge, and in a bow up the hill, for an arch of above a mile long. It made me weep to see it.” Before they had done, the flames consumed 13,200 houses, 400 streets, St Paul’s and 89 other churches, 52 livery company halls, the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange, the Custom House, schools, libraries, hospitals, 4 Thames bridges and 3 prisons. The fire raged for three days. Then, in the words of the Dean of York, Dr Gale, inscribed on the north side of the Monument, a 202-foot high column standing 202 feet west of the site of the fire’s beginning at the king’s bakery in Pudding Lane, “it stopped as it were by a command from heaven, and was on every side extinguished.”
The morning after, any water remaining in fountains was still boiling. (Just as underground fires burned at Ground Zero for 69 days.) Evelyn found himself “clambering over heaps of yet smoking rubbish, and frequently mistaking where I was”. The disorientation is hardly surprising. In London: The Biography, Peter Ackroyd makes the point, “This was also the experience of Londoners after the bombing raids of 1940; their city was suddenly unknown and unrecognisable. It had become an alien place, as if they had woken from some dream to encounter a quite different reality.” The same effect was clearly apparent in Lower Manhattan after the 9/11 attack. And, in hard truth, so was the same unpreparedness before the event.
In 1666, London was a wooden city whose denizens could shake hands or whisper secrets window to window with their neighbours across the street, so close was one projecting upper storey to another. Even the stone-clad structures of God or Mammon were timber-framed and fatally girdled by a huddle of wooden satellite dwellings and offices. Fire was a known hazard – how could it not be? – and buckets of water and earth were kept by prudent households against such local disasters as could be imagined.
What no one had foreseen was a northeasterly wind of such sustained malevolence and gusting force that it would act as a gargantuan bellows, driving fire spilled from the oven of James Farynor, the king’s baker, to make a furnace of the whole city. A plan to break the course of so all-encompassing a conflagration did not exist. The king’s orders went unheeded. Each City inhabitant attempted to save his own house as, row-by-row, like blazing dominoes, each burning street collapsed into the next, spreading the contagion of fire onward. In Canning Street, amidst smoke and confusion, Pepys came upon the Lord Mayor, Sir Thomas Bludgeon, a vintner, who “cried like a fainting woman, ‘Lord, what can I do? I am spent! People will not obey me.’” Ten hours before, this dignitary had pooh-poohed the fire as so insignificant that a woman could extinguish it by urination, although he phrased it more earthily.
In 2001, the World Trade Center was a city in the sky with 50,000 working inhabitants and 140,000 visitors daily thronging the vertically stacked streets, squares, restaurants, shopping plazas, leisure facilities, public meeting places, utility sites and company enclaves of its dual towers. Helene Hanff, better known for her World War II-long transatlantic love affair with a lowlier structure, the three-storey London bookshop of Marks & Co at 84, Charing Cross Road, looked down on Manhattan in 1977 from the Center’s 107th floor and wrote: “Suddenly, irrationally, I gloried in the high-handed, high-flying, damn-your-eyes audacity that had sent the Trade Center’s twin columns rising impudently above the skyline”. Dubbed by press a ‘United Nations of Commerce’ and surely untouchable by the malice of any one, the Center was secure. Efficiently self-policed. Networked by wireline and wireless to the world. Armed with its own internal emergency services. Confidently aware that the urban rescue resources of the most high-rise-wise city on earth lay within instant call beyond its perimeter. It was safe. So well architected and constructed that its steel frames each tolerated the impact of a 300,000 lb jetliner travelling at 470 mph, and the subsequent whiplash reactive shock which bent each tower like an Olympic vaulter’s carbon fibre pole before slamming it back to vertical. Exactly as per design.
Unimagined, in the worst-case scenario, was that an aircraft strike might not be accidental, but deliberate. Or that both towers would be struck in close succession by fully fuelled aircraft of substantial size, at the maximum speeds and optimally damaging points available to terrorist pilots threading New York’s crowded skyline. Or the effect that 10,000 gallons of igniting aviation kerosene and the resultant 2,300 degrees Fahrenheit downward percolating fires would have on the steel skeleton of each tower.
Did the terrorists have a better grasp of physical chemistry and stress dynamics than the WTC’s architects? That seems unlikely. Then did a symbolic blow against these twin bastions of Western economic power accidentally bring them both tumbling down? In a sense, it doesn’t matter. The first, and paramount, lesson of 9/11 is that nothing on or off the face of the earth is now unimaginable. Unlimited and undisciplined capacity to harm is loose in the world. No means, method, motive or scale of possible attack can be left unanticipated, unassessed and unprovided for. Pandora’s box dissolved along with the strength of the World Trade Center’s high tensile steel frames. The City of London’s metaphorical Ring of Steel could, self-evidently, prove similarly frangible.
Miraculously, the 1666 fire cost only 6 human lives. But it cost the City £10,750,500 and, although that equates to trillions of dollars in today’s money, the translated sum does not begin to scratch the surface of the cost of an identical 436-acre footprint of destruction in the 21st century. Nor the cost of the likely mortality amongst the 300,000 people working in the high rise City of today. It is a price that would be paid by the City, the United Kingdom, the Economic Community and the world economy. Laid to waste (along with commercially ‘soft’ targets such as St Paul’s Cathedral, the Central Criminal Courts of the Old Bailey, Bart’s Hospital, the London Museum, Smithfield meat market, Billingsgate fish market and Leadenhall poultry market) would be the hard core of UK PLC’s infrastructure. And the future of everyone and everything dependent upon it.
Look at a street map or at the view from your own office window. Within the scope of one major conventional thermal explosion are the Bank of England, the Mansion House, the Royal Exchange, the Stock Exchange and Richard Rogers’s Lloyd’s Building. (Which, fancy might suppose, already has its entrails fatalistically on the outside.) A nuclear device in a delivery truck, a car boot or a suitcase could further extend the destruction and its toxic fallout to engulf the Guildhall, Broadgate, the General Post Office and everything within the complex ground plan of the Barbican, including three 43-foot tower blocks, 4,000 of the City’s 5,500 permanent resident population, the City of London Girls’ School and the London Symphony Orchestra. More crucially in financial logistics terms would be the 1,000-tonne 600-foot-tall bulk of Richard Seifert’s National Westminster Tower, the HQs of every other British clearing bank, the City offices of 430 major foreign banks, 800 insurance companies, merchant banks, investment trusts, brokerages, commodity exchanges, discount houses and actuaries, auditors, accountants, advisors and consultants almost without number. With them would go Cannon Street Station, Fenchurch Street Station, Blackfriars Station, City Thameslink Station, the westernmost section of the Docklands Light Railway and a key segment of the London Underground network.
First fish, meat, poultry, leather, cloth, wine, spirits and ships. And then money. Now futures, commodities, stocks, shares, metals, assurance of lives, limbs and property. And still, above all, money. The City of London is one of the three great stock markets of the world, the insurer of the world, the banker of the world, the gold standard bearer to the world, capital provider to the world and, in the money markets, turns over as much in a day as New York and Tokyo combined. The financial markets, utilities and symbionts that have agglomerated around a river crossing in a tiny and obscure group of islands near the end of ancient Rome’s known earth have combined to become a stupendous international trading force of immeasurable value to the global economy.
Since 1694, the Bank of England has been the lodestone and central engine of the progressively assembled apparatus of the modern City, its immense inner power contained and cryptically symbolised by the massive windowless outer walls of Sir John Soane’s new Bank building of 1788. The forbiddingly blank walls remain but within them has grown a 7-storey structure. And around them has grown a new City, intersticed with the old. Pevsner’s Buildings of England for the City of London notes how the Bank has acted as a field of force for other commercial enterprises.
However, it could now be a cause for sleepless nights as well as pride that the Bank itself, CRESTCo, London Clearing House, LIFFE, the London Stock Exchange, Lloyd’s and so many more of the financial institutions it drew are packed around it within the square mile, Victorian facade by steel & glass tower, Soane by Seifert, Gibson by Rogers, Terry Farrell by Horace Jones. As weaponry improved, the redcoats of the British Army became too conspicuous for their own safety. Similarly, the concentration of key strategic assets presented by the City of London may prove a luminously attractive target for those who would do us ill. Gilray’s 1797 cartoon, The Old Lady in Threadneedle Street in Danger, referred to the Bank’s issue of paper banknotes in lieu of trusted and familiar coinage. Now the danger is more real than apparent.
Nor does this danger stop at the city walls. The City of London’s portfolio contains assets that are extra-peripheral to the square mile but vital to its well-being. Just beyond the Great Fire’s north-westernmost extent, in Clerkenwell, is the enclave of Hatton Garden, which grew up around the Goldsmith’s Hall. It is the unpretentious source of cut and uncut gem and precious metal artefact exports that make a highly visible contribution to the positive side of the UK’s payments balance. It escaped in 1666, but was, to devastating effect, in the bombsights of 160 aircraft a night in 1940. Today it is geared to frustrate sneak thieves and ram raiders, not idealism-fuelled fanatics.
On the South shore of the Thames, at No 1 Southwark Bridge, is the Financial Times, the City’s ‘parish paper’ that is now printed synchronously-by-date in the five financial capitals of the world, is sold in 56 countries and has become the parish paper of the financial globe. Its new age headquarters rises above the causeway towards which refugees of the Great Fire rowed in a flotilla of small boats. (Just as survivors of 9/11 headed in fireboats, ferries and launches for the New Jersey shore.) Safe then, Southwark and all the South Bank boroughs were carpet-bombed 274 years later.
Three miles down the Thames is the 800-foot-tall pillar of One Canada Square, Canary Wharf, where West India Dock once welcomed rum from the Caribbean. Within it are the Financial Services Authority and 43 companies of the 42,000-worker, 10-million square foot financial, media and communications community that is the City’s ears, eyes and voice. On Black Saturday, September 4th 1940, the docklands over which the towers of Canary Wharf now soar suffered nightlong bombing raids which left 430 dead, 1,600 seriously injured and 10,000 homeless. At dawn, a police station with shattered windows displayed the scrawled sign, “Be good, we’re still open.” But by September 29th, 7,000 were dead and 9,000 injured, good and bad alike. The bombers returned to the City on 74 out of the following 75 nights. City-dwellers became nocturnal troglodytes. Bethnal Green tube station (close to Pepys’s haven for his goods in 1666) opened an underground public library for its nightly guests. On January 11th 1941 more than 100 shelterers were killed by a direct hit on Bank Station, and 1,400 separate fires raged throughout the City. When peace came, one-third of the square mile consisted of bombsites and the Corporation’s Holden-Holford Report of 1947 briefed enterprises and their architects to rebuild. Calculate the potential of a single strike by 21st century means upon the hyper-concentration of high-density targets that has since evolved.
London City Airport, pontooned on the foundations of King George V Dock beside Silvertown, three further miles down the tideway from Canary Wharf, is a logistic asset and potential target through which 6,500 City people and City visitors pass on 200 internal and international flights each day. It could put up only Dash-7 feeder jets in its own and the City’s defence, rather than the F-16 fighters now on continuous alert to police American airspace. Those passenger aircraft could, as we have seen, themselves be subverted to become inward-striking weapons. The City’s assets are its vulnerabilities. Perhaps one more should be added to this very incomplete count.
Under the approach path of the Airport’s incoming passengers are the gleaming fins of the Thames Barrier at Woolwich, rising from the tidal river like the dorsal vertebrae of a silver-scaled sea monster whenever abnormally high tides threaten. It is the largest movable flood barrier in the world, another City superlative, laid across London’s threshold in 1975-82 in acknowledgement of two facts. London is sinking slowly, comfortably, stably but measurably into its clay foundations. The cloud-borne bubble of St Paul’s, 7 miles upstream, now floats in the sky inches lower than it did when Wren topped it out in 1710 or Wordsworth contemplated the skyline of the sleeping City from Westminster Bridge in 1802. And, as it sinks, with cosmic irony, sea levels are rising. They will be 20 cm higher by year 2030, according to the best guess of the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, driven upwards by the onslaught of CO2, CH4 and N20 emissions on the temperature of the troposphere.
Even now, if the Thames Barrier were breached or disabled in the down position by well-timed terrorist action, meteorologically disturbed equinoctial spring tides could send millions of tons of water surging upriver at the velocity of a long free wave and the force of hundreds of thousands of horsepower to inundate riverine London. The electronics-dependent City and its digital systems would take an early bath. But a forearmed City would have some time to act while such a high-speed wall of water travelled the 47.75 miles from the Nore to London Bridge. Ample time to get its entire virtual infrastructure out of there before picking up the office cat and moving its personnel to higher ground.
Before September 11, most thinking about terrorist activity was based on experience gained from ‘traditional’ bomb attacks like those perpetrated in the IRA’s mainland bombing campaign. We learned bitter and successive lessons in Birmingham’s Bull Ring complex, Knightsbridge Barracks, Hyde Park and Manchester’s Arndale Centre. The City of London did not go unscathed. A parked vehicle near the Baltic Exchange erupted to devastate the commodities exchange and other buildings around. Among the dead were a small girl and a small church. A bigger bomb caused greater havoc at Canary Wharf, the City’s communication links were temporarily disrupted and more people died. A No 9 bus, friendly red trademark of London – hold very tight please, ding ding – trundled down the Strand over the margin of the City carrying a cargo of death that exploded prematurely, in the lap of the IRA man bearing it. Our relief and grim sense of justice done was tempered by the fact that he took innocents with him. By now, we knew that terror can be delivered for the price of a bus ticket, a deckchair in the park, an evening drink or some spare change in a parking meter. We thought we understood what evil masquerading as conscience could do. We were mistaken.
We were wrong, too, to assume that friendly fire, not malice, was the most serious threat faced by high-rise office buildings, and naive to underestimate the extremity of the peril in which they stand. These exuberant curtain-walled palaces of glass, laminate and stone held aloft by a cantilevered filigree of steel, now scrape the sky in celebration of every great city’s greatness. (Or in prudent use of expensive real estate, depending which part of the balance sheet you are arguing.) They are obvious targets of envy. Expert calculation of their vulnerability, however, was largely extrapolated from one accident, ill remembered and little understood from long ago.
On July 28th, 1945, an astonishingly off-course USAF B-25 Mitchell bomber crashed into the 78th and 79th floors of the Empire State Building, 915 feet above 5th Avenue in fog-bound Manhattan. The B-25 had a mere two piston engines and was small enough to take-off from an aircraft carrier. A jeweler occupying then, as he occupies now, an office three stories above the point of impact recalls the damage as being only superficial. Perhaps he looks back through the golden haze in which most of us giftwrap the days of our youth. Investigation reveals that this modest aircraft, flying blind at minimum speed and with no ill-intent, ripped through the substantial stone curtain of Shreve, Land & Harmon’s architectural landmark, wiped out the Catholic Charities office beyond and hurled one red-hot motor clean across the 78th floor through the opposite wall to descend like a bomb on a neighbouring penthouse. Simultaneously, flaming gasoline cascaded from the ruptured fuselage through the Empire State Building’s breached floors and stairwells and 13 people died. Santayana’s dictum holds good. The writing was on the wall for a future still five and a half decades away when burning kerosene would descend 900 feet through 14 banks of elevator shafts to the lobbies of the two World Trade Center towers. The message went undeciphered until 9/11.
Cassandra was not a lovable woman. Few of us would invite her to write a mission statement or sit-in on a board meeting. But her predictions were spot on the money. Bad things happen. We must open our minds to the most appalling of them. The City of London does not need clairvoyance to deduce what those may be. All it needs is long hindsight and long foresight with a pause for reasoned analysis in between. The recipe, you may remember, is Henry Ford’s. It appears to have served him quite well.
If you have been, thanks for reading.