‘The Buildings are Screaming’: The Spatial Politics of Terrorism in London

Abstract

This article outlines the need for a sustained investigation into London’s relationship with terrorism. Drawing on recent critiques of security studies, and challenging histories of London’s violence, the article demands that we prioritize an analytical approach centred upon terrorism’s spatial impact. London’s built environment is loaded with symbolic resonances (from imperialism to neo-colonialism, institutional power to high finance), all of which have made (and make) this city a recurrent target for terrorism. Crucial to this reading of the city is an awareness of London’s transnational circuitry — that is, how violence committed in London is tethered to violence enacted abroad. By understanding terrorism through these spatial politics, it also becomes possible to isolate London as the historic origin of a new form of terrorist violence — one orientated around place alienation as opposed to targeted assassination. This shift can be located in the nineteenth century and connected to technological advances. It is this conjunction between terrorism and urban modernity that has been a constant refrain in London’s development.

KEYWORDS:

• Terrorism
• London
• Place
• Riot
• Imperialism
• Military urbanism
• Media

ORCID

George Legg http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3001-8562

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Note on contributor

George Legg is a Lecturer in Liberal Arts and London at King’s College London. He is the author of Northern Ireland and the Politics of Boredom: Conflict, capital and culture (Manchester University Press, 2018). George is currently working on a monograph about the history of terrorism in London.

Notes

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2 M. Crenshaw, ‘Thoughts on Relating Terrorism to Historical Contexts’ in Crenshaw (ed.), Terrorism in Context (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 1995), 4, 8.

3 J.D. Derian, ‘Imaging terror: logos, pathos and ethos’, Third World Quarterly, 26:1 (2005), 23–37, 27. It is important to realise that this reasoning does not just apply to what we might call a post-9/11 world order. As far back as 1987 Edward Said was charting similar essentialisms in relation to the middle-east. See E. W. Said, ‘The essential terrorist’, Arab Studies Quarterly, 9:2 (Spring, 1987), 195–203.

4 E. Boehmer and S. Morton, ‘Introduction: Terror and the Postcolonial’ in Boehmer and Morton (eds.), Terror and the Postcolonial (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2010), 8.

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6 U. Beck, ‘The Terrorist Threat: World Risk Society Revisited’, Theory, Culture and Society, 19:4 (2002), 39–55.

7 G. Ó Tuathail, ‘Localising geopolitics: disaggregating violence and return in conflict regions’, Political Geography, 29 (2010), 256–65, 257.

8 C. Bloom, Violent London: 2000 Years of Riots, Rebels and Revolts (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2010), xxxviii.

9 C. Bloom, Riot City: Protest and Rebellion in the City (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012), 16; Bloom, Violent London, xviii.

10 A. Taylor, London’s Burning: Pulp Fiction, the Politics of Terrorism and the Destruction of the Capital in British Popular Culture, 1840–2005 (London: Bloomsbury, 2012), 5.

11 Taylor, London’s Burning, 177.

12 S. Inwood, A History of London (London: Pan Macmillan, 1998), 7.

13 P. Ackroyd, London: The Biography (London: Vintage, 2001), 391.

14 Ibid., 391.

15 Ibid., 397.

16 R. Porter, London: A Social History (London: Penguin, 2000), 308.

17 Bloom, Riot City, 8.

18 T. Burke, ‘From terror to terrorism in Bleak House: Writing the event, representing the people’, The London Journal, 45:1 (2020). DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2019.1687221

19 M.C. Frank, The Cultural Imaginary of Terrorism in Public Discourse, Literature, and Film: Narrating Terror (London: Routledge, 2017), 8–9.

20 A. Radcliffe, ‘On the Supernatural in Poetry’, New Monthly Magazine, 16:1 (1826), 150.

21 Porter, London, 308.

22 M. Joseph, Against the Romance of Community (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), vii.

23 L. Harrison and G. Legg, Not A Split Second: Remembering the Docklands Bomb (London: Republic Gallery, 2017) <http://www.lucy-harrison.co.uk/projects/docklands/> [accessed 8 February 2019]

24 My thanks to Sita Balani for drawing this point to my attention. See also S. Balani, ‘The Far-Right Views Behind the London Bombings of 1999’, Vice, 25 April 2019 <https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/597bdb/the-far-right-views-behind-the-london-bombings-of-1999> [accessed 13 November 2019].

25 Panorama Special, The Nailbomber (BBC 1, 30 June 2000) <http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/audio_video/programmes/panorama/transcripts/transcript_30_06_00.txt> [accessed 19 December 2018].

26 Ibid.

27 Mustafa and Brown, ‘The Taliban, Public Space, and Terror in Pakistan’, 497.

28 Crenshaw, Terrorism in Context, 4.

29 D. Clark, ‘Recollections of Resistance: Udham Singh and the IWA’, Race and Class, 17:1 (1975), 75–77, 77.

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33 Stadtler, ‘The Caxton Hall Assassination’, 28–30.

34 British soldiers shot 28 unarmed civilians during a protest march in Derry’s Bogside on 30 January 1972. Fourteen people died.

35 See G. Legg, ‘Security Experiments: London, Belfast and the Ring of Steel’, Divided Society (Belfast: Linen Hall Library, 2018) <https://www.dividedsociety.org/essays/security-experiments-london-belfast-and-ring-steel> [accessed 26 January 2019]

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40 M. Foucault, Society Must Be Defended (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 103.

41 J. Derrida, ‘Autoimmunity: Real and Symbolic Suicides. A Dialogue with Jacques Derrida’ in Giovanna Borradori (ed.), Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 97.

42 H. Williams, ‘Fortifying the city: visualising London 2012’, The London Journal, 45:1 (2020)

43 Graham, Cities under Siege, xvii.

44 D. Massey, For Space, 154.

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46 Clive Norris, Jade Moran and Gary Armstong, Surviellance, Closed Circuit Television and Social Control (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), 262.

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55 J. Conrad, The Secret Agent (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 26.

56 Bloom, Violent London, 491.

57 A. Amin and N. Thrift, Seeing Like a City (London: Polity, 2017), 3.

58 H. V. Savitch, Cities in Time of Terror: Space Territory and Local Resistance (London: M.E. Sharpe, 2008), 9.

59 As Rustom Bharucha asserts, ‘to regard the involuntary deaths of victims as performances in their own right raises troubling issues around the agency, if not the privilege, to name “performance” in the first place’. (R. Bharucha, Terror and Performance (London: Routledge, 2014), 27).

60 Savitch, Cities in Time of Terror, 9.

61 P. Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993), 148.

62 J. Zulaika and W. A. Douglass, Terrorism and Taboo: The Follies, Fables, and Faces of Terrorism (London: Routledge, 1996), 65.

63 W. Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Harry Zohn (trans.), Illuminations (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 218.

64 Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism, 7.

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67 Frank, The Cultural Imaginary, 9.

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70 See B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 33–36.

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72 D. Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 147.

73 L. Brake and M. Demoor (eds.), Dictionary of C19th Journalism: In Great Britain and Ireland (London: British Library, 2009), 303.

74 Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism, 7.

75 Stadtler, ‘The Caxton Hall Assassination’, 21.

76 A. Tickell, ‘Scholarship Terrorists: The India House Hostel and the “Student Problem” in Edwardian London’ in South Asian Resistances in Britain 1859-1947, 10.

77 C. Verhoeven, Odd Man Karakozov: Imperial Russia, Modernity, and the Birth of Terrorism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 175.

78 J. Littlechild, The Reminiscences of Chief Inspector Littlechild (London: Leadenhall Press, 1894), 12.

79 N. Whelehan, The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 25.

80 There has been much debate about whether comparisons can be made between terrorism in the 19th century and that in our contemporary moment. Nevertheless, across this history the spatial impact of such violence – ‘select[ing] highly symbolic targets’ – remains an undisputed similarity. See R. Bach-Jensen, ‘Nineteenth-century anarchist terrorism: how comparable to the terrorism of al-Qaeda?’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 20.4 (2008), 593.

81 R. Walker, ‘Deeds, not words: the suffragettes and early terrorism in the City of London’, The London Journal, 45:1 (2020). DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2019.1687222

82 H. Lefebvre, Toward an Architecture of Enjoyment, ed. by Lukasz Stanek and trans. by Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 30, 19.

83 BBC, Terror Through Time: The Fenian Dynamiters (8 October 2013) <https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b03c3cn4> [accessed 20 December 2018]

84 M. Smith, Britain and 1940: History, Myth and Popular Memory (London: Routledge, 2007), 82.

85 C. Holliday, ‘Contemporary Hollywood Terrorism and “London has fallen” Cinema’, The London Journal, 45:1 (2020). DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2019.1649515

86 D. Kelsey, Media, Myth and Terrorism: A Discourse-Mythological analysis of the ‘Blitz Spirit’ in British Newspaper Responses to the July 7th Bombings (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

87 J.D. Derian, Antidiplomacy: Spies, Terror, Speed, and War (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1992), 94.

88 G. Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Malcolm Imrie (trans.), (1988) <http://www.notbored.org/commentaires.html> [accessed 30 January 2019].

89 For a critique of this academic industry see A. Kundnani, The Muslims are Coming! Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror (London: Verso, 2014).