‘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

Anarchists. Activists. Fanatics. Revolutionaries. Extremists. Martyrs. Guerrillas. Criminals. The recurrent desire to label terrorists has led to what can only be described as the loss of terrorism’s semantic meaning. For years now, journal papers, academic books, and even entire university departments, have all tried to define this mode of political violence. Yet the cumulative effect has been that terrorism is now a far less knowable category. With each new interpretation, and each new act of violence, understandings of terrorism have shifted — its signifying elements becoming almost liquid matter, always provisional and forever in flux. Rather than add to such confusion, this special issue of The London Journal takes a different tack. Instead of trying to classify terrorism as a stable act, we consider what the diversity of London’s experience of such violence can tell us about terrorism’s spatial formation. How different does 7/7 look, for example, if we start not with its agents, but with its impact upon the city’s geography? Some of London’s earliest bomb-attacks, such as those conducted by the militant Suffragettes, displayed a clear knowledge of the power carried by assaults on the city’s symbolic landscape. By attending to terrorism’s topography, this special issue asks whether it is possible to detect a symbolic outline for the terrorism performed in London. After all, if terrorism’s nebulous contours are ever to be discerned, then perhaps it is best to consider terrorism not in terms of its operatives, but in terms of its spatial politics: not who is doing the violence, but where it is being done.

Such an approach is instructive because it places an emphasis upon terrorism’s contingencies. Rather than trying to incorporate an ever-expanding repertoire of ‘incidents’ into a universal definition, an attention to terrorism’s spatial strategies might ensure that we can, in Jeffory Clymer’s words, ‘historicise and understand terrorist violence as a phenomenon that emerges from within particular political situations and contexts’.¹ To advance such an argument is to expand upon Martha Crenshaw’s pioneering Terrorism in Context (1995). Here, Crenshaw stresses the need to move away from ‘sweeping cross-national generalisations’, so as to focus upon terrorism’s ‘social construction, which is relative to time and place’.²

The decades since 9/11, have seen terrorism’s complexity reduced to what James Der Derian terms ‘a single physiognomy of global terror’.³ And there is a risk that studies which adopt such a singular perspective might also provide the intellectual ammunition for a perpetuation of this monocular outlook. ‘To what extent does an academic preoccupation with terror and terrorism provide intellectual and rhetorical support for the continuation of a war on terror’, ask Elleke Boehmer and Stephen Morton.⁴ After all, as Daanish Mustafa and Katherine E. Brown note, in much academic literature ‘terrorism is now about a de-territorialised amorphous global jihad’.⁵ Terrorism may come in a myriad of forms but, so the argument goes, it is nonetheless a universal problem. Such reasoning carries its own insatiable logic; today, terrorism can be conceived as yet another armature in Ulrich Beck’s ‘world risk society’ — that is, as one in any number of planetary disasters, be they hurricanes or nuclear fallout.⁶ With security analysis seemingly unable to perceive terrorism as anything other than an as yet undisclosed form of ‘risk’, the need for an idiosyncratic investigation into terrorism’s formation remains as pressing as ever.

In response to this often-reductive geopolitical logic, Gearóid Ó Tuathail has argued for the development of a framework which considers how terrorism unfolds in ‘a complex, diverse and heterogeneous social mosaic of places’. Yet despite the urgency of his request, such an approach has been far from forthcoming. ‘There has been little debate on the alternative geopolitics’, writes Ó Tuathail, ‘that localises rather than globalises analysis and explanation’.⁷ Faced with these persistent, homogenising imperatives, an insistence upon terrorism’s peculiar environmental impact — its effect upon a specific city like London — can gain considerable momentum. While the essays in this edition are still weighted with the thorny ethics of taking terrorism as their theme, their collective attention to London means that the violence they examine is one that can be continually refined by the specificities of place, space and scale.

There have, of course, been studies of terrorism in London prior to this special issue. Clive Bloom’s Violent London (2010) and Riot City (2012), provide a portrait of the city in which terrorism is enfolded into a wider search for continuities within London’s experience of ‘racism, religious bigotry, republicanism and Parliamentary reform’.⁸ As the breadth of these themes suggest, Bloom struggles to account for terrorism’s particular construction. Instead, Bloom sees terrorism repeatedly subsumed by the collective category of ‘street violence’ — a term flexible enough ‘to make wider claims for a continuous history of radical outrage’.⁹ This is not to say that terrorism does not braid London’s development. One of the aims of this special issue is to foreground the ways that terrorism has become the very grammar through which London’s modernization might find its explanation. However, to insist that terrorism is compatible with other modes of violence — whether real or imagined — is to obscure terrorism’s unique features.

Bloom is not alone in forging a narrative of London’s terrorism in which larger categories of urban violence take control. Anthony Taylor’s London’s Burning (2012), tackles the subject of terrorism and ‘strives to retur[n] it to its urban context’.¹⁰ By the end of his study, however, Taylor’s attention has shifted to ‘images of “the mob”’ — captivated by what he sees as its ability to contain ‘the possibility for change and the imminence of alternative power’.¹¹ That Taylor should become preoccupied with the destructive potential of crowd violence is not surprising. The prospect of ‘the mob’ has loomed large in London’s history; it is something to which writings on the city frequently allude. ‘One of the things governments have always feared’, Stephen Inwood tells us, ‘is London’s ability to muster a huge mob, and threaten the citadels of power in Westminster and the City’.¹² For Peter Ackroyd, this anxiety is a product of London’s peculiar geography: ‘as if the very restriction of the city encouraged the sudden appetite for wildness and licence’.¹³ Yet, despite the ‘strange fevers and excitements’ London’s ‘massive overcrowding’ are thought to have ‘engendered’, the city has always managed to survive the violent theatre its streetscape seemingly inspires.¹⁴

For London’s biographers such endurance is no accident. Instead, it is a direct consequence of the city’s construction. ‘London is at once too large and too complex to react to any local outbreaks of passionate feeling’, writes Ackroyd.¹⁵ As a result, argues Porter, ‘a mob in London is wholly without cohesion, and the individuals composing it have but few feelings, thoughts or pursuits in common’.¹⁶ Although prosaic, these explanations are significant because they help to stress some of London’s distinct qualities. They also highlight how those qualities contribute to the city’s crowd violence. London’s urban fabric is often in flux — its geography orientated towards dispersal and discontinuity — and this, the city’s historians claim, creates a world of mob action rather than terrorist destruction.

Despite their shared concern with materializing in symbolic locations, crowd violence is very much antithetical to terrorism. Where terrorism tends to be pre-planned, the behaviour of the crowd is largely spontaneous. Where terrorism can be conducted by individual lone-wolves or martyrs, crowds always require collective mass action. Where participants in a mob are a pointedly public phenomenon, agents of terror often wish to remain hidden. In 2010, student protestors wanting to leave the police kettles around Parliament Square had to agree to have their faces filmed; since 1993, the identity of the Bishopsgate bombers has remained officially unknown.¹⁷ What Edmund Burke described long ago as the obscurity necessary ‘to make anything very terrible’ has now become one of the key scales by which we might separate the violence of terrorism from that of the crowd. As Tristan Burke highlights in his essay on Bleak House (1853) for this special issue, terrorism’s form is intimately connected to its opacity or, in Charles Dickens’s case, its ‘failure of representation’.¹⁸

The visibility of the crowd makes its threat both concrete and palpable; the unknowability of terrorism makes its violence both uncertain and widespread. What characterizes terrorism — as opposed to ‘the mob’ — is not the type of violence but the fact that, as Michael C. Frank argues, an act of terrorism ‘is perceived to be the beginning, or part, of a potential series, and that further (indeterminate) acts are expected to occur’.¹⁹ The indeterminacy that underpins terrorist action is precisely why its affective energies — what Ann Radcliffe called its ‘dreaded evil’ — can prove so effective in urban environments.²⁰ So long as terrorism remains opaque, or its motives unclear, then an indiscriminate fear can percolate through the city. According to this reasoning, anyone moving through London could be the terrorist’s next target.

It is as a point of distinction, then, that the writings of Ackroyd and Porter can help to penetrate the ambiguities surrounding existing histories of terrorism in London. Rather than collapsing the city’s terrorism into broader categories of civil disorder and protest, we can use this characterization of ‘the mob’ to isolate terrorism’s points of departure. Where London’s mob is, for Ackroyd, a product of the city’s restriction, we might argue that terrorism is motivated by the breadth of London’s landscape. Where the violent crowd is unable to cohere across what Porter calls London’s ‘localised and fragmented’ geography, we could speculate that terrorism is, in fact, able to bind London in a collective state of anxiety.²¹ The mob may not have ‘thoughts or pursuits in common’, but terrorism has the potential to unite London’s diverse communities under the auspices of fear.

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Communities are works of fiction, but they are fictions built around stories of traumatic origin. As Miranda Joseph has written in her brilliant critique of community formation, ‘communities are frequently said to emerge in times of crisis or tragedy, when people imagine themselves bound together by a common grief or joined through some extraordinary effort’.²² Terrorism is one such galvanizing tragedy. Yet just as counter-terrorism policies can create networks of exclusion — cultivating a landscape of suspicion where certain identities (Muslim, Irish, Suffragette) are more suspect than others — so, the collective trauma that terrorism induces is experienced in highly differentiated ways. My work with artist Lucy Harrison on the legacy of the IRA’s 1996 Docklands bomb identified a clear schism between the interpretive labels supplied by the media and the actual memories of those who experienced the blast.²³ What was framed nationally as the ‘Canary Wharf Bomb’, was remembered locally as an explosion at South Quay. What was read by many as an attack on the Northern Irish Peace Process was experienced by victims as bomb damage on the Barkantine Estate.

Congealing London’s variegated topography is a task riddled with contradictions. But it is also a task at which terrorism can excel. It is worth remembering that David Copeland’s 13 day nail bomb campaign effectively distilled London into discrete zones (Black Brixton, Asian Brick Lane, Queer Soho), and did so in ways that distorted lived experience in each of these locations.²⁴ Copeland had never been to Brixton prior to planting his device. As he later, haltingly, confessed, he was dismayed by what he saw when he first arrived: ‘I always thought Brixton was … I mean I’d stand out like a sore thumb. I didn’t. It’s quite multicultural now’.²⁵ Such ethnic plurality notwithstanding, Copeland proceeded with his odious task, the consequence of which was ‘naturally’ interpreted as being ‘racial in nature’, given what police Commander Alan Fry called ‘the very symbolic location’ in which it took place.²⁶

As this suggests, one way of understanding terrorism in London is through the perspectives offered by social geography. Indeed, as Mustafa and Brown note, terrorism differs from other acts of violence (assassinations, genocide, war) precisely because it is ‘directed towards place destruction’ and thus produces ‘place alienation’. Those injured by terrorism are not necessarily its main targets; terrorism is peculiar in that it is primarily ‘directed towards a wider audience than the immediate victims’. Consequently, a crucial factor in understanding terrorism is understanding its location: the ‘place’ of the violence itself. You are a victim of terrorism, Mustafa and Brown conclude, ‘not because of who you are or what you have done, but by virtue of where you are’.²⁷

There are exceptions to this reasoning. But they are also exceptions that help to refine our object of study. Most immediately, the matter of state terror skews a conception of terrorism as desiring a wider audience. This is because the controversies subtending the state’s use of illegal violence are so significant that they must be, in Crenshaw’s phrase, ‘carefully concealed in order to avoid public attribution of responsibility’.²⁸ The little remembered assassination of Michael O’Dwyer in 1940 is a case in point. Murdered by Udham Singh at London’s Caxton Hall, O’Dwyer’s death made known the colonial terrors perpetrated by the British Army at Amritsar in 1919. O’Dwyer had been Lieutenant Governor of the Punjab when soldiers fired approximately 1,650 rounds into an estimated crowd of 15,000 unarmed individuals.²⁹ Whether or not Singh was amongst the crowd at Jallianwala Bagh, the five to six hundred fatalities produced by this outburst of violence had a profound impact upon his future biography. ‘The massacre transformed Udham Singh’, notes Anita Anand, and for the next twenty years he would try ‘to become the avenging angel for his people’.³⁰ O’Dwyer’s death in 1940 was hereby far more than an act of unprompted murder. As the Daily Mirror reported in response to events at Caxton Hall: ‘this is no new affair’ but an act of ‘revenge’.³¹ The comparisons are stark but nonetheless significant: London has long been tethered to colonial constructions of nation, but rarely has the city been made to confront the state-led terror that ensures such concepts take root.

In the event, Singh had little opportunity to alert the metropolis of what Florian Stadtler has now termed the ‘countless acts of terrorism perpetrated under colonial rule’.³² Aware of ‘the explosive potential’ of this assassination, London’s India Office took steps to reduce its reverberations. Rather than being politically motivated, Singh’s actions were reframed as ‘an isolated incident’, and one conducted ‘by a man of unsound mind’. Moreover, because Singh’s trial offered a ‘platform to voice his protest’, the India Office also sought to ‘restrict press coverage by limiting the number of spectators in court’.³³ Any wariness about investigating terrorism in terms of its agents should be signalled by the fact that it is the state who often controls their narrative. Shortly after Singh had started his final statement, the judge interrupted and instructed that his words be stricken from the record.

Echoes of Amritsar’s shooting in the Derry Bogside of 1972 raise another aspect of London’s entanglement in colonial terror: surveillance.³⁴ As I have argued elsewhere, although one of London’s most sophisticated surveillance systems was designed to deter Northern Irish terrorism, the technology it produced actually served to separate London from the Troubles with which the city was increasingly implicated.³⁵ The London Corporation might still own Derry’s seventeenth-century walls, but it was precisely because London’s security forces wanted to avoid the aesthetics of such a fortified architecture that a discrete system of checkpoints — known as the Ring of Steel — was used to protect London’s financial centre following the Baltic Exchange and Bishopsgate bombs. Belfast was the origin of this ringed defence, but over there this structure meant a network of iron barriers and barbed wire. In London, by contrast, it meant fibre optic cabling and closed-circuit television. Belfast’s version of the Ring of Steel had a formidable impact, transforming the city, in Neil Jarman’s arresting phrase, into a ‘besieged citadel’.³⁶ London’s Ring, conversely, combined subtle landscaping and advanced technology to produce a security infrastructure that was largely invisible. As Keith Power told readers of the Police Review in 1995, ‘the chances are that the quarter of a million commuters who flock to work in the area would be blissfully unaware that they owe their safety to vigilant officers, Gulf War technology and a bank of screens at Wood Street police station’.³⁷

Terrorism’s adaptive interplay of the imperial centre and periphery has other repercussions. In such an exchange, technologies developed in colonial war-zones are refined so that they can be redeployed in the capitalist heartlands of the global North.³⁸ It is a process Hannah Arendt has likened to a ‘boomerang’,³⁹ with the result being that the West can come, in Michel Foucault’s terms, ‘to practise something resembling colonization, or an internal colonialism, on itself’.⁴⁰ Henrietta Williams’s visual-essay in this special issue explores a similar process against the backdrop of London’s 2012 Olympic Games. London, at this time, was a city transformed by extreme securitization — a militarized policing that conditioned an expectation of disaster akin to what Jacques Derrida has called the ‘traumatism’ of terror. Terrorism, in this guise, poses ‘the threat of the worst to come, rather than an aggression that is “over and done with”’.⁴¹ ‘Sniper helicopters on standby, battleships in the Thames, long range guns on Blackheath’, writes Williams, ‘all demonstrate how techniques of “fortress urbanism” function to import military techniques to control and secure London’.⁴² It is this synergy between the apparatus of military intervention overseas and the desires for hyper security at home that has, according to Stephen Graham, become a ‘key feature of the new military urbanism’.⁴³

At such points we must take heed of the relational dynamics that underpin terrorism in the city. The places of London’s terrorism are a product of the city’s response to such violence, as much as the attacks themselves. As Doreen Massey has taught us, place is not a static concept but an entity formed through ‘negotiation and contestation’. At times, certainly in the case of London’s terrorism, this ‘negotiation is forced upon us’.⁴⁴ John Scofield’s contribution to this special issue gives an overview of precisely these ‘negotiations’ against the backdrop of bomb damage at the Churches of St. Ethelburga and St. Helen. His report on their reconstruction guides us through the challenges archaeologists faced as they tried to recover each site’s ‘heritage values … to the extent that the severe damage allowed’.⁴⁵ But the prospect of terrorism also reverberates across London’s every-day functioning, and these vibrations change the conditions of other urban industries (transport, tourism, sanitation) — tempering our spontaneous engagement with the urban fabric. Across the city an elaborate mosaic of street furniture and urban artwork protects the entrances to financial institutions and public buildings. Automatic Number Plate Recognition cameras ease congestion in the capital while also indexing driver details and casting a net of suspicion over vehicular movement in the city. In the Square Mile alarms are triggered if vehicles remain static for an extended length of time.⁴⁶ The accelerating nature of London’s postmodern segregation is not hereby the sole preserve of economic development. Instead the urban infrastructure built in response to terrorism also produces a habitat of predictive analytics — one that privileges private space at the expense of urban exploration, celerity at the expense of curiosity.

London’s ‘public buildings are protected as if they were gold bullion vaults’ wrote Nabila Ramdani in the wake of the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks. Yet while this journalist implored ‘relaxed, liberal Paris’ to prevent terrorism via a network of surveillance that might rival London’s, the 2017 attacks on London’s bridges have foregrounded that no amount of CCTV can mitigate against terrorism’s unpredictable status.⁴⁷ Whatever else might be made of the bridge attacks, they nevertheless foreground how the history of London’s terrorism has been hitherto a history of incendiary devices. The turn to vehicle ramming and indiscriminate stabbings might well mark a new chapter in the narrative of London’s terrorism. Nevertheless, the positioning of these attacks across London’s river Thames — the ‘long distance setting for its greatest monuments’ — reiterates how, despite the modulations in terrorism’s definition, its spatial politics remain a consistent thread.⁴⁸

An emphasis upon such spatial politics is significant because they foreground the diverse Londons with which this special issue is concerned. London’s topography has often been in flux, but the city’s growth has also been propelled by a global outreach that has made the metropolis a recurrent target for terrorist attack. London, unlike almost any other city, has been forged through a long history of imperial ventures and (neo)colonial networks. The geography this produces is one woven with an architectonics of power and prosperity. When a royal commission was first appointed to ‘consider the most effectual means of improving the Metropolis’ in 1842, it was quick to highlight London’s privileged status, its function as ‘the central point of commerce for the world’ — the point to which ‘a native looks with pride, and a foreigner with curiosity’.⁴⁹ The ‘symbolic presentation of Britain as an Imperial power’ thus became the architectural mantra of the Victorian city — a project accelerated by the 1851 Great Exhibition, and one that has proceeded with speed ever since.⁵⁰ Whether it be the transformation of the South Bank following the Festival of Britain, or the hosting of global spectacles like the Olympic Games, London has frequently, in Paul Gilroy’s arresting phrase, ‘reached out across the world and brought that conflicted and divided world into itself’.⁵¹ ‘All of the blood that was bled for this city to grow, / all of the bodies that fell’, declares Kate Tempest in her extraordinary performance poem dedicated to London: ‘the buildings are screaming’.⁵²

With London’s built environment freighted with so much figurative weight, its sudden destruction can create ominous reverberations. The city witnessed as much when the IRA’s Bishopsgate bomb propagated fears that foreign investment might suddenly evacuate the capital. ‘There is a real possibility that Japanese companies will have to look for a safer alternative, another financial center within the EC’, explained their Chamber of Commerce in 1993.⁵³ Likewise, whether intended or not, Martial Bourdin’s explosion near the Greenwich Observatory in 1894 was layered with symbolic significance. Insinuated as an attack on the meridian itself, the seat of Bourdin’s bomb became a focal point for the city. ‘Crowds were not allowed to assemble’, reported London’s Evening Standard, ‘but during the day there was an almost continuous passage of people around the spot’.⁵⁴ Thus, in direct contrast to the fragmented geography Porter and Ackroyd associate with the city, the dramatic destruction of London’s iconic landscape can become something of a centripetal force. ‘The blowing up of the first meridian is bound to raise a howl of execration’, as Joseph Conrad fictionalized the incident in his 1907 novel The Secret Agent. ‘The whole civilised world has heard of Greenwich’.⁵⁵

As these examples suggest, terrorism in London is not preoccupied with mortality alone. Terrorism is undoubtedly brutal and traumatic, but even when attacks in London have produced substantial casualties, there is a spatial choreography at work. When Hasib Hussain, Germaine Lindsay, Mohammad Sidique Khan and Shehzad Tanweer left King’s Cross on 7 July, they headed north, south, east and west, and did so simultaneously.⁵⁶ Such emblematic action helps to distinguish London’s terrorism from that of other urban centres: terrorism in this city appears to be loaded with a particularly performative agenda. Where the excessive militarization of (neo)colonial war zones in the global South have rendered its terrorism extremely fatal, the surveillance systems of the overdeveloped world have channelled its terrorism towards architectural damage. London has not witnessed fatalities akin to that at Mogadishu on 14 October 2017, but the emblematic venues for London’s transport, finance and politics have all found themselves recurrent targets for terrorist attack. As with Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift’s reading of the city, London’s streetscape becomes hereby far ‘more than a mere “infrastructural” background … on which other powers perform’.⁵⁷ Instead it forms part of a sociotechnical system in which the city is littered with symbolic places that embody historical injustices and perpetuate repressive routines. If, as Hank Savitch has argued, ‘terrorism is macabre theatre’, then London provides terrorism with a particularly explosive stage.⁵⁸

This bold interpretation necessitates that attention is paid not to the actual act of terrorism as performance, but rather that we consider how terrorism’s dissemination and consumption can carry performative agendas.⁵⁹ Fear ‘lubricates the flow of publicity’, Savitch continues, and, as with any performance, the matter of mediation becomes integral to the production of meaning.⁶⁰ Even in Peggy Phelan’s foundational insistence on the ‘undocumentable event of performance’, an anxiety about the need for reproduction remains. ‘The gazing spectator must’, she writes, ‘try to take everything in’.⁶¹ This is an ambitious task, and Phelan’s insistence on ‘must’ unwittingly privileges documentation as a logical step towards accessing the ‘everything’ upon which a seemingly successful viewing will depend. Terrorism is little different in this regard. It also searches for a life beyond its immediate production; it likewise implies that documentation will be necessary if we are to capture the totality of its meaning. ‘The event is not what happens. The event is that which can be narrated’, argue Joseba Zulaika and William A. Douglass in Terrorism and Taboo (1996).⁶² From the missives left by Suffragette bombers to the telephone warnings of the IRA, the delivery of London’s terrorism has often been designed to ensure a prolonged narration. Indeed, the diverse form of London’s terrorism might readily align with its restless search for novel modes of transmission. To riff on Walter Benjamin’s discussion of mechanization, it could be said that the act of terrorism reproduced becomes the act of terrorism designed for reproduction.⁶³

Historians have not been blind to this process. Clymer, in his remarkable America’s Culture of Terrorism (2003), is quick to chart a convergence between ‘the growth of a mass press’ and the development of modern terrorism.⁶⁴ More recently, Thrift has noted how:

Almost from its inception, news has been an affective form, bound up with the generation of emotional response through the deployment of various practical aesthetics of layout, by-line, story, picture, and so forth. Engaging the reader requires the production of an emotional reaction of some kind: horror, condemnation, surprise, amusement, fear.⁶⁵

The media’s role in constructing and disseminating acts of terrorism is threaded throughout the essays in this special issue. As Margaret Scull writes in her essay for this volume, one of the realisations following the Old Bailey bombing in 1973 was that, ‘where news of a bombing in Belfast might receive a few column inches, a Provisional IRA attack on London was front-page news’.⁶⁶ Such impact notwithstanding, the ‘practical aesthetics’ Thrift identifies in the passage above are also significant. Terrorism’s emotive qualities — its very terror — mean that this mode of violence is, in Michael Frank’s phrase, ‘a halfway house between the real (actual attacks and their tangible aftermath) and the imaginary (possible future assaults)’.⁶⁷ A degree of artistry is, then, always at work in terrorism’s production, and thus terrorism becomes a mode of violence that lends itself to particular forms of narration. Maria-Irina Popescu and Asma Jahamah’s essay in this collection explores this potential in detail. Together they highlight how the novels of Chris Cleave and Mohsin Hamid provide a space in which terrorism can be explored but also resisted. Both novels, they argue, ‘begin to imagine London as a dystopian space, only to discover hope in the redemptive possibilities of empathy’.⁶⁸

Several issues are knotted here. An understanding of terrorism’s entanglement with print culture can offer specific insights into terrorism’s impact in London. The birth of the Police Illustrated News in 1864, for instance, begins to acquire a substantive significance when we realize that this decade also saw the first throes of a new Fenian bombing campaign in the capital. The Clerkenwell explosion of 1867 was ostensibly a prison break but, as Richard Kirkland’s essay for the special issue demonstrates, such an incident — along with future Fenian bombs — gave a new accent to political violence in the city. ‘Newspapers reported the attacks in exhaustive detail with countless witness statements, diagrams, maps, and opinion pieces’, writes Kirkland. ‘It is hard not to perceive this detail as a means of compensating for the one truly terrifying element of the campaign: its fundamental unknowability’.⁶⁹ Much has been written about the newspaper’s role in constructing publics, but the community of fear propagated by the illustrated coverage of these explosions should not be understated.⁷⁰ Nineteenth century London was a city on the cusp of a ‘burgeoning visual culture’, and terrorism was thoroughly embroiled in this development.⁷¹

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London has been threatened with sudden and rapid destruction throughout its history. And these events have often concentrated on the city’s symbolic locations: the Fire of London, the Gun Powder Plot, the Fatal Vespers of 1623. But before the 1850s there were few means by which these incidents could be communicated to the diversity of London’s population with consistency and speed. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, London’s broad topography could be traversed through a time–space compression close to that which David Harvey has theorized. ‘The time horizons of both public and private decision making have shrunk’, writes Harvey of post-modernity. ‘Satellite communication and declining transport costs have made it increasingly possible to spread those decisions immediately over an ever wider and variegated space’.⁷² Similarly, the late nineteenth century was a period of modernization in which London’s press adopted a larger appeal through the removal of stamp duty, the distribution of the railways and the global reach of newly laid telegraph cables. The readership for the Illustrated Police News, for example, grew from 100,000 to 300,000 in the first 20 years of its production.⁷³ Alongside this, the invention of dynamite in 1867 created new opportunities for anonymous and catastrophic violence in ways that had been unimaginable before. ‘Hustling along the crowded urban streets of a modern metropolis’, argues Clymer, ‘the dynamiter could wreak his or her destruction and possibly escape’.⁷⁴ Between 1881 and 1885, Irish-American Republicans deployed precisely these tactics: planting bombs in advance of their detonation at iconic landmarks across London. The anonymity of these attacks marked a shift from the ‘horror’ of Clerkenwell. Where the agents and motives of violence had once been readily identifiable, the unpredictability of remote attacks carried something of the obscurity necessary for terror.

In many ways the recklessness of the ‘dynamite war’ marked another point of distinction between the terrorism performed in London and that enacted elsewhere. In Ireland, Russia and continental Europe, nineteenth century terrorism was very much the preserve of the would-be assassin. These tactics originated, in part, from a small group of Russian constitutionalists called Narodnaya Volya — a group that sought to ‘promote the use of violence against individuals, representative of repressive institutions, to galvanize mass movements or express a broader ideological meaning’.⁷⁵ Singh’s attack at Caxton Hall is a representative example of this strategy; indeed, the network of Indian activists around which Singh gravitated euphemistically termed his tactics the ‘Russian Methods’.⁷⁶ However, because London is such a locus for sovereign power, it is important to realize that there is little popular support for violence committed against representatives of the state. Assassinations in London struggle to cohere an audience who are often ignorant of the killing's ideological underpinnings. This shortcoming is further exacerbated by the state’s ability to dismiss such incidents as aberrant behaviour without encountering concerted opposition. What the Fenian dynamite campaign initiated was a change in emphasis. No longer targeting individuals deemed to be ‘corrupting the system’, the bombs that reverberated through late-nineteenth century London could be read as attacks on the system itself.⁷⁷ Theirs was an indiscriminate violence, one whose spatial dynamics — the targeting of civilians and infrastructure — not only presented the state as vulnerable, but also captivated a burgeoning mass media. Unlike assassinations, these acts of violence did not try to galvanize particular sections of the population. Instead they attempted to force change by constructing a climate of fear. It was a significant shift in strategy, and it introduced a mode of violence that still reverberates today.

Despite, or perhaps because of, this change in tactics, the term ‘terrorism’ was rarely deployed to describe the Fenians’ London bombs. John Littlechild, the Chief Inspector tasked with investigating this campaign, was adamant that ‘terrorism was the object’, but his was a rare usage of that term.⁷⁸ Instead the language of criminality (‘treason’, ‘conspiracy’) or subversion (‘outrages’, ‘mischief’) was regularly attributed to these events. Consequently, historians like Niall Whelehan have argued that the Fenian attacks do not represent the year zero for modern terrorism in London. To view these acts as ‘the first blasts of modern terrorism’, Whelehan argues, ‘is too simplified an approach’. ‘If anything else’, he continues, this timeline ‘is impeded by the sizable obstacles of the two world wars, when concepts of terrorism and indiscriminate violence changed profoundly’. As the essays in this issue demonstrate, Whelehan is surely right to suggest that there is not ‘a direct path between the dynamiters and the terrorism of the 2000s’. ⁷⁹ The merest glance at the special issue's two chronological extremes provided by the essays of Tristan Burke and Christopher Holliday, demonstrates that there is a substantive shift between the textual and visual nodes by which London’s terrorism is performed, mediated and consumed. For Burke, Dickens’ ruminations on the Court of Chancery provide a vehicle for exploring terrorism’s uneasy relationship with state and criminal violence. For Holliday, these tensions are now carried through the medium of Hollywood cinema, whose digital effects are also mined by the propaganda wings of contemporary terrorist groups. Yet, to use these temporal differences to downplay the Fenian campaign as anything other than a pivotal moment in the history of London’s terrorism is to miss the very significance of the city itself. By attacking Parliament, the Tower of London, London Bridge and Victoria station, the Irish-American dynamite campaign introduced a strategy that was not motivated by military tactics but ideas of spectacle alone.⁸⁰

The targeting of London’s iconographic landscape was a move that created a template for future terrorism in the city: threatening London’s smooth functioning while also suggesting the city’s figurative weakness. As Rebecca Walker demonstrates in her essay for this special issue, militant Suffragettes learnt much from the Fenians’ approach.⁸¹ While the WSPU devices were, at times, more sophisticated than the Fenian bombs, they nonetheless followed the earlier example of targeting symbolic locations, for example the Bank of England and St. Paul’s Cathedral. As such, these attacks confirmed that London was a city filled with what Henri Lefebvre would call an ‘obscure synthesis between the building … and the monument’: that is to say the city as layered with imposing structures that also encode a ‘deliberately political signification’.⁸² The impact of these bombs rippled across the Atlantic. In 1885, American President, Grover Cleveland, called for a new extradition treaty that would stymie those Irish-Americans responsible for the London attacks. What happened in London, it was feared, might now unfold in Washington.⁸³ Perhaps predictably, though, the clearest indication that the Fenians had established a rationale by which London could be terrorised came on 29th December 1940. On this day, Herbert Mason's now famous photograph of a smoke shrouded St. Paul’s became not only a ‘prime signifier for the Blitz’, but a clear example of the emotive power that the destruction or survival of London’s iconographic skyline could induce.⁸⁴ Holliday’s essay likens this visual regime to a longstanding ‘aesthetic fascination with the city as an extensively fragile space’.⁸⁵ Yet the framing of this experience through a single London monument confirms another important facet of the city’s urban geography: the targeting of London as a synecdoche for the targeting of the nation.

To make such a claim is to near the irresponsible trap of equating the complexities of war with the intricacies of terrorism. Darren Kelsey has highlighted the shortcomings of such an approach following the verbose ‘Blitz spirit’ that was scripted in the wake of 7/7.⁸⁶ Terrorism, through this alignment, can be easily equated with a foreign body, and its resistance with the putative communality of the white-working class city mythologized in the wartime filmography of Humphrey Jennings. In this we are reminded, once again, of counter-terrorism's propagandistic capacity to unify ‘a national identity through the alienation of others’.⁸⁷ The engineering of such perspectives is perhaps terrorism’s darkest edge. And it is for this reason that Guy Debord was so prescient when he wrote that the story of terrorism is always already ‘written by the state’.⁸⁸ Unlike the ever-expanding litany of studies that claim to probe terrorism’s motivations (while simultaneously stimulating prejudiced policies for terrorism’s circumvention),⁸⁹ the essays that follow are all driven by a desire to cast a critical eye upon terrorism’s spatial impact. Certainly, the politics of London’s ruination punctuates all the essays in this collection. From Kirkland’s discussion of Fenianism to Williams’s visualization of military security, from Walker’s attention to the materiality of WSPU bombs to Popescu and Jahamah’s understanding of terrorism’s fictionalization, London is repeatedly shown to be a target of terrorist violence precisely because of the spatial politics the city produces. The approach offered by this collection hereby aims to establish something of a dissenting place within studies of terrorism. It is a position to be typified by a renewed understanding of terrorism’s social and geographic construction, while also being augmented by equally novel ways of imagining and writing London’s history.

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

1 J.A. Clymer, America’s Culture of Terrorism: Violence, Capitalism and the Written Word (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 16.

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.

5 D. Mustafa and K. E. Brown, ‘The Taliban, Public Space, and Terror in Pakistan’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, 51:4 (2010), 496–512, 498.

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.

30 A. Anand, The Patient Assassin A True Tale of Massacre, Revenge and the Raj (London: Simon and Schuster, 2019), 112.

31 ‘Revenge after 20 Years’, Daily Mirror, 14 March 1940, 22.

32 F. Stadtler, ‘“For every O’Dwyer … there is a Shadeed Udham Singh”: The Caxton Hall Assassination of Michael O’Dwyer’ in R. Ahmed and S. Mukherjee (eds.), South Asian Resistances in Britain 1858–1947 (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), 30.

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]

36 N. Jarman, ‘Intersecting Belfast’ in B. Bender (ed.), Landscape: politics and perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 151.

37 K. Power, ‘Lens support’, Police Review, 8 September 1995, 23.

38 S. Graham, Cities under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (London: Verso, 2010), xvii.

39 H. Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, 1970), 54.

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.

45 J. Schofield, ‘The archaeology of terrorism’, The London Journal, 45:1 (2020). DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2019.1651038

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

47 N. Ramdani, ‘Relaxed, liberal Paris needs to wake up – and become more like London’, Telegraph (15 November, 2015), np <https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11996909/Relaxed-liberal-no-CCTV-Paris-needs-to-wake-up-and-become-more-like-London.html> [accessed 14 May 2019]

48 M. Hebbert, London: More by Fortune than Design (Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, 1998), 4.

49 M. H. Port, Imperial London: Civil Government Building in London 1850–1915 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 9.

50 Port, Imperial London, 274.

51 P. Gilroy, ‘A London Sumting Dis … ’, AA Files, 49 (Spring 2003), 9.

52 K. Tempest, Let Them Eat Chaos (London: Picador, 2016), 16-17.

53 J. Mullin and F. Kane, ‘The Scared Mile’, Guardian (3 August 1993), 2.

54 ‘The Greenwich Explosion’, Standard (19 February 1894), 3.

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.

65 N. Thrift, ‘Immaculate Warfare? The Spatial Politics of Extreme Violence’ in Allan Pred and Derek Gregory (eds.), Violent Geographies: Fear, Terror and Political Violence (London: Routledge, 2013), 282.

66 M. Scull, ‘“They are murderers”: the English Catholic Church and provisional IRA attacks on London’, The London Journal, 45:1 (2020). DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2019.1699639

67 Frank, The Cultural Imaginary, 9.

68 M. Popescu and A. Jahamah, ‘“London is a city built on the wreckage of itself”: state terrorism and resistance in Chris Cleave’s Incendiary and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West’, The London Journal, 45:1 (2020). DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2019.1687203

69 R. Kirkland, ‘“A secret, melodramatic sort of conspiracy”: the disreputable legacies of Fenian violence in nineteenth-century London’, The London Journal, 45:1 (2020). DOI: 10.1080/03058034.2019.1649523

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

71 S. Goebel and J. White, ‘London and the First World War’, The London Journal, 41:3 (2016), 199–218, 206.

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).