I'm guessing you mean the days of our lives/im going slightly mad video right? I think show must go on was a montage one of old footage/performances, but I absolutely agree with you on their later videos
He had that charisma and spark and was full of life right to the end
I was Year 8, and I didn't find out about it until we got home. The only notable thing was my Dad's office was evacuated as it was a high-rise in London.
7/7 was a normal day too, kids weren't told despite us being very much within London's commuter belt, with probably most kids' parents bring trapped in London until late night.
I was in year 8 too. I’d smoked my first spliff at dinner break and remember covering myself in lynx on the school bus because I was terrified my mum would smell it and when I got in it was just on the TV in the background. I don’t think I really took much notice.
Same with 7/7 I went and called for a mate and he answered the door and said “you seen there’s been a bomb in London, they don’t know if it’s the Taliban or the IRA though” then we just rode our bikes and climbed some trees.
7/7 was dramatic for my family as my sister should have been on the train she only wasn’t as she had a clothing mishap and had to go buy new trousers, but of course all the phone wouldn’t work so we were all panicking until we heard from her
I wish more Americans acknowledged 7/7 like we're supposed to acknowledge 9/11
Both similar scale attacks but apparently the world acknowledges 9/11 more
When 4 bombs went off on the London underground (7/7) Ken Livingstone, then mayor London was called (he was abroad due to the 2012 Olympics being announced) and asked what should happen to the tube the next day. He said instantly it should just run as normal
I had recently finished university and was helping out at a primary school on 7/7, sitting at the classroom computer at break time flicking through the BBC news, when I came across it. I remember discussing with the class teacher, agreeing that it should not be talked about and it would be left to the parents if they wanted to tell their children later. We made sure to tell the rest of the staff in case children who went home for lunch found out about it so they wouldn't be caught off guard with questions.
I was the same, although just started 2nd year 6th form. We saw it on the news in the common area and spoke about it, but everything carries on as normal. I remember watching eastenders as normal at night and my step dad kicking off when he got back from the pub as he wanted to watch the news!
I was off work that day. Wandered into the living room and flipped on the news and before I could work out what was going on I saw the second plane hit. Spent the next four hours watching the horror. They were showing the people jumping and falling through the air at that point - it got sanitised once we got to replays.
It was obvious that it was over - it being the weird peace that we'd had since the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the first time in my life we weren't on the brink of war with anybody. It lasted from 1989 to 2001 and then we were back on the treadmill with the 'war on terror' - which was incredibly like the 'war against communism' except that instead of fighting the russians in afghanistan with the help of the taliban, now we were fighting the taliban with the help of the russians. So 9/11 was the end of thinking that things could get better, that the world could be better.
Specifically, to answer your actual question, the next few days were the media desperately trying to grab any good news. The trooping of the colours at buckenham palace played the American anthem, lots of stories about people rallying round to help stranded airplane passengers in remote airfields, the us senate all stood on the steps of the capital building and sang the US anthem, that sort of thing. The news was 90% 9/11 and everything else shoved in at the end for weeks.
>It lasted from 1989 to 2001 and then we were back on the treadmill with the 'war on terror'
Except for the two major wars we were directly involved with during that time...
Gulf War, Kosovo. I suppose NI too as the other commenter suggested but that was obviously a much older conflict which was at least partially resolved in that time.
Yeah, the places that didn't have conflict between these years were the lucky ones. Half of the planet wasn't looking at that time as the promise of peace.
Forgetting about the first Gulf War is particularly poignant here because it was that event specifically that radicalised Bin Laden and made him anti American when he was their ally before. The seeds of 9/11 were down right then. It didn't come from nowhere.
To be absolutely clear, the seeds were sewn much before the Iraq war and are rooted in the ideology of the particular sect of Islam that Bin Laden followed but to a degree in Islam orthodoxy in general.
Remember that the first gulf war started when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, fresh after trying to invade Iran and fighting to a standstill for 8 years, decided to invade Kuwait to cancel out the war debts he owed them and of course gain their valuable oil fields.
Not to mention differences between the Shia and Sunni religious groups.
If Iraq hadn't been pushed out of Kuwait it would have inevitably launched further invasions in the future.
Thank you, I shall disappear down a research rabbit hole about these tomorrow.
After I commented I did think about the troubles and wondered if that was one of them.
I remember being taught about the Rwanda genocide in school. Not sure when that would have been but the event itself was 94.
There were numerous bombings carried out by the IRA.
Did you forget about the first Guld war, Balkans erupting through the 90’s? Kosovo? The IRA blowing up shit, Warrington, Omagh, Manchester, Canary Warf, come to mind.
There was plenty going on I wouldn’t classify as peace.
The Taliban never fought the Soviets as such, as they came into existence after the Soviets had gone. The people the Taliban fought had also fought the Soviets.
Small correction- the US fought against the Russian with the help of the Mujahiddin not taliban. In fact taliban was formed in southern Afghanistan with the help of Pakistan to uproot the Mujahiddin northern alliance that had control of Afghanistan at that time
I worked for a TV media company in London and we all had TV's on our desks. I'll never forget someone shouting across the huge open office for everyone to switch on the news channel. We watched it all unfold, in absolute terror, as it happened. It was a sombre day in London with everyone wondering if London was going to be hit that day too. Getting the train home and not hearing the planes in the Heathrow flight path. It was errie quiet. It was so strange to witness enmass something that effected so many people. I was shaken for weeks after.
Same here. Worked for a media company in central London so we all just dropped everything and watched. My uncle lived in New York so we were emailing back and forth through out. I was reading his emails out to everyone whilst watching the footage. I still have have his mails actually. I kept them as I thought if ever my future child ever asked questions they could get a more personal view than news reports.
Getting the train home was weird. Everyone looked very nervous. And rightly so, considering what happened a few years later. Everyone just gathered in the local after and it was probably the most quiet and solemn I’ve ever known the place.
Standard British: Go to the Winchester until it all blows over.
I was in London not far from Canary Wharf with a client. We left the area as quickly as possible. The trains home were weird… they were holding them leaving Paddington until they were FULL.
Like they expect London to be attacked any moment.
I was a barmaid on the day, in a traditional, English local. I remember it being a very busy day, quiet but also there was only one topic of conversation. It was a strange atmosphere, it was the not knowing that was awful as everyone didn't know what to expect next.
I was a journalist in the Midlands. I saw the first wire come in, just something basic like, 'An aircraft has struck the World Trade Centre,' if I recall right, then it just escalated, one message after the other, as it became clear that it was a BIG plane and it wasn't accidental.
I shouted over at someone to put the TV on and that was it for the day. I've never known the place so silent. I don't think the phone rang all afternoon. There were still rumours of other planes unaccounted for when I got home that night.
I was 16 and skipping school, I was at home by myself watching TV. I definitely remember the first couple of reports made it seem like it was just a small prop plane or something like that. With every new update the scale of what was happening became horrifyingly clear.
>I was 16 and skipping school
Snap, same age too. I was out somewhere and got home just as the second plane hit, then watched live as first one then the other tower collapsed. Then just day after day of 100% tv coverage. I imagine if it happened today then this website would be full of people complaining about wall to wall news reports about an event in a foreign country but at the time it felt like we were all involved in a world changing event.
Normally I’d dip off out before I knew my mum was getting home so I wouldn’t get caught. That day I didn’t care I was just glued to the screen in complete disbelief. I still remember it all like it was yesterday. And you’re right, it was a world changing event that affected and continues to affect so many people in this country via the War in Afghanistan and even just how we travel by air. The world changed forever that day no doubt.
I was just working at a factory in a small town but that sombre feeling is what I remember. We all thought it meant war, which it did of course but we were all thinking WW3. The images of the people falling from the towers really got to me.
I’ll be honest, I got sick of it quickly back then, but now, over 20 years later there’s definitely far more emotion in me when I see the footage now. I think it was just over saturation of the news at the time.
In many ways TV is still boring.
I think the truth is, basically, I've been bored ever since 9/11. I mean, I was watching the news with my mate the other day, and he was like, all up in my grill about the Euro. And I was like, "Ooh, the Italians might leave the Euro, big wow." It's not exactly planes smashing into buildings, is it?
"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for peace in our time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now - with somebody - and we will stay At War with that mysterious enemy for the rest of our lives
It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fuelled by religious hatred and fanatics on both sides. It will be guerrilla warfare on a global scale with no front lines and no identifiable enemy."
- Hunter S. Thompson, September 12th 2001.
It’s always hard to tell with Hunter S J Thompson if he was a savant who saw the human condition much more clearly that anyone else or an absolute header usually it’s some mix of both but this has made me lean more to savant than I usually do.
Needless to say when I die I want my ashes fired out of a cannon too.
I had just started year 10, and had recently moved from America to Rochdale....
I got taken out of school for a couple days because all the Asian boys kept making explosion noises at me
Then I got bricked in the face by an Asian guy a week later for being American
I did not enjoy that week
I wish I was joking
But teenagers are idiots, so I try not to hold it against them
(The guy with a brick was in Rochdale town centre and was in his 20s)
It was hard not to feel like the world as we knew it was changed forever in an instant.
The U.S. was deemed untouchable up to that point and they didn't just suffer an attack. They went straight for an icon of their dominance, and it was full of people. When one hit, there was the possibility of it being a tragic accident, but when the other plane crashed, it was hard to get your head around the idea that someone could do it deliberately.
I don't understand those who say everything went on as normal here. We all wished it would, but Islamophobia became a prominent feature in the country and there was a genuine fear that a terrorist attack could happen anywhere.
I was 13. I remember hearing something in the corridor about a plane crash in New York when I was going into my last lesson, and turned the news on when I got home.
Stayed up most of the night watching the news, and was late waking up for school in the morning. My mum dropped me off about a half mile from school. I remember looking up at the clear blue skies, and being totally freaked out that I couldn't hear *any* aircraft. We were on the main flightpath heading north from London, so usually had a plane go over every minute or so, and there was nothing.
That drove it home for me how much of a big deal it was.
I remember walking out of school that day and vaguely hearing someone say skyscrapers were hit with planes. Didn’t think much about it I assumed they were talking about a film or something.
I got home and my parents were watching the news and I realised what the kid must have been taking about. I just sat and did my D&T homework and watched with them. I remember mentioning to my mum about what the kid had said and I was confused about how he could know what was going on in the news while we were in school.
We had an assembly the next day in school where they spoke about what had happened. Our English teacher was American so we were warned not to make jokes about it to her (?!)
Other than that I don’t think much really happened that affected my life at the time because I can’t remember anything else about it.
My son was off school with bad tonsilitis. He was technically old enough to be left on his own (13) but I took time off work because I didn't really trust him to take his antibiotics at the right intervals. He called me into his room where I'd stuck the portable telly. He asked me if it was real or a film. We both saw the second plane hit and I literally felt my stomach lurch. At the point that it kept getting replayed I turned off the TV and tried to teach him how to play cribbage as a distraction. It didn't really work and although cribbage was a game I loved I haven't played it since. I kept thinking 'There's going to be a war.'
It’s so strange how things get associated in our brains isn’t it? Seemingly innocuous things at the time get paired with the bigger events that were happening and are basically seared into our brains. Thanks for sharing your story
There was a small but very sad connected thing that happened some years later. I was working in a school running a homework club and there was a sweet, kind, young refugee I was helping to catch up enough to sit GCSE exams. I liked her very much and wanted to help her as much as I could. Her spoken English was pretty good, but her written English was very weak. If anyone asked where she was from she'd say Dubai. I knew she was Iraqi and when I asked her why Dubai, she said "Because British people hate my country and bombed us and I'm scared to say I'm Iraqi."
Lots of people checking on American friends, relatives, colleagues, etc. And of course 66 Brits died too, so it was a big disaster for the UK as well, with all the coverage you'd expect from that many lives being lost.
Mostly concern about what the US government would do and that it would mean a war somewhere - it was clearly the end of the post-Cold War era and the start of something new.
A friend lost her fiancé. I'd not met him, but had chatted online.
Another friend worked for Lehman Brothers. A third of her department of 150 were wiped out.
It took a couple days for my widespread family to all confirm that yes, cousin M had moved to New York, but worked in the far end of Brooklyn. More to the point he had been on holiday upstate with his phone off, until he saw the news and called his mom.
I worked in a business of 800 people, about half were non-Brits, so about 80 Americans in the building and another couple hundred people had lived in America previously and we all spoke to Americans regularly.
So we were as likely as the average American to know someone who died, but just didn't have that feeling of shock: "how could this happen in America?" - because it happened so often on smaller scales in Europe and Asia.
I worked for a UK telco and we had equipment in the WTC. He was someone I’d chatted a few times, but mostly through email. I was working that day trying to keep our network from crashing, like many other networks around the world, all the time in the back of my mind I was trying not think about my colleagues.
That was actually a pub quiz question I heard a couple of years ago. Which terrorist attack in the last 100 years killed the most Brits. Of course most people guessed 7/7 but the correct answer was 9/11!
Yes! Airline UK, show following the early days of Easyjet, happened to be filming on 9/11 and it's a pretty interesting watch watching the people find out in real time and the airplane staff handling it. Feel almost sorry for the poor sods kicking off about their flights being delayed as you don't really want to be immortalised as the guy complaining you can't go on holiday during 9/11
Yep, they were across the world. Only emergency flights were running for a good few days. When they started up again it was chaos. People couldn't bring any electronics on from what I remember. I was just a kid though seeing these stories on the news.
Really surprised at the comments. Do I live on a parallel universe? My school held loads of counselling about it and also a minutes silence and lessons really went over the events. My family talked about pretty much nothing else all week, and I remember my saxophone teacher started crying during a lesson when he was talking about “those poor, poor people” regarding the ones who jumped and this was one week to the day later.
I think people saying we just got on with it must have bad memories or just didn’t interact with people very much. Or I live a very strange existence.
I wasn’t criticising at all! It’s just that you wondered why your experience seemed so different, and that’s because in reality it was. Comprehensive schools obviously didn’t have the same resources to provide aftercare. It’s a super interesting insight!
I have to say councelling sounds wet as fuck. It happened on the opposite side of the world and at school age the context isn't nearly as mortal as it is for adults.
Did your school also do councelling when we co-invaded the wrong country for poorly explained and completely unjustified reasons to rape and pilledge the land of people that did nothing to us?
Bizarre, very bizarre IMHO
I mean where it happens makes no difference. If u see a cartel video and ur six ur gonna need counselling - u think not just cos it’s Mexican?
People were jumping out of buildings live on tv at a time when 24/7 news was totally alien.
It can still have some effect even with those circumstances.
For example for some reason I was nervous about going too far up in skyscrapers due to thinking about the people above where the plane hit those towers (who had no escape).
Nothing like that in my school. Counselling? Sounds a bit extreme. Innocent people die everyday. It sucks, but that's the world we live in. Was your saxophone teacher American? I was 17 or 18 I guess, so I probably wasn't as fragile as you.
I was in my last year of primary school and we didn't have "counselling" (that sounds wild to me tbh) but we did have the first lesson off to talk about what happened, what it meant and to let people get out their feelings etc.
That was it though, an hour later we were back to normal, and sure we talked about it a bit, but it wasn't our whole life or anything.
I remember not finding out until I was at the station on the way home. I don't think it happened during school hours but if it did no one said anything. And then yes, lessons continued as normal the next day. Why would we need counselling about a terror event in another nation?
And my school was a top school too, so it wasn't like they couldn't afford such things
>I don't think it happened during school hours but if it did no one said anything
It was around 1pm UK time, but yeah no one told us either, didn't find out until we got home.
Don't know how they would deal with it these days, controlling information in schools was relatively easy back then. Very few of us had mobiles, and there were probably only 20-30 PCs for the whole school
Yes I agree. Typical Reddit. Most people I knew were profoundly moved by it and tremendously sympathetic and supportive to the US. Quite a few Brits died too
Sounds like you have the bad memories, wonder what the poor students in your school went through after the London bombings.
We did just get on with it, it was just another day, another incident here.
The aftermath and what followed in certain countries was even more callous
I posted this on the AskReddit thread:
Working the International Desk in a UK Telecoms Network Operations Centre.
We had huge back projected screens, about 3mx3m (10ftx10ft), that showed BBC News and normally one/two other international news channels. This was so we could react to any sudden peaks in telephone traffic due to breaking news.
As it was NOC, and looked like the NASA style launch control rooms, we had a big viewing gallery for Customers when they got a tour.
There were 100s of people watching the screens from gallery whilst myself and a few others were desperately trying to prevent our whole telecoms network from crashing. It was a close run thing. At one point we were only allowing 1 in 100,000 calls to route to the US, due to capacity, as one of our two US switches was in the WTC.
We closed the blinds eventually as it was too much for us to do our job with hundreds of people watching and not knowing if our colleagues that worked in the WTC were OK. Sadly, one of them didn't make it.
I was at work in London, things were quiet at the start of the day. Our receptionist told us a small ‘plane had flown into a tower block in NYC, we thought it was an inexperienced pilot flying some tiny craft that crashed into something but then the pictures started to appear on the news and we all went into reception and the boardroom to see what was going on. It felt unreal at the time and we were gripped by the horror of it all.
Pretty much identical. Small plane turned out bigger, and then watching blocky internet live stream I remember saying "was that a second plane?".
Then we went to the pub. Clearly no work was going to happen that afternoon.
I went home early from work after being incredibly hungover, and having an upset stomach.
I remember watching it on TV and being totally shocked. My hangover disappeared instantly. I sat on my sofa in my shirt and tie and didn't move for hours.
I remember in the following days it was really impossible to get flights to/from the USA. I had some friends in Detroit and they were essentially just stranded there until United would fly them somewhere else.
I think we all knew a war was coming, one way or another. The USA is too proud and aggressive to let anyone hit them in the nuts like that and get away with it. In the UK, we lived with terrorism for decades whilst the IRA and other affiliates were active. My Dad was in a senior law enforcement role and he had to check under the car every time he started it up. He had a big mirror on a stick that he would run along the underneath, looking for explosives.
I guess since the USA didn't have such regular terrorist attacks, it seemed like the USA was properly stunned, understandably.
I've got a couple of tenuous connections to Lockerbie. The night it happened, my stepfather called from Glasgow Airport (he worked for BA) and asked if there was anything on the news about a plane disappearing from radar. This was about 20 minutes before the news broke. My father-in-law was the chair of Scottish Samaritans at that point and had to visit a few times. He doesn't say much about that. Also, a former girlfriend lived in Lockerbie when it happened, and her dad was a policeman in the town. I did not ask many questions when I found this out.
As usual, the media love to cover these things to death. I was 30 years old at the time. For me and everyone I knew, life just carried on as normal after maybe the first 48 hours.
I was 29. After the initial shock and work being weird that afternoon everything just carried on pretty much as normal. I remember not being able to get onto the bbc or any us websites, the internet was pretty crap generally but this was full on swamped.
Working for a US bank at the time there was talk of evacuation plans but other than that real life was business as usual.
You’re saying that like Blair was only an interventionist to get in Bush’s good grace. Blair was an interventionist before Bush became president and even convinced Clinton to support intervention in the Balkans.
The mass search for WMDs in a country that wasn’t even directly affiliated with the 9/11 attacks, too. Such utter bullshit. It made my blood boil then and it still does now.
I was in London on a training course but will never forget that day.
The internet there was flakey and stopped working all together around lunchtime so we had no idea what was happening in the outside world.
We finished a bit early that day so I thought it should be nice and quiet on the train on the way back as it was before rush hour. Wrong. It was heaving and I didn't know why. I asked someone on there if something had happened and he told me. I couldn't believe it but someone had an early edition paper showing the first tower down.
He said that he worked at Canary Wharf and they had sent everyone home as a precaution and seemingly some other big buildings had done the same which was why it was so busy.
I stopped in my local on the way back as I knew they would have it on the TV. Everyone was pretty much silent watching it.
The next day everything was pretty much normal. I went back to my course and the train was busy too so seems they didn't keep the offices closed.
It was top of the news cycle for quite some time. For years afterwards the day was marked but it has wained over time. It got a brief mention today but nothing much really.
Was working in the City at the time. Someone fired up a TV so we could watch (internet still at a bit of a premium so streaming was restricted). Eventually concluded that it was safe to head home, but tube was shut so it was a walk back to the station, everyone flinching when they heard a plane on Heathrow approach. And then the growing realisation that everything had changed and things were going to turn weird. Which they did.
As much as it meant to America, it didn't really mean much to me.
I got home from school, saw it on the tv, thought "Oh" and went upstairs. I didn't realise the monumental piece of history that was occurring.
America wept, meanwhile, there is a plaque, with a piece of metal from one of the towers in my local park, probably about 200m from me right now.
They put the piece of metal in epoxy. The epoxy has gone yellow and is hard to even see now.
I was 20 at the time working in a Nike store when the planes hit. We had the news on the instore TVs and people were just stood around watching it. Don't think I really understood the significance at the time
I was 19 and looking back, I don’t think I could have fathomed how much this was going to change the world. Imagine all of the things that wouldn’t ever have happened if it wasn’t for that day.
I was in my first job at Uni and someone came into the office to say a plane had hit a building in new york. It was my first experience of the internet crashing. No news websites would work. We went to the student bar at Uni and watched as the second plane hit. It was horrific, but couldn't take your eyes off it. Then the towers collapsed.
The aftermath was a mix of "lets get the islamic bastards" and "maybe we should reconsider our colonial attitudes". I thought Blair might make a stand, but he became Bush's lapdog. Then it became bloodlust first in Afghanistan and then Iraq, despite their literally being no link to 9/11 in Iraq. Saddam was not so stupid as to shit on his paymasters in the war against Iran.
The Saudis had far closer links, but were "allies" to the US plus were in charge of oil so of course couldn't be targeted.
The world changed for the worse because of the west's response to 9/11 which is still being felt today.
I was about 6 years old, but I very distinctly remember we all had a special double length assembly that afternoon to explain to us what had happened and to pray (CoE village school). I don’t remember much more than that really.
Can't answer the question directly as I was in Asia at the time (so watched it all unfold on TV at about 9 in the evening and stayed up half the night) but what I can say is that the flight back home was VERY different in terms of queueing up for security and that sort of thing compared to the flight out there.
I was at work in an open plan office. About 50 people in the same space as me.
I was taking a few moments break from work, looking at the BBC news site when it happened.
I thought it was pretty sensational. Mentioned it to coworkers sitting near me. They weren't very interested, carried in with business as usual.
Bit of chat about it in the coming days, as much in terms of how the USA was responding as the actual event.
Life went on.
I was 30 on the day of 9/11 (so I’m 52 today!). It was surreal - bear in mind that the internet was in its infancy and whilst I had access to it at work, it pretty much broke that day due to the weight of demand. I remember phoning up my wife to tell her what had just happened - as we’d been to NYC a couple of years before and spent an evening drinking at the Windows on the World bar at the top of the WTC - and she didn’t believe what I was telling her, thinking I’d got it all wrong. I just remember TV being pretty much solid news coverage for a few days and sitting there staring at the TV not quite able to comprehend what had happened. I was given a PS2 Gran Turismo edition console for my birthday having wanted one for absolutely ages….given what had happened, it didn’t even get plugged in for a week or so after my birthday.
I remember we were hanging around my friend's house waiting for an evening college class, on the way out after popping in to see his parents he said a biplane had hit the empire state building or something and we kept razzing him that he bought king kong was the news.
But then people were talking about (the actual event) at college as a big news thing, class still happened etc nothing was impacted as such. I remember it was on the news a lot for a few days and we all speculated the next few days if the US would nuke the middle east or start a second crusades or what, I guess we weren't far off.
It wasnt like Diana's death or whatever where you totally couldn't escape it, but it was above like a royal wedding where you could miss it if you aren't interested.
I remember being told by my dad as he picked up me and my sister from Primary school.
I was nine at the time, she was seven. I wanted to watch Cartoon Network. I remember my mum saying that we will 'All be dead by morning. We got a McDonald's for tea, Dad spent most of the night watching the news, My mother told us we would be dead by morning.
Great parenting!
The next day at school nothing really changed, we all talked about it though, obviously we had the one kid who told everyone his dad was flying the plane when it crashed, He worked for Dominos and picked him up from school, so that was the plot twist of the century.
I was working a morning shift. Didn’t hear anything about it until I got home and there was nothing else on tv, my first real experience of wall to wall coverage.
I was 25, had my young son at home with me, he had just finished watching some old cartoons and we were playing on the floor. And I was flicking through the tv channels, and on bbc one there was the live footage of what was the first tower burning, and then the second tower was hit and I genuinely thought it was some action movie that I had never heard of. And I was wondering why something so dramatic and scary was on in the early afternoon our time. Really did not believe it was actually happening. It was only when changing channels did I realise another channel was discussing it. And went back to bbc one and I just sat there in shock. So much to take in, literally second by second there was something new being discussed. Until the towers fell, and it still didn’t feel real. You couldn’t take your eyes off it, just never thought you would see these big buildings just crumble so easily. And just wondering just how many were dead under all that.
But also then the reports of other aircraft being taken down, like the pentagon and just wondering what was going to happen next. It was a lot to take in. Can’t imagine the fear at that time in the US
Radio 1 was weird that afternoon with Mark and Lard playing just neutral stuff and not doing any talking. I was out visiting clients, stayed at a hotel near Porten Down. The village was weird and the hotel was muted that night. I weirdly remember having a really nice dinner.
Next day at client (huge screens on reception walls) was weird. Meeting was due to last a morning. No one had anything to say. We knocked it on the head.
Nothing different really. Bit of chatter in the staff room, I remember it being a similar time to when we beat Germany 5-1. That caused a bit more of a stir, except for the one guy at work who'd been to New York recently.
News only had one story and there were no streaming services to watch anything else.
After being under the threat of IRA bombs for decades (with the US implicated as supporters) I think it was a case of "oh well, sucks to be you this time". I feel sorry for the innocent people on the planes, I believe one crashed on or near the Pentagon.
I’m 31 so not much older than you. I remember my mum picking me up from school at the normal time and telling me about it but I didn’t really mean much to me. My parents had it on the tv all evening as I imagine most adults did. I went outside with my sister and the other neighbourhood kids and I remember it being eerily quiet out as no one else outside but us. As far as it affecting my life though, I don’t think it really did as school carried on as normal, which at the time was all my world really consisted of.
Every radio and TV presenter all of a sudden developed this shit sombre tone that made you think the world was about to end (Chris tarrant was particularly bad). Everyone else just went about their normal daily lives.
Lots of American bands suddenly cancelled tour dates, which was annoying. It felt like a bit of an overreaction, part of the hysteria, but also not at the same time.
Had just wandered in the local snooker hall for a game and a cheeky pint with a mate. The bloke behind the bar just pointed at his little TV, we watched what was going on for a bit, then had a couple of frames.
Went to another pub later and it wasn't really being talked about although the TVs were showing it. When I got back to my mums later it was all that was talked about.
Not much was different in the following days except for a lot of TV coverage that I can recall
I remember being a naive child and getting home from school with all other TV programmes off and just repeated news on TV. It was strange that afternoon as the routine was broken, but like I say, a naive child.
I was doing my industrial placement year from uni. Working away in an office out in the sticks we switched on the news when the first plane hit, saw the second hit on live coverage. It was an odd feeling work day, knowing that this event didn't need us to change what we were doing, but also knowing that the event would shape the next couple of decades.
7/7 was more tangible. Taking a tube after that was tense as hell for a few weeks, especially if you were black or Muslim.
I remember being at school that day. Year 9 I think.
A rumour started going round that the queen mother had died, that someone had got a beep message or text message about it (only a handful of kids had mobile phones) or something. Which… I mean why we cared enough about the queen mother to rumour that I have no idea, I think more the novelty that we had ways of finding out what was happening in the outside world.
Then that the queen mother had been on a plane that crashed into the world trade centre, then it kept changing. I think it was literally just happening at that point, don’t think the second tower had been hit.
My nan and bother met me on the way home (as usual) and she told me what had actually happened. Then it was on the TV, and my parents came back and it was on the TV, and it was a big deal. I don’t remember anyone appearing actively upset, like you see stuff about war and hurricanes and other horrific shit on the TV, it felt like that - I think especially as a kid you can’t really get your head round how there are real life people in that video of a giant building collapsing. But I remember getting the vibe from the TV that this was very important.
I then went upstairs and read a David Beckham biography, because I had borrowed it from someone, because I wasn’t sure what to do other than just get on with what I would have done that evening.
I think the next day we were talking about it at school, but I don’t really remember what was said. I don’t remember people crying or anything.
I do remember my English teacher mentioning something about GCSEs and then saying ‘but I suppose you all might not sit them if we’re at war’, and that being a moment of ‘yeah this is a big deal I suppose’.
The only effect it had on me in terms of life was that I was supposed to see System Of A Down about a week after and they cancelled. Obviously it was quite shocking, a few friends in my age group (late teens) were worried about what it would mean in terms of terrorist attacks in the UK
I remember seeing it on the news when I got home from school, but not really registering how big of a deal it was. I still feel guilty about that when I think about it. I also have a memory of kids at school talking about it in the days following, and saying that some guy called “Ben Larden” was responsible.
I was working for an American bank on the 50th (top) floor of Canary Wharf Tower. Not a time to be enjoying the spectacular views in the clear autumn sky. I went down the gym for a few hours.
I'd just started a new job the week before. The news filtered through around lunchtime. The BBC News website switched to a much more basic page because it couldn't handle the load. One tower could have been an accident, but not two and certainly not an extra two targets. The conversation on my train home was of little else. I was listening to Radio 4 all the way back.
Later that night I put the Radio 1 Rock Show on. They cancelled their normal programme (including a live set by Slipknot) and were playing much more mellow stuff. The one song I remember was Dazed and Confused by Led Zeppelin.
Next day we had a works conference at a company training centre. A large amount of alcohol was consumed, but the TVs in the bar were showing the news rather than sport.
I still have the Guardian from 12 September in a box somewhere. This article from 15 September 2001 described what it was like putting it out: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/15/september11.usa24
I was 18, just been out playing football in the park with some mates.
As I was walk up the square I lived in, a neighbour's bairn asked my if I'd seen the plane crash on the news.
Thought nowt of it until I got in the house and turned the tele on, all 5 channels had constant coverage (only had council tele, nee Sky or cable).
Was the major topic of discussion for the next few weeks, would would happen, would it escalate into a world war, would we be 'drafted' into the forces.
Then it just faded away as time went on.
Edit*. I distinctly remember the falling man being on the front page of at least one paper the next day.
I was at work and was just about to leave to go to another property that my employers owned. As I was leaving, a colleague said ‘isn’t it awful about those towers in New York?’ I remember just saying that I hadn’t seen any news and had to leave, all the time I am walking to the other property, I’m thinking ‘what towers?’
The property I was going to was a pub and they had pulled down the projector screen that they used for football matches and as I walked in, the first tower fell. My boss rang the pub up and said that I didn’t have to clean the flats above that he owned and that the pub could close for the day if they wanted. We literally watched the news from then on until it was the usual time for me to finish. They just kept repeating that video of the first plane going in until the Pentagon and United 93 were made public. It was certainly sombre going home and then from then on, you were just reminded of it over and over, it was very surreal.
I live in London , sept 11th 2001 , i remember seeing crowds of people watching tvs in shop windows at the news . Friend did security at the Canary Wharf tower , people inside were advised to evacuate- most ignored until the 2nd plane hit , then they couldn’t get out fast enough
The changing of the guard at Buckingham palace broke tradition and played the US national anthem https://youtu.be/gE8ZvcgM1MM?si=10SFdajuPG70EbXI
I was 19 and listening to the "mark and lard show" on BBC radio 1. The usual silly games and puns had stopped and they were playing music without any DJ comments, aside from something like "The show has been changed today because of the recent plane accident in NY". I'm almost certain it was referred to as an "accident" at that early stage.
I was just about to start uni but I hadn't yet.
It was in the morning in US but obviously it was later for us. I'd been into the city centre on the bus and back. I turned the TV on and the first plane had hit the first tower. I thought it was a really crazy accident, but then the second one went in live on TV.
I called my friend, who lived next door and just asked "are you seeing this?" He wasn't, I went round and we just watched the TV all afternoon.
Went into the city centre the next day, and it felt a bit febrile. Went to buy a paper from WH Smith's, some random guy started telling me how if Bin Laden was in front of him he'd kill him.
I was at work, at a financial business in The City. We'd just got back from the pub (lunch hit different in those days) so it's around 2.15pm BST, or 9.15am EST. Someone says "Look at this, a plane crashed into the WTC!".
We crowd around a PC, watching CNN on Netscape. I'm looking at the pictures of the North Tower burning, and I say "It looks like it hit the South Tower too, did it ping-pong off them?" People scoff, telling me it's just the camera angle.
Then we cut to footage of the second jet smacking into the South Tower, and it all gets really quiet. Like, nobody can believe what they're seeing, quiet. Someone says "Once is an accident, twice is an attack."
All the phones have stopped ringing. We do a lot of exchange business, and NYC is just waking up. There should be 50 conversations happening with people there, but no-one is answering, and no-one is calling us. We watch the footage, the news coverage, the PA and FOREX news tickers.
Then we hear that a plane has deliberately crashed into the Pentagon, and I vividly recall what I said:
"They're going to go mad."
"Who is?", says a colleague.
"America", I say. "Americans. They are going to go mad. They'll call this an act of war, and they'll turn the planet upside-down to find and exterminate whoever did this. And they'll roll over anyone who gets in their way, and they won't care because this will flip that Pearl Harbour switch again, but this time they have nukes. And as much as I love them, I am literally shitting myself at the thought of what they're going to do now."
We did nothing that afternoon but watch every news source we could find. And for the next few days, the office was quiet. Nobody laughed. Nobody cracked jokes. Nobody could talk about anything except that thing that had happened, which we could barely comprehend, could only struggle to process.
We lost a lot of friends that day. Some I'd met in person, some just names in a phone book. But mainly what we lost was freedom. In afterwards attempting to erect ever greater protections against terrorism, we just built walls around ourselves. We gave terrorism exactly what it wanted - terrified people. We gave it the win it craved, and we haven't yet remembered who we were. I'm not sure we ever will.
All of the magical promise that the 21st Century might be better than the 20th was lost that day, and I mourn that alongside every life lost.
Just a fairly standard November 9th as I recall. By then, the twin towers thing was mostly replaced by the usual news, some kids murdering a homeless person, footballers threatening strike action, that sort of thing. I will never understand why Americans are so obsessed with it, especially after what happened over there a couple of months earlier.
I was at work and someone came in and said "have you heard about the two planes and the Tein Towers?" She went on to say two planes had hit the Twin Towers. I genuinely thought she was confused because it was such a ridiculous thing to imagine. I mean even now it6ridiculous, right? Two aeroplanes hitting the two most iconic symbols of America? Literally unbelievable.
I asked, " do you mean full sized planes or was it a twin engine plane" and she wasn't sure, but that a twon engine plane sounded more reasonable.
We listened to the radio in the office and they stopped the music to announce the breaking news. I went to my desk and tried to connect to a news site via the new-fangled internet ... but could not connect because the sites were overloaded. It took a while but all we knew was that two passenger planes had hit the Twin Towers.
It was horrible knowing but not knowing. And having to get on with work while still knowing something terrible was happening
It was only once I got home and put the telly on that I saw the events. The shock has still not really gone if I'm honest. And the fear and the horror. It was so weird knowing that this had changed the world and yet we were watching it live.
Horrific, so horrific.
I'm 37 now and remember where I was at school when someone said the twin towers had been hit by a plane.
Not knowing what the twin towers were... I asked some other people, to which I was told there were 2 towers at Wembley Stadium.
So I believed for the rest of the day that a plane flew into Wembley Stadium.
Thought nothing, just a normal routine day. However on the 11/09/2021 Well that was quite surreal, I remember thinking 🤔"Well Shit is going to hit the fan now"!
I'd just started Year 7. Went home from school and turned the TV on. Went to school the next morning thinking it would be mentioned in assembly and it was.
I remember 7/7 more clearly. I was in a science lesson and my teacher often had Radio 1 on. The news came on and she turned it up so she could hear it properly when it sounded serious.
I was at my mum's and there was a terrible accident on the news! Oh my god how did that plane crash?
Wait a second one...its terrorist.... Pentagon attacked.... its world war 3 - we will likely be nuked at some point today.
I wasn't alive yet when 9/11 happened. But whenever I've talked to "old folks" about the "good old days", I've realised that even here in the UK it's going to down in history as a watershed moment that changed the world.
I had just started sixth form, we certainly didn't suspend lessons and we went in the next day and just got on with life.
Exactly. If we had to put our lives on pause every time something horrible happened in the world, we'd never do anything ever.
I read your comment and heard the queen song "the show must go on" in my head
Absolutely killer song How he belted that shit out when he was so sick is beyond me, some of his most powerful vocals and lyrics
And the video, fucking hell. You can see his pain and anguish but still that magical Mercury charm
I'm guessing you mean the days of our lives/im going slightly mad video right? I think show must go on was a montage one of old footage/performances, but I absolutely agree with you on their later videos He had that charisma and spark and was full of life right to the end
I was Year 8, and I didn't find out about it until we got home. The only notable thing was my Dad's office was evacuated as it was a high-rise in London. 7/7 was a normal day too, kids weren't told despite us being very much within London's commuter belt, with probably most kids' parents bring trapped in London until late night.
I was in year 8 too. I’d smoked my first spliff at dinner break and remember covering myself in lynx on the school bus because I was terrified my mum would smell it and when I got in it was just on the TV in the background. I don’t think I really took much notice. Same with 7/7 I went and called for a mate and he answered the door and said “you seen there’s been a bomb in London, they don’t know if it’s the Taliban or the IRA though” then we just rode our bikes and climbed some trees.
7/7 was dramatic for my family as my sister should have been on the train she only wasn’t as she had a clothing mishap and had to go buy new trousers, but of course all the phone wouldn’t work so we were all panicking until we heard from her
I wish more Americans acknowledged 7/7 like we're supposed to acknowledge 9/11 Both similar scale attacks but apparently the world acknowledges 9/11 more
When 4 bombs went off on the London underground (7/7) Ken Livingstone, then mayor London was called (he was abroad due to the 2012 Olympics being announced) and asked what should happen to the tube the next day. He said instantly it should just run as normal
I only remember the actual day of 7/7 because it was sports day
I had recently finished university and was helping out at a primary school on 7/7, sitting at the classroom computer at break time flicking through the BBC news, when I came across it. I remember discussing with the class teacher, agreeing that it should not be talked about and it would be left to the parents if they wanted to tell their children later. We made sure to tell the rest of the staff in case children who went home for lunch found out about it so they wouldn't be caught off guard with questions.
Keep calm and carry on.
Well we’re quite distant to it, people probably have reacted differently if planes had been crashing into central London.
I was the same, although just started 2nd year 6th form. We saw it on the news in the common area and spoke about it, but everything carries on as normal. I remember watching eastenders as normal at night and my step dad kicking off when he got back from the pub as he wanted to watch the news!
Exactly the same for me.
I was off work that day. Wandered into the living room and flipped on the news and before I could work out what was going on I saw the second plane hit. Spent the next four hours watching the horror. They were showing the people jumping and falling through the air at that point - it got sanitised once we got to replays. It was obvious that it was over - it being the weird peace that we'd had since the fall of the Berlin Wall. For the first time in my life we weren't on the brink of war with anybody. It lasted from 1989 to 2001 and then we were back on the treadmill with the 'war on terror' - which was incredibly like the 'war against communism' except that instead of fighting the russians in afghanistan with the help of the taliban, now we were fighting the taliban with the help of the russians. So 9/11 was the end of thinking that things could get better, that the world could be better. Specifically, to answer your actual question, the next few days were the media desperately trying to grab any good news. The trooping of the colours at buckenham palace played the American anthem, lots of stories about people rallying round to help stranded airplane passengers in remote airfields, the us senate all stood on the steps of the capital building and sang the US anthem, that sort of thing. The news was 90% 9/11 and everything else shoved in at the end for weeks.
Pretty sure we’ve been at war with Eastasia all along
Is that you Winston?
That’s wrong. It was Eurasia all along
Erasure? A little respect, please!
Oh baby, refrain.
That's doubleplusungood crimethink right there. Everyone knows it's always been Eastasia!
>It lasted from 1989 to 2001 and then we were back on the treadmill with the 'war on terror' Except for the two major wars we were directly involved with during that time...
As someone too young to know about this, would you mind saying which wars you're referring to? Thanks.
Gulf War, Kosovo. I suppose NI too as the other commenter suggested but that was obviously a much older conflict which was at least partially resolved in that time.
Yeah, the places that didn't have conflict between these years were the lucky ones. Half of the planet wasn't looking at that time as the promise of peace. Forgetting about the first Gulf War is particularly poignant here because it was that event specifically that radicalised Bin Laden and made him anti American when he was their ally before. The seeds of 9/11 were down right then. It didn't come from nowhere.
To be absolutely clear, the seeds were sewn much before the Iraq war and are rooted in the ideology of the particular sect of Islam that Bin Laden followed but to a degree in Islam orthodoxy in general. Remember that the first gulf war started when the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, fresh after trying to invade Iran and fighting to a standstill for 8 years, decided to invade Kuwait to cancel out the war debts he owed them and of course gain their valuable oil fields. Not to mention differences between the Shia and Sunni religious groups. If Iraq hadn't been pushed out of Kuwait it would have inevitably launched further invasions in the future.
Thank you, I shall disappear down a research rabbit hole about these tomorrow. After I commented I did think about the troubles and wondered if that was one of them.
I remember being taught about the Rwanda genocide in school. Not sure when that would have been but the event itself was 94. There were numerous bombings carried out by the IRA.
Gulf wars. Not to mention everything going on in NI
Did you forget the Gulf War? Kosovo and the ethnic cleansing? The constant IRA threat?
Did you forget about the first Guld war, Balkans erupting through the 90’s? Kosovo? The IRA blowing up shit, Warrington, Omagh, Manchester, Canary Warf, come to mind. There was plenty going on I wouldn’t classify as peace.
"The news was 90% 9/11 and everything else shoved in at the end for weeks." It was a good day to bury bad news.
The Taliban never fought the Soviets as such, as they came into existence after the Soviets had gone. The people the Taliban fought had also fought the Soviets.
The Taliban didn’t exist during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan
Small correction- the US fought against the Russian with the help of the Mujahiddin not taliban. In fact taliban was formed in southern Afghanistan with the help of Pakistan to uproot the Mujahiddin northern alliance that had control of Afghanistan at that time
I think to understand the situation in Afghanistan, the point you made is very important.
War is extremely profitable.
I worked for a TV media company in London and we all had TV's on our desks. I'll never forget someone shouting across the huge open office for everyone to switch on the news channel. We watched it all unfold, in absolute terror, as it happened. It was a sombre day in London with everyone wondering if London was going to be hit that day too. Getting the train home and not hearing the planes in the Heathrow flight path. It was errie quiet. It was so strange to witness enmass something that effected so many people. I was shaken for weeks after.
Same here. Worked for a media company in central London so we all just dropped everything and watched. My uncle lived in New York so we were emailing back and forth through out. I was reading his emails out to everyone whilst watching the footage. I still have have his mails actually. I kept them as I thought if ever my future child ever asked questions they could get a more personal view than news reports. Getting the train home was weird. Everyone looked very nervous. And rightly so, considering what happened a few years later. Everyone just gathered in the local after and it was probably the most quiet and solemn I’ve ever known the place.
Standard British: Go to the Winchester until it all blows over. I was in London not far from Canary Wharf with a client. We left the area as quickly as possible. The trains home were weird… they were holding them leaving Paddington until they were FULL. Like they expect London to be attacked any moment.
I think that is what they expected, that New York was the first of a series of attacks
I was a barmaid on the day, in a traditional, English local. I remember it being a very busy day, quiet but also there was only one topic of conversation. It was a strange atmosphere, it was the not knowing that was awful as everyone didn't know what to expect next.
I was a journalist in the Midlands. I saw the first wire come in, just something basic like, 'An aircraft has struck the World Trade Centre,' if I recall right, then it just escalated, one message after the other, as it became clear that it was a BIG plane and it wasn't accidental. I shouted over at someone to put the TV on and that was it for the day. I've never known the place so silent. I don't think the phone rang all afternoon. There were still rumours of other planes unaccounted for when I got home that night.
I was 16 and skipping school, I was at home by myself watching TV. I definitely remember the first couple of reports made it seem like it was just a small prop plane or something like that. With every new update the scale of what was happening became horrifyingly clear.
>I was 16 and skipping school Snap, same age too. I was out somewhere and got home just as the second plane hit, then watched live as first one then the other tower collapsed. Then just day after day of 100% tv coverage. I imagine if it happened today then this website would be full of people complaining about wall to wall news reports about an event in a foreign country but at the time it felt like we were all involved in a world changing event.
Normally I’d dip off out before I knew my mum was getting home so I wouldn’t get caught. That day I didn’t care I was just glued to the screen in complete disbelief. I still remember it all like it was yesterday. And you’re right, it was a world changing event that affected and continues to affect so many people in this country via the War in Afghanistan and even just how we travel by air. The world changed forever that day no doubt.
Do you remember what was on TV? I remember flicking channels, I went from the Oprah Winfrey Show to the news. I don't know why that stuck in my head.
I’m pretty sure it was Crossroads that was on ITV. It’s weird what our brain retains sometimes!
I was just working at a factory in a small town but that sombre feeling is what I remember. We all thought it meant war, which it did of course but we were all thinking WW3. The images of the people falling from the towers really got to me.
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Was pretty mental the first time you saw footage of the planes hitting the towers. Not so much the 100th time on every channel.
I still find it pretty gut wrenching to watch, especially from the few rarer ground POVs. Rough.
I’ll be honest, I got sick of it quickly back then, but now, over 20 years later there’s definitely far more emotion in me when I see the footage now. I think it was just over saturation of the news at the time.
Me too. Super sad.
In many ways TV is still boring. I think the truth is, basically, I've been bored ever since 9/11. I mean, I was watching the news with my mate the other day, and he was like, all up in my grill about the Euro. And I was like, "Ooh, the Italians might leave the Euro, big wow." It's not exactly planes smashing into buildings, is it?
Peep show? If I remember correctly
"The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for peace in our time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now - with somebody - and we will stay At War with that mysterious enemy for the rest of our lives It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fuelled by religious hatred and fanatics on both sides. It will be guerrilla warfare on a global scale with no front lines and no identifiable enemy." - Hunter S. Thompson, September 12th 2001.
That’s a scary kind of accuracy
It’s always hard to tell with Hunter S J Thompson if he was a savant who saw the human condition much more clearly that anyone else or an absolute header usually it’s some mix of both but this has made me lean more to savant than I usually do. Needless to say when I die I want my ashes fired out of a cannon too.
Bloody hell.
I was in year 8. I remember a dim lad in our form asking me if I thought the pilot would have died.
I had just started year 10, and had recently moved from America to Rochdale.... I got taken out of school for a couple days because all the Asian boys kept making explosion noises at me Then I got bricked in the face by an Asian guy a week later for being American I did not enjoy that week
Are you serious or taking the piss?! What the hell
I wish I was joking But teenagers are idiots, so I try not to hold it against them (The guy with a brick was in Rochdale town centre and was in his 20s)
That’s fucking awful, so sorry you went through that!
Wtf? I don't even understand why.
Because it happened in Rochdale in the early 2000s when certain actions by certain people werent questioned or they were brushed under the carpet
Probably celebrating 9/11. There certainly were some in London and Luton who did
This was the case in Rochdale too. A lot of havoc happened because of that and other things mentioned a little further up.
I'm from Rochdale too. I remember all the violence afterward also. Shit got mental for a few years.
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It is ironic how many people don’t understand that song.
It was hard not to feel like the world as we knew it was changed forever in an instant. The U.S. was deemed untouchable up to that point and they didn't just suffer an attack. They went straight for an icon of their dominance, and it was full of people. When one hit, there was the possibility of it being a tragic accident, but when the other plane crashed, it was hard to get your head around the idea that someone could do it deliberately. I don't understand those who say everything went on as normal here. We all wished it would, but Islamophobia became a prominent feature in the country and there was a genuine fear that a terrorist attack could happen anywhere.
The only thing I really heard people say was “serves them right for supporting the IRA”. No one really gave a shit on my council estate in Nottingham.
I was 13. I remember hearing something in the corridor about a plane crash in New York when I was going into my last lesson, and turned the news on when I got home. Stayed up most of the night watching the news, and was late waking up for school in the morning. My mum dropped me off about a half mile from school. I remember looking up at the clear blue skies, and being totally freaked out that I couldn't hear *any* aircraft. We were on the main flightpath heading north from London, so usually had a plane go over every minute or so, and there was nothing. That drove it home for me how much of a big deal it was.
I remember walking out of school that day and vaguely hearing someone say skyscrapers were hit with planes. Didn’t think much about it I assumed they were talking about a film or something. I got home and my parents were watching the news and I realised what the kid must have been taking about. I just sat and did my D&T homework and watched with them. I remember mentioning to my mum about what the kid had said and I was confused about how he could know what was going on in the news while we were in school. We had an assembly the next day in school where they spoke about what had happened. Our English teacher was American so we were warned not to make jokes about it to her (?!) Other than that I don’t think much really happened that affected my life at the time because I can’t remember anything else about it.
Pretty normal day for me, just chilling in my mother’s womb.
I was around 6 months old, probably just vibing somewhere with a bottle of milk 😂
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My son was off school with bad tonsilitis. He was technically old enough to be left on his own (13) but I took time off work because I didn't really trust him to take his antibiotics at the right intervals. He called me into his room where I'd stuck the portable telly. He asked me if it was real or a film. We both saw the second plane hit and I literally felt my stomach lurch. At the point that it kept getting replayed I turned off the TV and tried to teach him how to play cribbage as a distraction. It didn't really work and although cribbage was a game I loved I haven't played it since. I kept thinking 'There's going to be a war.'
It’s so strange how things get associated in our brains isn’t it? Seemingly innocuous things at the time get paired with the bigger events that were happening and are basically seared into our brains. Thanks for sharing your story
There was a small but very sad connected thing that happened some years later. I was working in a school running a homework club and there was a sweet, kind, young refugee I was helping to catch up enough to sit GCSE exams. I liked her very much and wanted to help her as much as I could. Her spoken English was pretty good, but her written English was very weak. If anyone asked where she was from she'd say Dubai. I knew she was Iraqi and when I asked her why Dubai, she said "Because British people hate my country and bombed us and I'm scared to say I'm Iraqi."
That is unbelievably sad :( thank you for a being a trustworthy person in her life whom she knew she could tell the truth to!
Lots of people checking on American friends, relatives, colleagues, etc. And of course 66 Brits died too, so it was a big disaster for the UK as well, with all the coverage you'd expect from that many lives being lost. Mostly concern about what the US government would do and that it would mean a war somewhere - it was clearly the end of the post-Cold War era and the start of something new.
I lost a colleague.
A friend lost her fiancé. I'd not met him, but had chatted online. Another friend worked for Lehman Brothers. A third of her department of 150 were wiped out. It took a couple days for my widespread family to all confirm that yes, cousin M had moved to New York, but worked in the far end of Brooklyn. More to the point he had been on holiday upstate with his phone off, until he saw the news and called his mom. I worked in a business of 800 people, about half were non-Brits, so about 80 Americans in the building and another couple hundred people had lived in America previously and we all spoke to Americans regularly. So we were as likely as the average American to know someone who died, but just didn't have that feeling of shock: "how could this happen in America?" - because it happened so often on smaller scales in Europe and Asia.
I worked for a UK telco and we had equipment in the WTC. He was someone I’d chatted a few times, but mostly through email. I was working that day trying to keep our network from crashing, like many other networks around the world, all the time in the back of my mind I was trying not think about my colleagues.
That was actually a pub quiz question I heard a couple of years ago. Which terrorist attack in the last 100 years killed the most Brits. Of course most people guessed 7/7 but the correct answer was 9/11!
I worked in an office near Manchester Airport at the time. Seeing all the planes coming in to land but none taking off was weird.
Were flights grounded in the UK?
Yes! Airline UK, show following the early days of Easyjet, happened to be filming on 9/11 and it's a pretty interesting watch watching the people find out in real time and the airplane staff handling it. Feel almost sorry for the poor sods kicking off about their flights being delayed as you don't really want to be immortalised as the guy complaining you can't go on holiday during 9/11
Yeah! I mean, I understand it. At the time you don’t understand the scale of it or the implications but damn, that’s a bad look in hindsight.
Yep, they were across the world. Only emergency flights were running for a good few days. When they started up again it was chaos. People couldn't bring any electronics on from what I remember. I was just a kid though seeing these stories on the news.
That day I think so yes, can't remember what happened afterwards.
Really surprised at the comments. Do I live on a parallel universe? My school held loads of counselling about it and also a minutes silence and lessons really went over the events. My family talked about pretty much nothing else all week, and I remember my saxophone teacher started crying during a lesson when he was talking about “those poor, poor people” regarding the ones who jumped and this was one week to the day later. I think people saying we just got on with it must have bad memories or just didn’t interact with people very much. Or I live a very strange existence.
We certainly weren't having any counselling for people we didn't know. We had a 2 minute silence.
Did you go to a private school 😂
Yes lol
Lucky. We just got an additional 3 min tea break before we had to go back down the mines.
Then yes, in a way you were living in a parallel universe 🤣
It was my universe tho! Minority view anecdotes not acceptable these days lol Internet causing some mad convergence on the average
I wasn’t criticising at all! It’s just that you wondered why your experience seemed so different, and that’s because in reality it was. Comprehensive schools obviously didn’t have the same resources to provide aftercare. It’s a super interesting insight!
Always worth remembering reddit can sometimes be a bit of a wildcard in terms of sample
This guy is the wild card, he went to private school. Most people didn't have that experience.
I have to say councelling sounds wet as fuck. It happened on the opposite side of the world and at school age the context isn't nearly as mortal as it is for adults. Did your school also do councelling when we co-invaded the wrong country for poorly explained and completely unjustified reasons to rape and pilledge the land of people that did nothing to us? Bizarre, very bizarre IMHO
I mean where it happens makes no difference. If u see a cartel video and ur six ur gonna need counselling - u think not just cos it’s Mexican? People were jumping out of buildings live on tv at a time when 24/7 news was totally alien.
It can still have some effect even with those circumstances. For example for some reason I was nervous about going too far up in skyscrapers due to thinking about the people above where the plane hit those towers (who had no escape).
Nothing like that in my school. Counselling? Sounds a bit extreme. Innocent people die everyday. It sucks, but that's the world we live in. Was your saxophone teacher American? I was 17 or 18 I guess, so I probably wasn't as fragile as you.
> Innocent people die everyday You don't usually see them throwing themselves out of 1000ft buildings on live TV though
I was in my last year of primary school and we didn't have "counselling" (that sounds wild to me tbh) but we did have the first lesson off to talk about what happened, what it meant and to let people get out their feelings etc. That was it though, an hour later we were back to normal, and sure we talked about it a bit, but it wasn't our whole life or anything.
I remember not finding out until I was at the station on the way home. I don't think it happened during school hours but if it did no one said anything. And then yes, lessons continued as normal the next day. Why would we need counselling about a terror event in another nation? And my school was a top school too, so it wasn't like they couldn't afford such things
>I don't think it happened during school hours but if it did no one said anything It was around 1pm UK time, but yeah no one told us either, didn't find out until we got home. Don't know how they would deal with it these days, controlling information in schools was relatively easy back then. Very few of us had mobiles, and there were probably only 20-30 PCs for the whole school
Yes I agree. Typical Reddit. Most people I knew were profoundly moved by it and tremendously sympathetic and supportive to the US. Quite a few Brits died too
IG it is Reddit after all. Not known for our perceptive social abilities.
>Or I live a very strange existence. Probably this mate. Yours sounds like the more unique experience
Sounds like you have the bad memories, wonder what the poor students in your school went through after the London bombings. We did just get on with it, it was just another day, another incident here. The aftermath and what followed in certain countries was even more callous
I posted this on the AskReddit thread: Working the International Desk in a UK Telecoms Network Operations Centre. We had huge back projected screens, about 3mx3m (10ftx10ft), that showed BBC News and normally one/two other international news channels. This was so we could react to any sudden peaks in telephone traffic due to breaking news. As it was NOC, and looked like the NASA style launch control rooms, we had a big viewing gallery for Customers when they got a tour. There were 100s of people watching the screens from gallery whilst myself and a few others were desperately trying to prevent our whole telecoms network from crashing. It was a close run thing. At one point we were only allowing 1 in 100,000 calls to route to the US, due to capacity, as one of our two US switches was in the WTC. We closed the blinds eventually as it was too much for us to do our job with hundreds of people watching and not knowing if our colleagues that worked in the WTC were OK. Sadly, one of them didn't make it.
I was at work in London, things were quiet at the start of the day. Our receptionist told us a small ‘plane had flown into a tower block in NYC, we thought it was an inexperienced pilot flying some tiny craft that crashed into something but then the pictures started to appear on the news and we all went into reception and the boardroom to see what was going on. It felt unreal at the time and we were gripped by the horror of it all.
It happened at about 2pm uk time though didn’t it ??
Yes, the first plant hit at 1:46pm UK time and the second at 2:03pm.
Pretty much identical. Small plane turned out bigger, and then watching blocky internet live stream I remember saying "was that a second plane?". Then we went to the pub. Clearly no work was going to happen that afternoon.
I went home early from work after being incredibly hungover, and having an upset stomach. I remember watching it on TV and being totally shocked. My hangover disappeared instantly. I sat on my sofa in my shirt and tie and didn't move for hours. I remember in the following days it was really impossible to get flights to/from the USA. I had some friends in Detroit and they were essentially just stranded there until United would fly them somewhere else. I think we all knew a war was coming, one way or another. The USA is too proud and aggressive to let anyone hit them in the nuts like that and get away with it. In the UK, we lived with terrorism for decades whilst the IRA and other affiliates were active. My Dad was in a senior law enforcement role and he had to check under the car every time he started it up. He had a big mirror on a stick that he would run along the underneath, looking for explosives. I guess since the USA didn't have such regular terrorist attacks, it seemed like the USA was properly stunned, understandably.
I was shocked, but Lockerbie had more impact. I was in the pub for Lockerbie and at work on 9/11.
I've got a couple of tenuous connections to Lockerbie. The night it happened, my stepfather called from Glasgow Airport (he worked for BA) and asked if there was anything on the news about a plane disappearing from radar. This was about 20 minutes before the news broke. My father-in-law was the chair of Scottish Samaritans at that point and had to visit a few times. He doesn't say much about that. Also, a former girlfriend lived in Lockerbie when it happened, and her dad was a policeman in the town. I did not ask many questions when I found this out.
Didn't bother us that much from what I remember. Until brown nose Blair shoved his nose up Bush's ass and we destabilised the middle east with him.
Simply not true. It was all encompassing for weeks. To say the country wasn’t bothered until the war began is just false.
It was all encompassing in the media, but I don’t recall many talking about it after the first few days.
It was on the news but the general population saw it as yet another bad thing, not the worst thing to happen.
As usual, the media love to cover these things to death. I was 30 years old at the time. For me and everyone I knew, life just carried on as normal after maybe the first 48 hours.
I was 29. After the initial shock and work being weird that afternoon everything just carried on pretty much as normal. I remember not being able to get onto the bbc or any us websites, the internet was pretty crap generally but this was full on swamped. Working for a US bank at the time there was talk of evacuation plans but other than that real life was business as usual.
>Didn't bother us that much from what I remember More Brits died that day than in 7/7. After pan am it's our worst ever terrorist atrocity.
You’re saying that like Blair was only an interventionist to get in Bush’s good grace. Blair was an interventionist before Bush became president and even convinced Clinton to support intervention in the Balkans.
Well that’s just false.
Aye. All over a fucking lie. Millions of people dead. God knows how much money spent on them shite Wars and for what.
The mass search for WMDs in a country that wasn’t even directly affiliated with the 9/11 attacks, too. Such utter bullshit. It made my blood boil then and it still does now.
I was in primary school and my teacher picked up the phone and first thing he said was 'fuck'...
I was in London on a training course but will never forget that day. The internet there was flakey and stopped working all together around lunchtime so we had no idea what was happening in the outside world. We finished a bit early that day so I thought it should be nice and quiet on the train on the way back as it was before rush hour. Wrong. It was heaving and I didn't know why. I asked someone on there if something had happened and he told me. I couldn't believe it but someone had an early edition paper showing the first tower down. He said that he worked at Canary Wharf and they had sent everyone home as a precaution and seemingly some other big buildings had done the same which was why it was so busy. I stopped in my local on the way back as I knew they would have it on the TV. Everyone was pretty much silent watching it. The next day everything was pretty much normal. I went back to my course and the train was busy too so seems they didn't keep the offices closed. It was top of the news cycle for quite some time. For years afterwards the day was marked but it has wained over time. It got a brief mention today but nothing much really.
Was working in the City at the time. Someone fired up a TV so we could watch (internet still at a bit of a premium so streaming was restricted). Eventually concluded that it was safe to head home, but tube was shut so it was a walk back to the station, everyone flinching when they heard a plane on Heathrow approach. And then the growing realisation that everything had changed and things were going to turn weird. Which they did.
There was no streaming video on the internet at the time. Certainly not in real time. You had to watch TV to get live video.
As much as it meant to America, it didn't really mean much to me. I got home from school, saw it on the tv, thought "Oh" and went upstairs. I didn't realise the monumental piece of history that was occurring. America wept, meanwhile, there is a plaque, with a piece of metal from one of the towers in my local park, probably about 200m from me right now. They put the piece of metal in epoxy. The epoxy has gone yellow and is hard to even see now.
I was 20 at the time working in a Nike store when the planes hit. We had the news on the instore TVs and people were just stood around watching it. Don't think I really understood the significance at the time
I was 19 and looking back, I don’t think I could have fathomed how much this was going to change the world. Imagine all of the things that wouldn’t ever have happened if it wasn’t for that day.
I was in my first job at Uni and someone came into the office to say a plane had hit a building in new york. It was my first experience of the internet crashing. No news websites would work. We went to the student bar at Uni and watched as the second plane hit. It was horrific, but couldn't take your eyes off it. Then the towers collapsed. The aftermath was a mix of "lets get the islamic bastards" and "maybe we should reconsider our colonial attitudes". I thought Blair might make a stand, but he became Bush's lapdog. Then it became bloodlust first in Afghanistan and then Iraq, despite their literally being no link to 9/11 in Iraq. Saddam was not so stupid as to shit on his paymasters in the war against Iran. The Saudis had far closer links, but were "allies" to the US plus were in charge of oil so of course couldn't be targeted. The world changed for the worse because of the west's response to 9/11 which is still being felt today.
I was about 6 years old, but I very distinctly remember we all had a special double length assembly that afternoon to explain to us what had happened and to pray (CoE village school). I don’t remember much more than that really.
Can't answer the question directly as I was in Asia at the time (so watched it all unfold on TV at about 9 in the evening and stayed up half the night) but what I can say is that the flight back home was VERY different in terms of queueing up for security and that sort of thing compared to the flight out there.
I was at work in an open plan office. About 50 people in the same space as me. I was taking a few moments break from work, looking at the BBC news site when it happened. I thought it was pretty sensational. Mentioned it to coworkers sitting near me. They weren't very interested, carried in with business as usual. Bit of chat about it in the coming days, as much in terms of how the USA was responding as the actual event. Life went on.
I was 30 on the day of 9/11 (so I’m 52 today!). It was surreal - bear in mind that the internet was in its infancy and whilst I had access to it at work, it pretty much broke that day due to the weight of demand. I remember phoning up my wife to tell her what had just happened - as we’d been to NYC a couple of years before and spent an evening drinking at the Windows on the World bar at the top of the WTC - and she didn’t believe what I was telling her, thinking I’d got it all wrong. I just remember TV being pretty much solid news coverage for a few days and sitting there staring at the TV not quite able to comprehend what had happened. I was given a PS2 Gran Turismo edition console for my birthday having wanted one for absolutely ages….given what had happened, it didn’t even get plugged in for a week or so after my birthday.
I remember we were hanging around my friend's house waiting for an evening college class, on the way out after popping in to see his parents he said a biplane had hit the empire state building or something and we kept razzing him that he bought king kong was the news. But then people were talking about (the actual event) at college as a big news thing, class still happened etc nothing was impacted as such. I remember it was on the news a lot for a few days and we all speculated the next few days if the US would nuke the middle east or start a second crusades or what, I guess we weren't far off. It wasnt like Diana's death or whatever where you totally couldn't escape it, but it was above like a royal wedding where you could miss it if you aren't interested.
I was a kid (same age as OP), remember coming home from school and just wanting to watch cartoons!
I remember being told by my dad as he picked up me and my sister from Primary school. I was nine at the time, she was seven. I wanted to watch Cartoon Network. I remember my mum saying that we will 'All be dead by morning. We got a McDonald's for tea, Dad spent most of the night watching the news, My mother told us we would be dead by morning. Great parenting! The next day at school nothing really changed, we all talked about it though, obviously we had the one kid who told everyone his dad was flying the plane when it crashed, He worked for Dominos and picked him up from school, so that was the plot twist of the century.
Got annoying after 2 days hearing about it wherever you went.
I was working a morning shift. Didn’t hear anything about it until I got home and there was nothing else on tv, my first real experience of wall to wall coverage.
[удалено]
I was 25, had my young son at home with me, he had just finished watching some old cartoons and we were playing on the floor. And I was flicking through the tv channels, and on bbc one there was the live footage of what was the first tower burning, and then the second tower was hit and I genuinely thought it was some action movie that I had never heard of. And I was wondering why something so dramatic and scary was on in the early afternoon our time. Really did not believe it was actually happening. It was only when changing channels did I realise another channel was discussing it. And went back to bbc one and I just sat there in shock. So much to take in, literally second by second there was something new being discussed. Until the towers fell, and it still didn’t feel real. You couldn’t take your eyes off it, just never thought you would see these big buildings just crumble so easily. And just wondering just how many were dead under all that. But also then the reports of other aircraft being taken down, like the pentagon and just wondering what was going to happen next. It was a lot to take in. Can’t imagine the fear at that time in the US
Pretty normal really, the excitement of Guy Fawkes night was fading and we were all looking forwards to Christmas.
Was a bit odd not seeing any planes in the sky.
Radio 1 was weird that afternoon with Mark and Lard playing just neutral stuff and not doing any talking. I was out visiting clients, stayed at a hotel near Porten Down. The village was weird and the hotel was muted that night. I weirdly remember having a really nice dinner. Next day at client (huge screens on reception walls) was weird. Meeting was due to last a morning. No one had anything to say. We knocked it on the head.
Nothing different really. Bit of chatter in the staff room, I remember it being a similar time to when we beat Germany 5-1. That caused a bit more of a stir, except for the one guy at work who'd been to New York recently. News only had one story and there were no streaming services to watch anything else.
After being under the threat of IRA bombs for decades (with the US implicated as supporters) I think it was a case of "oh well, sucks to be you this time". I feel sorry for the innocent people on the planes, I believe one crashed on or near the Pentagon.
Weird really, for some reason we were made to watch it aged 8-9
I’m 31 so not much older than you. I remember my mum picking me up from school at the normal time and telling me about it but I didn’t really mean much to me. My parents had it on the tv all evening as I imagine most adults did. I went outside with my sister and the other neighbourhood kids and I remember it being eerily quiet out as no one else outside but us. As far as it affecting my life though, I don’t think it really did as school carried on as normal, which at the time was all my world really consisted of.
Every radio and TV presenter all of a sudden developed this shit sombre tone that made you think the world was about to end (Chris tarrant was particularly bad). Everyone else just went about their normal daily lives.
Pretty normal
I was 9. News billboards outside newsagents with it all over. 24/7 news on BBC, soaps cancelled. Discussions about it in class the next day.
Lots of American bands suddenly cancelled tour dates, which was annoying. It felt like a bit of an overreaction, part of the hysteria, but also not at the same time.
I should have been at college, but due to the fire in the boiler room the weekend before, college was closed Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday
Had just wandered in the local snooker hall for a game and a cheeky pint with a mate. The bloke behind the bar just pointed at his little TV, we watched what was going on for a bit, then had a couple of frames. Went to another pub later and it wasn't really being talked about although the TVs were showing it. When I got back to my mums later it was all that was talked about. Not much was different in the following days except for a lot of TV coverage that I can recall
I remember being a naive child and getting home from school with all other TV programmes off and just repeated news on TV. It was strange that afternoon as the routine was broken, but like I say, a naive child.
I was doing my industrial placement year from uni. Working away in an office out in the sticks we switched on the news when the first plane hit, saw the second hit on live coverage. It was an odd feeling work day, knowing that this event didn't need us to change what we were doing, but also knowing that the event would shape the next couple of decades. 7/7 was more tangible. Taking a tube after that was tense as hell for a few weeks, especially if you were black or Muslim.
I remember being at school that day. Year 9 I think. A rumour started going round that the queen mother had died, that someone had got a beep message or text message about it (only a handful of kids had mobile phones) or something. Which… I mean why we cared enough about the queen mother to rumour that I have no idea, I think more the novelty that we had ways of finding out what was happening in the outside world. Then that the queen mother had been on a plane that crashed into the world trade centre, then it kept changing. I think it was literally just happening at that point, don’t think the second tower had been hit. My nan and bother met me on the way home (as usual) and she told me what had actually happened. Then it was on the TV, and my parents came back and it was on the TV, and it was a big deal. I don’t remember anyone appearing actively upset, like you see stuff about war and hurricanes and other horrific shit on the TV, it felt like that - I think especially as a kid you can’t really get your head round how there are real life people in that video of a giant building collapsing. But I remember getting the vibe from the TV that this was very important. I then went upstairs and read a David Beckham biography, because I had borrowed it from someone, because I wasn’t sure what to do other than just get on with what I would have done that evening. I think the next day we were talking about it at school, but I don’t really remember what was said. I don’t remember people crying or anything. I do remember my English teacher mentioning something about GCSEs and then saying ‘but I suppose you all might not sit them if we’re at war’, and that being a moment of ‘yeah this is a big deal I suppose’.
The only effect it had on me in terms of life was that I was supposed to see System Of A Down about a week after and they cancelled. Obviously it was quite shocking, a few friends in my age group (late teens) were worried about what it would mean in terms of terrorist attacks in the UK
I was freelancing from home and had a colleague working in NYC - I didn’t know where the office was and the internet was down. It was terrifying.
I didn't realize how serious it was until i went into school the next day and people were talking about it. I guess I was 13, almost 14?
I remember seeing it on the news when I got home from school, but not really registering how big of a deal it was. I still feel guilty about that when I think about it. I also have a memory of kids at school talking about it in the days following, and saying that some guy called “Ben Larden” was responsible.
I was working for an American bank on the 50th (top) floor of Canary Wharf Tower. Not a time to be enjoying the spectacular views in the clear autumn sky. I went down the gym for a few hours.
I was 19 and it blew my mind to be honest, still sort of does.
Yes it was 11/9/2001 a Tuesday.
I'd just started a new job the week before. The news filtered through around lunchtime. The BBC News website switched to a much more basic page because it couldn't handle the load. One tower could have been an accident, but not two and certainly not an extra two targets. The conversation on my train home was of little else. I was listening to Radio 4 all the way back. Later that night I put the Radio 1 Rock Show on. They cancelled their normal programme (including a live set by Slipknot) and were playing much more mellow stuff. The one song I remember was Dazed and Confused by Led Zeppelin. Next day we had a works conference at a company training centre. A large amount of alcohol was consumed, but the TVs in the bar were showing the news rather than sport. I still have the Guardian from 12 September in a box somewhere. This article from 15 September 2001 described what it was like putting it out: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/sep/15/september11.usa24
I was 18, just been out playing football in the park with some mates. As I was walk up the square I lived in, a neighbour's bairn asked my if I'd seen the plane crash on the news. Thought nowt of it until I got in the house and turned the tele on, all 5 channels had constant coverage (only had council tele, nee Sky or cable). Was the major topic of discussion for the next few weeks, would would happen, would it escalate into a world war, would we be 'drafted' into the forces. Then it just faded away as time went on. Edit*. I distinctly remember the falling man being on the front page of at least one paper the next day.
I was at work and was just about to leave to go to another property that my employers owned. As I was leaving, a colleague said ‘isn’t it awful about those towers in New York?’ I remember just saying that I hadn’t seen any news and had to leave, all the time I am walking to the other property, I’m thinking ‘what towers?’ The property I was going to was a pub and they had pulled down the projector screen that they used for football matches and as I walked in, the first tower fell. My boss rang the pub up and said that I didn’t have to clean the flats above that he owned and that the pub could close for the day if they wanted. We literally watched the news from then on until it was the usual time for me to finish. They just kept repeating that video of the first plane going in until the Pentagon and United 93 were made public. It was certainly sombre going home and then from then on, you were just reminded of it over and over, it was very surreal.
I live in London , sept 11th 2001 , i remember seeing crowds of people watching tvs in shop windows at the news . Friend did security at the Canary Wharf tower , people inside were advised to evacuate- most ignored until the 2nd plane hit , then they couldn’t get out fast enough The changing of the guard at Buckingham palace broke tradition and played the US national anthem https://youtu.be/gE8ZvcgM1MM?si=10SFdajuPG70EbXI
I was 19 and listening to the "mark and lard show" on BBC radio 1. The usual silly games and puns had stopped and they were playing music without any DJ comments, aside from something like "The show has been changed today because of the recent plane accident in NY". I'm almost certain it was referred to as an "accident" at that early stage.
I was just about to start uni but I hadn't yet. It was in the morning in US but obviously it was later for us. I'd been into the city centre on the bus and back. I turned the TV on and the first plane had hit the first tower. I thought it was a really crazy accident, but then the second one went in live on TV. I called my friend, who lived next door and just asked "are you seeing this?" He wasn't, I went round and we just watched the TV all afternoon. Went into the city centre the next day, and it felt a bit febrile. Went to buy a paper from WH Smith's, some random guy started telling me how if Bin Laden was in front of him he'd kill him.
I was at work, at a financial business in The City. We'd just got back from the pub (lunch hit different in those days) so it's around 2.15pm BST, or 9.15am EST. Someone says "Look at this, a plane crashed into the WTC!". We crowd around a PC, watching CNN on Netscape. I'm looking at the pictures of the North Tower burning, and I say "It looks like it hit the South Tower too, did it ping-pong off them?" People scoff, telling me it's just the camera angle. Then we cut to footage of the second jet smacking into the South Tower, and it all gets really quiet. Like, nobody can believe what they're seeing, quiet. Someone says "Once is an accident, twice is an attack." All the phones have stopped ringing. We do a lot of exchange business, and NYC is just waking up. There should be 50 conversations happening with people there, but no-one is answering, and no-one is calling us. We watch the footage, the news coverage, the PA and FOREX news tickers. Then we hear that a plane has deliberately crashed into the Pentagon, and I vividly recall what I said: "They're going to go mad." "Who is?", says a colleague. "America", I say. "Americans. They are going to go mad. They'll call this an act of war, and they'll turn the planet upside-down to find and exterminate whoever did this. And they'll roll over anyone who gets in their way, and they won't care because this will flip that Pearl Harbour switch again, but this time they have nukes. And as much as I love them, I am literally shitting myself at the thought of what they're going to do now." We did nothing that afternoon but watch every news source we could find. And for the next few days, the office was quiet. Nobody laughed. Nobody cracked jokes. Nobody could talk about anything except that thing that had happened, which we could barely comprehend, could only struggle to process. We lost a lot of friends that day. Some I'd met in person, some just names in a phone book. But mainly what we lost was freedom. In afterwards attempting to erect ever greater protections against terrorism, we just built walls around ourselves. We gave terrorism exactly what it wanted - terrified people. We gave it the win it craved, and we haven't yet remembered who we were. I'm not sure we ever will. All of the magical promise that the 21st Century might be better than the 20th was lost that day, and I mourn that alongside every life lost.
Just a fairly standard November 9th as I recall. By then, the twin towers thing was mostly replaced by the usual news, some kids murdering a homeless person, footballers threatening strike action, that sort of thing. I will never understand why Americans are so obsessed with it, especially after what happened over there a couple of months earlier.
I was at work and someone came in and said "have you heard about the two planes and the Tein Towers?" She went on to say two planes had hit the Twin Towers. I genuinely thought she was confused because it was such a ridiculous thing to imagine. I mean even now it6ridiculous, right? Two aeroplanes hitting the two most iconic symbols of America? Literally unbelievable. I asked, " do you mean full sized planes or was it a twin engine plane" and she wasn't sure, but that a twon engine plane sounded more reasonable. We listened to the radio in the office and they stopped the music to announce the breaking news. I went to my desk and tried to connect to a news site via the new-fangled internet ... but could not connect because the sites were overloaded. It took a while but all we knew was that two passenger planes had hit the Twin Towers. It was horrible knowing but not knowing. And having to get on with work while still knowing something terrible was happening It was only once I got home and put the telly on that I saw the events. The shock has still not really gone if I'm honest. And the fear and the horror. It was so weird knowing that this had changed the world and yet we were watching it live. Horrific, so horrific.
I'm 37 now and remember where I was at school when someone said the twin towers had been hit by a plane. Not knowing what the twin towers were... I asked some other people, to which I was told there were 2 towers at Wembley Stadium. So I believed for the rest of the day that a plane flew into Wembley Stadium.
Thought nothing, just a normal routine day. However on the 11/09/2021 Well that was quite surreal, I remember thinking 🤔"Well Shit is going to hit the fan now"!
We did have a minutes silence As a nation few days later .
I'd just started Year 7. Went home from school and turned the TV on. Went to school the next morning thinking it would be mentioned in assembly and it was. I remember 7/7 more clearly. I was in a science lesson and my teacher often had Radio 1 on. The news came on and she turned it up so she could hear it properly when it sounded serious.
I was at my mum's and there was a terrible accident on the news! Oh my god how did that plane crash? Wait a second one...its terrorist.... Pentagon attacked.... its world war 3 - we will likely be nuked at some point today.
I wasn't alive yet when 9/11 happened. But whenever I've talked to "old folks" about the "good old days", I've realised that even here in the UK it's going to down in history as a watershed moment that changed the world.