20 years since the London bombings -- a new way to think about resilience

 

On this day 20 years ago, I was with @ChrisCocking and Steve Reicher at the Royal Society summer exhibition in London, presenting our work on how people behave in emergency evacuations. As I tried to travel to the exhibition venue, I was part of a crowd of grumbling commuters ordered off tube trains because of what we later discovered was a terrorist attack on three trains and a bus. It was surreal to walk across London during rush hour that morning and see so many others doing the same, as the tube system was completely closed down.

Later, we spoke to survivors and in the end gathered dozens of accounts of what people in those bombed trains saw, did and experienced. The study was important, not only for being a further riposte to the idea of public ‘panic’, but also because it prompted us to think in a new way about resilience.

The Civil Contingencies Act had just come in (2004), and there was now an official recognition that the public could – indeed had to – play a role in emergency response. But in the main, this public capacity for resilience was understood in the guidance as based on social capital or existing relationships. It was also understood officially as less agentic than that of the authorities. The new way of thinking about collective resilience was based on the social identity approach. Those caught up in the London bombings case were commuters, and so were strangers to each other.

Yet our interviewees described how after the bombs had exploded there was a sense of ‘we-ness’ with these strangers. They became a psychological group, based on their common situation. That groupness drove mutually supportive behaviours – sharing bottles of water, physically lifting others, tying tourniquets.

It allowed them to coordinate – for example in removing train doors as well as in filing out in an orderly way as they evacuated. The survivors were left alone for more than 15 minutes before the professionals reached them, but they had become the zero responders, providing emotional support and saving lives.

Read more here:

@ukri.org funded

 https://sus-udd.dk/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Drury-et-al.-2009-London-bombings-of-2005.pdf