The Baltic Exchange Bomb

In the wake of the terror attacks in Paris, I remembered I once wrote a piece on the one terror attack that I ever experienced, or at least came relatively close to. This is what I wrote in 2003 about the 1992 attack on the Baltic Exchange. I made a few edits, but is largely the same text. And the photo of the damaged Commercial Union building above wqs made on April 13, 1992.

It was in April 1992 when I was working in the City of London that I went on my first real business trip. For a young guy, a great milestone in an emerging career and the location was not bad either, Athens in Greece. It was a business development conference and that week, apart from the conference, was pretty much dominated by the very close election race back in the UK where the unexciting John Major eked out a narrow election victory over Neil Kinnock’s Labour Party. On Saturday morning as the conference wrapped up we heard the news that a big bomb had gone off in London’s financial district, the area where most of us worked. There were no clear indications of the exact location, casualties or damage other than that it had been a huge explosion. Those were the days before the internet and mobile, so we digested the news slowly and did not race to our laptops to have a complete minute-to-minute rundown of events. I stayed the extra day and when I got home on Sunday night one of my managers was on the phone shortly after my arrival asking me whether I had heard about the attack and how the trip to Athens had been. I summarized what I had to say quite briefly and let him know that I would give a full report of my trip the next morning. “Well, Pieter”, he said, “you are going to have a few days off because the bomb exploded at the Baltic Exchange and our office building is in such a shape that it is very unsafe for staff to return to work”. This was quite a surprise, our office was at the northern end of St Mary Axe, in fact everyday I walked right past the Baltic Exchange at the southern end of St Mary Axe, the place were the bomb had gone off.

The next morning, the day off, I went to the area, camera in hand, and what I witnessed shocked and perplexed me completely. The area that had been damaged not only extended well beyond to what anyone would have believed knowing the location of the bomb; the damage done to that area, now cordoned off by police, was phenomenal. The impact of the explosion had covered the direct area with endless mountains of glass as nearly all of the windows of the adjoining Commercial Union skyscraper were knocked to smithereens. The force had also seriously damaged many other buildings, destroyed windows over a vast area, damaged cars and what amazed me and for some reason stuck in my mind: it left most traffic signs in a very wide area curved. The damage had thus also affected our building at the very end of St Mary Axe, although from the outside things did not look particularly bad. Apparently, there was significant damage and one of the greatest concerns was the structural damage not directly visible to the eye. Hence our few days off, in fact we spent the next two months in some reserve office space the bank had made available near St. Paul’s Cathedral.

The background to the bombing was soon clarified. The IRA’s political affiliates, Sinn Fein, had lost a seat during the election (Sinn Fein did contest seats in Westminster but they never occupied them) and the heinous attack was a “punishment” for the conservative victory. Three people were killed and I remember very clearly that one of them was a teenage girl who had happened to be there, waiting in a car while her mother picked up her dad from work. 

I never directly linked the attack to myself or the chance that I could have been killed by it although the bomb went off right on the route that I walked every day from the Underground station to the office and back. I just did not happen to be there that day, I was in Athens, and there was, and is, no other way to look at it. During my stay in London Downing Street 10 had been attacked by a rocket propelled grenade launcher and one day the entire Underground system was shut down leaving my then girlfriend, and now wife, Irene presuming I was dead, however I was just four hours late being stuck in a bus somewhere on Piccadilly.  At the time, the terror never felt like it was directed at me, or us, or to anyone close to me and I never got the sense from my British colleagues that they ever felt like they were a target. It was a constant, it was there, and if it came close to home it was sure to move on to another location. I never sensed fear, pain or worry. The nature, origin, much less a solution was ever discussed. The IRA was qualified as a group of isolated fanatics who did not even have majority support in their own ranks, losing a seat during the election was yet more evidence of their failure, isolation and increasing irrelevance. For me, it left a very vivid image of the physical impact of a bomb attack and it makes it easier to picture what can happen to people if they are in the vicinity of such a dreadful blast.

Today, some twenty-three years on, with a settled conflict in Northern Ireland and a wave of new terror attacks enveloping Europe, it may be worthwhile to recall how the British in those days dealt with lethal terror. They adjusted a bit here and there, but carried on regardless. The other side of this of course is to remember those that perished, then and today, innocent bystanders in a pointless orgy of violence.