Paul Barker: A city is reborn

Already, the wounded capital is showing signs of regeneration - proof that a great metropolis is a more resilient organism than the terrorists might imagine

Walking behind the concrete edifice of London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, I see a calm-looking, green and gilt statue of a bearded man sitting on some freshly mown grass. Ah, I think, a symbol of contemplation among the aftermath of the terrorist bombs.

I read the inscription. The statue, is of Trivalluvar, "author of the classic text of Tamil philosophy and ethics". So much for easy symbols. The Tamil Tigers - Hindus rebelling against a Buddhist-dominated Sri Lankan government - were, I think, the protest group which invented suicide bombers.

Behind me, here in Bloomsbury, is the taped-off site of the explosion which lethally took the roof off a No 30 double-decker bus, and which was at first, not implausibly, attributed to a suicide bomber. Out of sight, specialists are trying to count the dismembered dead. Within sight, policeman move about in traditional helmets and bright yellow jackets; I see no guns on display.

A local TV presenter stands idly, waiting for his routine moment. A rivulet of backpackers and name-badged conference-goers ripples down from the Euston Road. They slide past the Institute of Education's banner, saying "Liberate Your Mind", and the little stall of Socialist Worker sellers. The paper's big black headline is, "Betrayed by the G8". I murmur politely: "Doesn't seem very relevant, somehow", and I am met with the usual steely look, which always implies, "Who is this fool?" The next edition will presumably say, "We told you so".

Coming in on the Tube with the usual Northern line commuters, and pounding London's uneven pavements, I am struck yet again by the enormous resilience of a great, mercantile metropolis. This is not a lovely city in any simple sense. Paris or Rome, for example, would never have stuck an extraordinary neo-classical edifice such as the British Museum in a shabby back street off the litter-strewn Tottenham Court Road. At 9.45 am, Japanese tourists are already photographing one another in the museum's palatial forecourt. But London has its own gritty charm. It also has grit in the metaphorical sense.

Such great cities can absorb a vast amount of damage, whether ill-intentioned like that of Thursday's bombers, or well-intentioned like the ambitions of the architects and planners who, all around me, flattened elegant Georgian terraces to replace them with the poured concrete of the University of London's behemoths of Academe.

This resilience is, I suspect, an unknown quantity in the minds of those who seek deliberately to destroy it, physically or morally. The hothouse of a narrow cult, after an upbringing in some dusty small town or village, may inspire you with visions of heaven and hell. But a great metropolis incorporates its own heavens and hells, and every tiny gradation in between. Such differentiation, such variety, is what it is about. London rode out Hitler's Luftwaffe and will ride out Osama bin Laden's attacks (the man surely behind the bombings in spirit, if not in every organisational detail).

What does "community" mean? It is a dreary, reach-me-down word which is more often used to obfuscate than to clarify. One reason why people live in a great city is precisely because it is not a "community" in the same way that a mountain village or a Gypsy camp is. I, for example, grew up in a Pennine village, from which I could not wait to escape, although (or perhaps because) I was related to about a third of the population, one way or another.

My return visits now have a nostalgia I did not feel at the time. If asked where I come from, I still say: "I live in London, but I'm a Yorkshireman really." But the converse is also true, as it would be for so many who have landed up in the capital. "I'm a Londoner, but I happen to come from Yorkshire", or, as may be, Dhaka, or Melbourne or Kampala). At the corner of Gordon Square, down from statue of Trivalluvar, I see the building I caught a train to, on my first visit to London, to be interviewed for what was then called a "state scholarship". Now it is sealed off by the police tapes. Builders opposite squat on the pavement, drinking tea from flasks. A bearded street-sleeper, carrying a white stick and an old radio, is asking two policemen what's going on. A silver helicopter whirrs overhead. In the background, I hear the sirens of police, hurtling up to Euston on a new alert. No one pays attention.

This is what community means in a great city. In the face of a threat, a kind of togetherness, yes, but, more precisely, a refusal to be cowed. In one newspaper, over breakfast, I read the obituary of an American former Navy pilot who endured years of imprisonment and torture after being shot down over North Vietnam. He bore it by thinking of the teachings of the Greek philosopher, Epictetus, whom he studied at university. Epictetus argued that the epitome of evil was not death, but the fear of death. This seems to me more apt today - as I see native and adoptive Londoners going about their lives, after a brutal attempt to make them walk in fear - than the tabloid frenzy I read over my neighbour's shoulder on the Tube, "We're all going to die!" That is not how it feels at all. The truth is greyer, but tougher.

This is not peculiar to London, of course. In the Second World War, the great merchant city of Hamburg was devastated by RAF and USAAF firestorms. On six near-consecutive nights in July and August 1943, about 44,600 Hamburg civilians were killed by the bombing (60,595 British civilians were killed in the entire war by German raids), half the city lay in rubble and almost two-thirds of the surviving population had to be evacuated.

Unlike landlocked Dresden under Communism, the capitalist, sea-going businessmen of Hamburg decided not to make a profession out of victimhood. But Dresden, having been a wonderful baroque city, created by the kings of Saxony, became a weapon of East German propaganda. Streets and palaces which could have been restored were pulled down to rub the message home. The great church was deliberately left in ruins.

Visiting Dresden after the regime fell, I was told: "The city was destroyed twice, by the RAF and by the Communists." But going to Hamburg as a Briton, I have never been asked to justify what happened. The city rebuilt itself as vigorously, but unbeautifully, as much of London was after the war.

Cities such as this have an enduring character: almost a sort of historical memory, built into their streets and their inhabitants. New York was not destroyed by the 9/11 assault, though so many died. The row over what should replace the World Trade Centre proves that New York and New Yorkers remain as tough, and as quarrelsome, as ever.

In London today, the streets are dominated by taxis and buses. Many are almost empty. A few people sit on bus upper decks, despite of what happened on that devastated No 30: they are classic exemplars of urban stoicism. Many Londoners have coped with the bombing in an equally classic way. They have taken the day off. The commuter Tube, as I come in, is nothing like as packed as usual.

In the train, we all seem to be suffering, not from fear, but from the usual Tube-carriage narcosis. A young woman swigs her bottle of still water, as if dehydration is the main hazard. It is a relief, somehow, to see a girl giggling with her boyfriend. I find myself reading the usual Underground publicity in a new, odd way. "London 1593", a book advert announces, "London on the edge. Killer on the loose". The advert is for a novel called Tamburlaine Must Die. Yet another threat from the East? Will the theatre which last night had to cancel its performance of The Producers change the publicity headline, "What a bombshell!" I expect not. The British, and Londoners in particular, are often accused of a failure of imagination. But unimaginativeness has a strength all of its own.

On Sunday we have that peculiar, bureaucratic invention, "Memorial Day" for the end of the Second World War. Neither VE Day nor VJ Day, this free-floating date must have been dreamt up in some committee room because of anxieties about offending 21st-century Germans or Japanese with British triumphalism. But triumphalism seems a distant threat, with the strange call of the ultra-modest Tube posters, to "celebrate World War Two". How can you celebrate a war, as opposed to a victory?

The memorial posters are decorated with discreet, almost shamefaced Union Jacks. On London streets, I see only a single Union Jack, fluttering bravely from the roof of an Oxford Street store. In France or the United States - countries extremely non-shamefaced about their patriotism - tricolours or Stars and Stripes would be out in force, to help face down the enemy. Londoners' "community" and their patriotism is almost entirely in the mind and in behaviour. They fight the good fight in their usual drab T-shirts and trainers.

For two hours after Thursday's first explosion, I had no idea anything unusual had happened. Then an uncle from Yorkshire rang to suggest we switch on the television. Then there was anxious phoning - made more difficult by the hour-long collapse of the telephone system - to try to find out if any of our family were caught up in the attacks. (They were not, and so far, I know no one who was.)

Friends rang from New York, San Francisco and Canada, to do their own check. Can you call it "solidarity", or has that word been devalued by politics? Outside the TUC headquarters in Great Russell Street, a big banner evokes that sort of solidarity. "Respect Workers' Rights" (in very large letters) and "Make Poverty History" (in much smaller ones). Leaving to catch the breakfast-time Tube, I see dustbins have been emptied on the due date, children are playing on scooters in the street, a new poster has been pinned to a tree, appealing for a lost cat.

At the height of the Second World War blitz, and trying to pin down just what Englishness meant, George Orwell said in an essay: "As I write, highly civilised human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me." As I write this, I suppose other human beings, also in thrall to an apocalyptic creed, are trying to kill me and other Londoners and their families. At the grubbier end of Oxford Street yesterday, I saw the gilded metal flag on the steeple of St Giles's church against the blue sky. It was peeping out from behind the glorious wedding-cake frontage of Centre Point. A classic London scene of beauty jumbled up with vulgarity, a picture which told you more about the capital's strengths than any words can.

As I stood there, I remembered an old soldier, on television on Thursday night on his way to a reunion, in spite of the bombs. "Nil desperandum," he told the interviewer. "You have to carry on, don't you?" There is another old Army catch-phrase, which I reckon fits even more closely what most Londoners now feel, "Nil illegitimis carborundum". Which is military dog Latin for, "Don't let the bastards grind you down".