International visitors with a couple of hours to spare can do worse than take in one of London’s food markets. Harrods Food Hall or Fortnam and Mason are legendary. But for something different and far closer to nature, where many vendors display and sell their own produce, few options surpass Borough Market.
It’s one of my favorite lunchtime jaunts during working days in offices about seven minutes away. It sits close by London Bridge and the South Bank of the River Thames. A few yards away is the Clink Museum, recalling the infamous twin prisons for women and men where bishops of Winchester were once chief custodians. To this day it provides a widely used nickname for prisons.
For centuries the South Bank has been a place for revelry and night life. At 10 p.m. on June 3 it was in full swing as drinkers spilled onto the streets enjoying the onset of early summer weather. A white van plowed into the crowd outside the Barrowboy and Banker pub. Then the van’s occupants began stabbing people. They left a trail of seven people dead and 21 in hospital.
A stone’s throw away is Southwark Cathedral, until 1905 a parish church, probably London’s oldest. It became a cathedral when Southwark was carved out of the Diocese of Rochester. Its doors are now closed behind police cordons as forensic teams comb the area for vital clues to piece together the horrible sequence of events. Pentecost services at the cathedral were canceled because of the cordons.
Islamic State has claimed responsibility, as it did for the suicide bombing in Manchester on May 22.
These outrages in Southwark and Manchester outwardly appear to be random acts of terror. For Islamic State, however, they are actions against the decadence of the West. Islamic State militants see the South Bank as a place of many excesses, and Ariana Grande as an agent of “raunch culture” that moderate Muslims also find troubling.