The Oval area was greatly affected by the July 2005 suicide bombing campaign. First, and tragically, a Richborne Terrace resident, Philip Russell, was one of the victims of the first ever London suicide bombers when he was killed on a bus in Tavistock Square, near Euston Station, on 7 July 2005. Then, two weeks later, a suicide bomber (said to be 23 year old North Kensington resident Ramzi Mohamed - above, and above left) tried and failed to detonate a bomb on a train at Oval Station. This led to the closure of the Clapham Road (second photo on the left) and intense police activity in the area (third left photo).

There was further tragedy next day (the 22nd) when an innocent man was shot dead by police at Stockwell Station, the next station down the line. There followed a number of arrests around the area, apparently of people associated with the bombers, or suspected of helping to harbour them. The bottom left photo shows police and a film crew at Corfe House on Carroun Road, which is at the end of Richborne Terrace.

It seems appropriate to repeat the words of Mayor Ken Livingstone:-

"This is a city in which you can be yourself as long as you don’t harm anyone else. You can live your life as you chose to do, rather than as somebody else tells you to do. It is a city in which you can achieve your potential. That is our strength and that is what the bombers seek to destroy. They fear freedom, they fear a world in which individuals make their own life choices and their own moral value judgements and that is what they seek to snuff out. But they will fail."