Sam Hawcroft reflects on her memories of the day that changed the world – and the generation now coming of age who have no memory of it…
There are some moments in history when everyone old enough to remember them can tell you exactly where they were.
For an earlier generation, it was the assassination of John F Kennedy. For mine, it is September 11, 2001.
I had just walked into the Hull Daily Mail newsroom to start a 2pm shift. I was a young sub-editor and, back then, the Mail had a large, busy office building full of reporters, subs, photographers, designers, marketing people – you name it.
The first plane had already hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center in New York.
Within minutes of me arriving, the second hit the South Tower.
Until that point, however appalling the pictures were, there remained the possibility that what we were watching was some kind of catastrophic accident. The sight of a second passenger jet flying deliberately into the other tower removed any doubt.
America was under attack and none of us had any idea what was going to happen next.
There was no question of simply putting the television on and watching it unfold. We were at work and we had a newspaper to produce.
So I divided my time between going over to the TV and trying to get on with whatever was in front of me, while the story became bigger by the minute. Another aircraft hit the Pentagon. Another came down in Pennsylvania. Then the towers themselves collapsed.
It soon became clear we were going to be there well into the night and there would be a special edition to produce.
It perhaps sounds uncomfortable to say that, professionally, there was an adrenaline rush to being in a newsroom that afternoon. But it wasn’t excitement… it was the feeling that this was precisely what you had joined a newspaper to do: breaking news, changing by the minute, with everyone pulling together to make sense of something extraordinary.
There had been a few too many times when working late meant waiting for a reporter to file three paragraphs about a cheque presentation, but this was, of course, a bit different.
Of course, everyone who remembers that day has their own version of it.
While I was in a newsroom watching events unfold almost minute by minute, John Prince – now our Hornsea correspondent – was living and working in London. For him, one of the most vivid memories is the silence.
Travelling home from work towards North Greenwich, his Tube passed through Canary Wharf station but slowed without stopping.
“It was very, very quiet,” John recalls. “I seem to remember the only announcement was there had been a security alert and the train would not be stopping.
“This was way before smartphones, apps and the internet the way we use it now, so there was no way of checking what was going on.
“I’d never seen Canary Wharf empty like that in all the years I’d been in London. It was usually packed.”
When he emerged at North Greenwich, he looked back across the Thames and saw helicopters circling Canary Wharf Tower – then the tallest building in the UK and at the heart of one of the world’s leading financial districts.
“It made sense that there would be some kind of lockdown there, as it was London’s main ‘target’, but in that moment I had no idea why,” he said.
“What I did know was that I had been directly underneath it just a couple of minutes earlier.”
John had been underground as news of the attacks spread. By the time he reached home, his then-partner already had the television on.
“She just said, ‘Have you seen this?’
“We went back outside and looked at the Canary Wharf tower, which you could see from the end of our driveway. It always looked huge, but on that day it seemed even bigger somehow.”
The usual noise of London seemed to have diminished too.
“I don’t remember sirens, although they are commonplace in London anyway, but the traffic was quieter and there were certainly fewer vehicles on the road.
“Then the phone calls started. My mum was first, of course, then my brother and friends, because we lived so close to Docklands. I could only reassure them that we were staying in the house and watching from a distance.”
There is another detail in John’s memories which, 25 years later, feels particularly poignant.
He had lived and worked in America during the 1990s and had once been photographed standing in front of the Twin Towers in New York.
“I’m very prudent at keeping photos, but for some reason I just can’t find it anywhere,” he said.
“It would be easy to say that maybe that has gone for ever as well.”
Both memories have the same quality that seems to run through almost everyone’s recollections of September 11: tiny details remain extraordinarily clear 25 years on.
Inevitably, 9/11 has also spawned an enormous industry in conspiracy theories, but I’ve never found any remotely convincing.
For one thing, so many rely on questionable science, selective evidence and poor-quality video recordings copied and recopied until almost anything can apparently be spotted in a blur of pixels.
It does make me wonder what the conspiracy industry would look like had September 11 happened now.
In 2001 there were no smartphones filming from every street corner, no X, TikTok or Facebook feeding thousands of clips around the world within seconds and, most importantly, no generative AI capable of producing remarkably convincing pictures and videos of things that never happened.
We worry now, quite rightly, about whether we can believe our eyes. Imagine trying to establish the truth of an event on the scale of 9/11 amid a flood of real footage, miscaptioned footage, deliberate misinformation and AI-generated fakery.
There are more basic problems with the conspiracy theories too.
The argument that the US government somehow engineered the attacks to provide a justification for subsequent wars requires you to believe it needed to murder nearly 3,000 people on its own soil to find an excuse to invade another country. History suggests powerful nations have rarely required anything quite so elaborate.
And conspiracy theories invariably credit governments with an extraordinary degree of competence. Authorities can struggle to process benefits claims efficiently, build computer systems that work or organise major infrastructure projects on time. Yet we are asked to believe that enormous numbers of officials conspired to carry out the biggest terrorist atrocity on American soil, covered it up perfectly and kept quiet about it for a quarter of a century.
But enough about nutcase conspiracists.
Twenty-five years have passed, and there are adults – people with jobs and children of their own – who weren’t born when any of this happened. I find that surprisingly difficult to get my head around.
And it is difficult to overstate how much the world changed afterwards.
Some of it was obvious. The United States went to war in Afghanistan. Iraq followed in a political climate fundamentally altered by 9/11. Terrorism moved to the centre of international politics. Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, the Taliban and the “war on terror” became part of everyday vocabulary.
Four years later, the July 7 bombings brought Islamist terrorism horrifically close to home in Britain.
Air travel changed. Security became more intrusive. Cockpit doors were reinforced. The relaxed assumptions about what a hijacking meant disappeared for ever.
Even the way we consume news has changed beyond recognition.
On September 11, 2001, most of us watched the same television pictures. Newsrooms and broadcasters were still the principal filters through which information reached the public.
Today, millions of people would see it first through their phones. Eyewitness video would appear within seconds. So would rumour, speculation, false claims and AI fakery.
We have more information than we could possibly have imagined in 2001, but in many ways establishing what is true has become harder, not easier.
For me, September 11 will always take my mind back to that busy newsroom in Hull, arriving for a 2pm shift and expecting another fairly ordinary day at work.
Within minutes, we knew it was anything but.
We just didn’t yet know quite how much the world had changed.
