Nail bomb at the Admiral Duncan
A bag full of nails: the attack on the Admiral Duncan struck at the heart of London's queer scene.
On 30 April 1999, it is an ordinary Friday evening in Soho. The Admiral Duncan on Old Compton Street, a meeting place of London's gay scene for decades, is filling up after work. Guests notice an unattended sports bag. When the manager goes to check, it explodes at 6.37 pm. Inside is a bomb packed with hundreds of nails.
Three people die: Andrea Dykes, twenty-seven and pregnant, and her friends Nik Moore and John Light. Around eighty people are injured; some lose a leg, an arm or their sight.
The perpetrator is a young neo-Nazi and former member of the far-right British National Party. In the two weeks before, he had already detonated bombs in Brixton and on Brick Lane, deliberately targeting the Black and Asian communities. Then he turned on the queer community. The police had even warned that a gay venue could be the next target. He was caught and in 2000 given six life sentences for murder. Many media outlets still deliberately do not name him. Fame, after all, was what he wanted.
On the Sunday after the attack, thousands gathered in Soho Square. There the Metropolitan Police promised to station an incident van outside the pub, staffed exclusively by openly gay and lesbian officers. This is regarded as a turning point in the long-strained relationship between the community and the police.
The Admiral Duncan has reopened. A chandelier with an inscription there commemorates the dead and the many injured. And every year on 30 April, survivors, relatives and friends gather in Soho. Then, for a moment, Old Compton Street falls silent.