LONDON – All over the city, throngs of people walking home through orderly, car-less streets expressed their gratefulness that most of their loved-ones were safe.

But their ashen faces betrayed a deeper fear, as Londoners put on the same stiff upper lip that helped them survive the Nazi Blitz in 1940.

Walking past the shards of a red double-decker bus, Sofia Stewart said she felt an odd kind of relief that London has become the latest victim of a coordinated terrorist attack.

“People are really upset, but some people are glad it’s happened, because we’ve been waiting for so long,” Ms. Stewart, 32, said as she nervously picked her way home through the police barriers encircling the King’s Cross station, in an area she said she once loved for its multicultural flavor and proximity to central London.

“Luckily, I missed it all, because I go to work so early,” she said.

Though initially shocked, few seemed surprised. First New York. Then Madrid. Now London.

Many were resigned that 7/7 has become their 9/11.

“We’ve been kind of lucky with only 33 dead, when you look at New York and Madrid,” said Lana Graud, 20, who recently moved closer into the city so that she could avoid London’s Underground subway, the tube, fearful of the impending attack that happened yesterday.

“It makes me believe it will happen again. Yeah, definitely,” she added, insisting that she would walk the 30 minutes to work instead of risking public transport.

By evening, the morning panic had subsided and given way to a combination of resignation and anger. At one point, the 42,000 calls an hour were flooding into an emergency hotline, but those tapered off mid-afternoon and by the time work let out, Londoners seemed ready for a drink to steel their nerves.

The West End shows had been canceled and REM would reschedule for another night. Without adequate transport, many took shelter in their afterwork pub, wondering how they would get home.

Just down from the police tape and cameras of Russell Square, where a tube stop and a double-decker bus was in shards, Londoners crowded into a 1729 cider house where Charles Dickens is claimed to have taken his own evening pint, the Lamb.

Enjoying a quiet beer, a 65-year-old retiree, Alex Melnikoff, looked up from his afternoon paper and took a steady look across the room.

“Everyone is drinking here in the pubs, so they can’t be too concerned,” he said.

And over at the bar, an American-British couple, on vacation in London, agreed that the mood was far less somber than America’s on September 11, 2001.

“Eighty percent of the people in this bar aren’t even talking about it,” Steve McDonough, 43, from San Francisco, said. “There was a lot more shock with 9/11.”

He and his girlfriend looked out of their hotel window and saw panicked faces running from the tube station. Then they heard the boom, boom, of the bomb that ripped apart one of the buses.

For the rest of the day, they were forced to remain in their hotel, at times being told to gather in the center of the building, as police feared more bombs in Russell Square Park.

In addition to tourists, the Russell Square area is home to many international students, such as the 145 high school seniors from Jericho High School on Long Island, whose dorm lies down the street from where the bus was exploded.

The students were forced back inside by their resident assistants, fearful of what was to come next.

For most of the morning, many of them could not reach home as the cell phone system was saturated with frantic calls. But eventually, 17-year-old Andrew Tifton got through. “My parents said if you feel unsafe, you can go home.”

As he and his friends tucked into their dinner on a sidewalk two streets away from the shards of the doubledecker bus, they all agreed that the bombing would not cut short their summer courses and internships.

“The point is, if we fly home, they win,” another Jericho student, Sean Tulkin, said.