Many of New York City’s British transplants were awakened yesterday before dawn by telephone calls from family members telling them about the deadly terrorist bombings on the London Underground.

The news touched off a chain of events that, to some, felt all too much like the 2001 World Trade Center terror attacks, marked by frantic tracking down of relatives and friends, fielding of e-mail messages from the concerned, and waiting for updates on the number of those killed or injured.

“We’ve got the BBC up, and we keep looking for the slightest little detail we can get,” a London native, Cliff Franklin, president of a Manhattan-based security and surveillance company, said. “It’s funny. Living further away, it kind of has more of an impact because you don’t get the news like everybody else.”

Mr. Franklin’s 18-year-old daughter was visiting from London and staying at his Upper West Side apartment, but he had a brother-in-law who was commuting through the Liverpool Street Station in London, site of one of yesterday’s four bombings, who was unreachable for about an hour.

A producer at the left-leaning radio station Air America, Christabel Nsiah, who moved to New York from West London three years ago, watched the horror unfold on television.

“You feel absolutely paralyzed,” she said. “You can’t hop on a plane, because all of the planes have been grounded. All you can do is rely on news reports and try to get through on the phones.”

Ms. Nsiah was in Leicester Square in London in 1999 when a nail bomb was detonated, killing two people and injuring 30. She predicted that when the dust settled and the damage was fully surveyed, the British would again voice their opposition to their country’s decision to join America’s invasion of Iraq.

New York and London have long had a symbiotic relationship; both are cosmopolitan cities with a seemingly never-ending selection of restaurants, museums, theater, and attractions, as well as huge subway systems. Many of the nearly 30,000 British transplants in New York City, however, said the relationship has intensified since September 11, 2001, and since Britain joined America’s invasion of Iraq. For better or worse, they said, the two countries’ fates are somewhat intertwined, and it is no surprise that both have been targeted by Islamic fundamentalists.

“I can’t believe this didn’t happen before,” a native of Ireland who has lived in New York since the mid-1970s, Patrick Brady, said.

Mr. Brady, who was eating lunch at the British-owned fish-and-chips restaurant in the West Village called A Salt and Battery – where the radio was tuned to the British Broadcasting Corporation – said it seemed inevitable.

“How do you stop something like this?” he said as he reached into his basket of fried chips. “The trains there are like the trains here. The transportation system is very vulnerable.”

The owner of A Salt and Battery and the two adjacent stores on Greenwich Avenue, Nicola Perry, who has been living in New York for almost 15 years, said passers-by stopped in to ask about her family.

“I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls from people all over the place,” she said. “One of the saddest calls I got was from somebody I know whose brother is a surgeon in England who has already amputated four legs so far today.”

Ms. Perry, whose wares include British flags and mementos, said she expected Londoners to recover quickly and to continue riding on the Underground, as they have done in the past after Irish Republican Army bombings.

“They don’t have as much ‘let’s run away from here’ … as the Americans have,” she said. “If this happened in New York, people would be terrified for weeks. In England, we’ve had so many bombings over the years that things tend to go right back to normal. It’s what we call the Dunkirk spirit.”

Dunkirk was the French coastal town from which more than 300,000 British and French troops were heroically evacuated in May 1940 after the Germans invaded France.

The owner of Showroom 64 London, a clothing store also on Greenwich Avenue that sells British merchandise, Holly Greenwald, who is from London but has lived in New York for 10 years, said yesterday’s attack, which included four almost coordinated bombings, felt different.

“We’ve long had highly publicized IRA attacks, which have been awful, but they have been more pinpointed in one location,” she said. “Never has there been one this organized before.”

Ms. Greenwald, 32, who found out about the attacks in the middle of the night while up with her newborn daughter, also spent much of yesterday fielding e-mails from worried friends – a stark change from the day before.

“Yesterday I was getting e-mails saying ‘Congratulations, you guys won the Olympics!’ ” she said. “Today it’s been condolences – all in the space of 24 hours.”

Mayor Bloomberg, who ramped up security in New York yesterday as a result of the attacks overseas, said residents here empathized with the pain.

“We know all too well what London is experiencing, and we will provide any help that we can in recovery and in bringing those responsible to justice,” he said. “This attack against the people of London hits close to home because of the special bond our cities and countries share.”