With the stations empty and buses rushing past empty or loaded with the wounded, London's streets are clogged with traffic leaving the city, but eerily quiet close to the scenes of this morning's explosions.

There is no smoke, the only signs of the destruction are the emergency vehicles and the stories of survivors.

Near Aldgate East, police barriers and lines of fire engines stood next a man sitting under a tree, his face darkened from smoke, shaking his head and not wanting to give his name. He described the flash of light he had seen on a train.

A number 67 bus, not in service, came past, the only passengers were a woman in an emergency blanket and the medical staff treating her.

Everyone else was walking, or standing in crowds next to parked vans where the radio had been turned up. Maps were suddenly useful, and appeared everywhere as people hailed down couriers and trainee taxi drivers on scooters.

On the busy streets near Russell Square, the cafes were full as people talked and tried to use their mobile phones. When someone got a line, the phone was handed round and people asked their families to pass on messages for strangers.

A gaggle of Spanish tourists struggling down Theobalds Road had just escaped from the explosion at Edgware Road. Shaken by the blast, but unharmed, they were trying to continue their journey to reach Stansted Airport.

The group of nine, from Cantabria, in the north of Spain, had just been rescued from their tube train after being trapped underground for twenty minutes. They described the explosion in Spanish as "a smack, a shock, a bomb".

Maria Eugenia said the group had boarded a Circle Line train at Gloucester Road and were in the tunnel, about a hundred metres short of Edgware Road, when they felt the blast and their carriage started to fill with smoke. People lay on the floor to breathe.

According to Senora Eugenia and her husband Javier, their train was passing another as the explosion happened and the two collided. They believe the blast did more damage to the other train. They described the wounded walking through their carriage from the back of the train as the uninjured waited to be evacuated.

"We saw people with head wounds and blood. Our carriage was calm but we heard shouts and calls from other carriages. We walked out, they didn't tell us anything," said Senor Eugenia, whose handkerchief was lined with soot.

"What are we going to do now? Just wait, listen and wait."

Just a few streets north, a silent glazed crowd stood on Bernard Street, looking towards the fire engines and lorries outside Russell Square underground station and Tavistock Square. Ambulance medics are reportedly using the station ticket hall to treat victims of the earlier explosions in the station and on a double-decker bus.

Pete Gordon, a consultant working at the headquarters of the British Medical Association, was browsing the internet when he heard the bus outside his office explode.

"I heard a big explosion, it was very frightening. I went to the window and saw that some of the windows of the office across the street were blown in. The bus was there with roof blown off, there was a lot of smoke and there were bodies on the ground," he said.

"When I got to the ground floor I saw the bodies on the ground. I don't know how many. I really don't know. It looked like they had been blown from the bus," said Mr Gordon.

Beside Mr Gordon there was a heap of white towels and an emergency blanket of bright silver foil hanging on the railings. Outpatients trying to reach Great Ormond Street Hospital had to talk their way past security guards as a stream of ambulances made their way through the cordon.

One street away, Graham Morley was standing outside, Theobald's, a butchers he runs on Theobald's Road opposite Holborn police station which responded first to the explosions at Russell Square.

"It's hard to put it into words really, it's hard to think who would have done this. I thought all of these things were over, you know?"

Mr Morley first heard about the explosions on Taverstock Square when two police bomb disposal teams pulled up outside his shop and ambulances started pouring up Lambs Conduit Street. He had just sent out his deliveries for the morning.

"Before I knew it they started to cordon this all off," he said. "They told us to evacuate but we had an 82-year-old woman in here. She said 'I've seen it all, I'm not going anywhere.' So we stayed with her."

"It's chaos really," he said.

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