Weather-wise it was exactly the same as last year, a failed summer's day of cloud and spotty rain, but London was a mixture of things today: of sadness, of briskness, of shaking heads carrying on.

Early, in Regent's Park, police officers sat in hired vans and ate sandwiches, preparing for a day of remembrance. Signs said "Production Gate" and "Guest Toilet" and apologised for the inconvenience of commemorating "the first anniversary of July 7", as if the date had not occurred before.

Two smart women were pushing the first purple and pink carnations into holes on a green wooden platform. Over the course of the day, members of the public will form a large, seven-petalled flower that will be completed by yellow gerbera, placed by families of victims of the attacks this evening.

But at 8am, most of the flowers sat in beige plastic buckets in a hot white tent. "They're all meant to be a lovely dark purple but they ran out, so we got nasty pink as well," said one of the women. "You know, this time last year, everything was fine. I was on my way to my son's speech day. Then it was horrible."

On the Tube there was the usual, processional silence of London commuters. But staring from the front page of newspapers was the face of the Shehzad Tanweer, the Aldgate train bomber, whose suicide video was broadcast with a nasty timeliness yesterday on al-Jazeera.

A guard at King's Cross sniffed the air and said the morning was indistinguishable from any other: "To be honest, I haven't noticed anything different," he said. "But it's early, I'm still waking up."

Others acknowledged that their minds had moved to last summer. Pausing before going into a work at a language school by Great Portland Street station, Mark Wilson confessed to being startled as a police van, siren wailing, made its way towards Euston.

"It's a funny atmosphere," he said. "All our kids aren't going on the Underground today. It's probably a little bit of paranoia to do with the video yesterday. I've got to be honest, I just saw a police van go past with its lights on and then you see someone with a big backpack... I don't know, you're only human."

At 8:50am, the moment the bombs went off at King's Cross, Aldgate and Edgware Road, Tessa Jowell, the Culture Secretary, and Ken Livingstone, the Mayor of London, laid flowers in the small garden outside King's Cross that has become a memorial to the atrocity.

Under a Union Jack at half-mast and a yellow digging machine from Morgan Tunnelling, a spontaneous crowd came together to watch. Standing with strangers and their half-drunk bottles of water, unfinished Su Doku puzzles in their bags, was immediately reminiscent of those disrupted journeys last summer, when London's commuters, mainly young, strikingly diverse, shared delays, doubts and worse.

Just under an hour later, at the corner of Tavistock Square and Upper Woburn Place, where the No 30 bus was blown up, killing 13 and injuring dozens, a similar gathering took place. Families of the victims laid flowers in the square next to a St George's flag inscribed with the words "Forgiveness sets us free".

Colleen Donagher, a regular visitor to London from America, watched the crowd, which stood mainly on either side of the road, leaving a space where the bus was destroyed, and said: "Mainly I hope that this can all be healed, all the hatred and divisions. Britain should be a place where people can come together."

Elsewhere, away from the crowds, there was pragmatism. "You can't think about it, you just have to get on with your day," said Richard Wallis, an IT worker, as he walked briskly towards Euston Square. "I suppose it's in people's minds with the video last night, but it should be a day for the families and the survivors."

Two Red Cross volunteers waited at Russell Square station and said that they hadn't really had to help anyone today. "I think people have underestimated everyone's resilience," one said, looking at a stream of students coming out of the station where last year ambulances waited to carry away the wounded. "They seem to be OK, which is good. We'd rather be superfluous to requirements."

In his butcher's shop on the Theobald's Road, Holborn, where last year he stayed with an elderly customer as armed police urged him to evacuate, Steve Ritchie said he had been telling his new employees "how horrid, how horrifying it was. It almost had the feeling it wasn't real, that feeling."

"The only way forward I can see," he said, "is that someone, somewhere along the line, is going to have to forgive. Otherwise it's going to go on for another 2,000 years or however long it's been going on for. I can understand for those directly affected by it how impossible that must seem, but I can't see any other way forward."

By Aldgate East, Ranjit Kudhail stood in the clothes shop his family has run since 1971. Surrounded by plastic-wrapped cotton shirts and England football strips, he said that he realised it was coming up to the anniversary of the July 7 attacks last night when he was stopped and searched at Gatwick airport after he picked up his nieces from a flight from America.

After the search Mr Kudhail said he was asked "What are you?" and had ticked a box saying "British Indian" on a form. "I wanted to just say British, and nothing more," he said. "You shouldn't have to categorise. British is the end of the story... We're all connected but people cannot see that."

A few minutes later, just down the Whitechapel Road, office doors opened and people walked in light rain to the entrance of Aldgate station. The families of the seven people killed there last year emerged from behind a blue screen to join police and ambulance personnel in their array of reflective jackets and badges for two minutes of silence.

Shop shutters came down but at first it was unclear how the silence would start. Then a bell tolled at the nearby St Botolph's and suddenly there was that stillness from July 14 last year, a week after the bombs and the last time London stopped.

Every bus and car came to a halt and the only movement came from the traffic lights changing on Aldgate. At the end there was a pause, and then applause, and then no one wanted to move.

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