THE French and German tourists at Towerhill Gateway station in East London are confused.
The electronic sign above the platform informs them that the Docklands Light Railway will not be running to Canary Wharf, but a special bus service will take them there if they want to go. One man asks what the problem is with the trains, and, by the way, what has happened to South Quay station?
Travelling into the Isle of Dogs from the centre of London yesterday, one of the passengers on the special bus service organised for the area in the wake of Friday's bombing says she has never seen a police checkpoint. Here on Westferry Circus is her first opportunity, as the bus is stopped and then waved on by a police check point, while taxi drivers and motorists are held up a little longer.
A woman beside me says she now knows how the people of Belfast must have felt for the past 25 years. No one walking around the Isle of Dogs in the past two days can have escaped feelings of horror on turning into the Canary Wharf complex or suddenly coming upon South Quay station.
Part of the station has collapsed into the street, while the newsagents and small shops beside it have been reduced to piles of rubble.
Looking towards the office blocks which have brought much needed employment to the Isle of Dogs, the picture is of millions of pounds worth of damage. Every window has been blown out and glass remains on the pavement.
An initial conservative estimate of the cost of repairs has been set between £50 and £100 million sterling.
A spokeswoman for the London Dockland Development Corporation, a government agency set up to attract investment to the area, says that, although buildings look like skeletons, with their windows blown out, their actual fabric may still be sound. "It is a setback, but it is not going to stop us. If Harrods bounced back, then so can we."
The Isle of Dogs is a great mishmash of tower blocks, waterways with large trading warehouses, a reminder of the area's mercantile past, and tiny back street pubs. It is a community which the Bishop of London, the Rt Rev Richard Chartres, described yesterday as "united in the face of a senseless tragedy".
Back at Westferry station, suspended high above the expanse of the Isle of Dogs, a young New Zealand woman who has lived in the area for the past 10 months sums up her private thoughts. "I feel so sorry for the people who are living here," she says. "It is an awful feeling that now I am worried about travelling in London. I'm thinking of leaving."