DANIEL Biddle, 35, of Abergavenny, suffered horrific injuries in the 7/7 London bombings. As the tenth anniversary approaches he talks to Kath Skellon about rebuilding his life and his work to improve access for the disabled.

  • Wasn't going to go to work as he had a migraine
  • Delays meant survivor got on later train
  • He missed stop which would have taken him off the doomed train
  • Bomber was sitting in neighbouring seat and looked at him as he detonated bomb

“ON THE morning of July 7, 2005, I was going to ring in sick because I had a really bad migraine, but I went back to sleep and woke up an hour later feeling better than I did. I decided to go into work.

I was a project manager working for a construction company.

By the time I left home, I was already an hour and a half behind my normal schedule.

I jumped on a bus to go to Watford Station. Normally I would have bought my travel card beforehand, but hadn’t that day. The automated machine was broken, so I had to queue up with the other commuters, which delayed me even further.

I took the fast train to Liverpool Street, but unfortunately it wasn’t so quick because there was a signal failure at Stratford.

I got off the train at Liverpool Street Station. My normal routine would be to get a coffee, sandwich and newspaper and go to the circle line to get my train to Baker Street and change for the Bakerloo line to Wembley Central.

I had a very young site assistant working with me who I was training and because I was running late, I texted him and planned to run outside the station when I got to Baker Street, send a text message and get back in time for my connecting train.

Rather large hands and small keys meant I messed up the text and was looking at the phone when the train pulled out of Baker Street and I missed my stop.

We pulled into Edgware Road, there was a young Asian fella sitting next to where I was standing.

As we pulled into the tunnel, I looked down at him, he looked at me, he then reached into his bag and detonated a home-made bomb.

There was a big white flash and a huge explosion and I was blown clean through the train doors and into the tunnel.

I landed in the space between the tunnel wall and the track.

My left leg had been taken clean off at the thigh.

My right leg was severed at the knee but still attached and shattered the bones to the point they came through the skin.

My arms and face were set on fire.

I had multiple lacerations and bits of metal sticking out of me. I was fully conscious while trapped for about an hour and a half before the emergency services got me out.

I saw six people die in the most horrific way possible.

A fellow passenger who showed immense bravery to get to me, Adrian Heili was absolutely unbelievable in what he did to keep me alive.

Adrian was on the other side of the train. When I was screaming for help, he was shouting back to me.

He bumped into an off-duty train driver and asked him if the tracks were live.

The off-duty train driver informed Adrian that he didn’t know if they were live.

Adrian told him I was badly hurt and he needed to get to me so he dropped to his knees shut his eyes and grabbed the track. A heroic move, which very quickly could have ended his own life.

He then crawled under the train to get to me and lifted the metal work off me.

He could see I had severed my left leg and the artery and was losing a lot of blood quickly.

He forced his hand into what was left of the stump and pinched the artery shut and we sat like that for an hour and 25 minutes.

The paramedics reckon I was a minute away from bleeding to death.

Adrian was severely hurt but went back into the tunnel and helped get other people out.

He won the Queen’s Commendation for Bravery and has become one of my best friends and biggest hero.

I was taken to St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington, where I suffered several cardiac arrests and was brought back to life before being taken into theatre.

I had my spleen removed and had a lacerated liver, kidneys failed and I was on dialysis for two weeks. One of my lungs doesn’t work properly. I am deaf on one side and have a prosthetic eye.

Surgeons had to remove house keys and about £7.40 worth of pound coins and 10p and 20p pieces embedded by the blast. One 20p piece remains lodged in my thighbone.

Four hours into surgery, I had a massive cardiac arrest. The surgeon had to open my chest and put his hands in and manually pump my heart back to life.

I spent eight weeks in a medically-induced coma. During that time, I had multiple operations just to keep me alive and lost 87 pints of blood. I was on a life-support machine for eight weeks and when I came out of the coma, I was in intensive care for four weeks and then in hospital and a rehabilitation hospital for 51 weeks and two days.

It makes me the worst-injured survivor from all four attacks as well as the longest hospital stay out of the four bombings. It’s not a claim to fame that I wanted, but it’s one that got stuck with me.

In hospital, as you can imagine, there is a lot of free time.

My parents were living in Spain and travelled back and forth to see me.

I knew I wanted to go back to work and it would be a big part of my recovery, but that it wouldn’t be feasible to go back to work on a building site in a wheelchair.

I came across the national register of access consultants on my laptop and very quickly realised that my construction knowledge and disability put me in a good place to find a career in that. I retrained and in December 2007,became a fully accredited consultant for the National Register of Access Consultants and a member of the Chartered Institute of Building.

In December 2008, I was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts for my work on social inclusion.

I got married in 2007, but unfortunately it didn’t work out as I had hoped and later divorced.

I had a nervous breakdown as a result of the post-traumatic stress disorder and a lack of support and understanding.

I met my fiancée, Gem Morgan, purely by accident. We had been friends on Facebook for about five years after I got a friend request from her by accident in 2009, but we never interacted with each other until 2013 when I wished her daughter well after a fall.

In September 2013, I visited Gem in Wales and we began our relationship.

My mental state wasn’t good and spiralled quickly out of control so in December 2013, Gem got me the specialist support that I needed and dragged me through treatment.

With her love and support, I have rebuilt my life and we are inseparable and neither of us would have it any other way.

When I acquired a disability my life changed forever, but just because you’re disabled it doesn’t mean you can’t do things.

The perception of disability is the biggest stumbling block yet my inspiration and goals are no different to anyone else’s.

Using my construction background and qualification as an access consultant and surveyor, we have since set up Nationwide Access Consultants Ltd. Its aim is to help organisations be more accessible for the disabled and deal with the legalities of the Equality Act 2010.

It’s a one-stop shop for all issues relating to disability and physical access, and works with the NHS, retailers and hotels to make their buildings more accessible.

I am very lucky to still be alive and want to make disability more acceptable in society.

We also run a Facebook group called Accessible Abergavenny to increase levels of accessibility in the town and raise awareness among local businesses of their legal obligations to the disabled and elderly community.

My work includes legislation training around the Equality Act 2010, disability hate crime training, as well as helping ex-military people back into employment.

We want to try and re educate people that disability isn’t something to be terrified of or brushed under the carpet. It’s there and is not going away.

I’ve rebuilt my life, am building our business and looking forward to our wedding in June.

You never know what’s around the corner. I didn’t get on a tube train on July 7 and expect to lose my legs that day. It comes from nowhere. My life went from being very open to being very insular very quickly and it has been a fight to get back to what most people would consider ‘normality’.

I am a very determined and driven person. I’m more determined and focused to achieve the things that I want to do. I’ve been given another chance in life and want to do the most that I can with it.

It’s about taking a different road and learning to accept that I’m disabled and what happened to me has taken me a long time. It’s not about looking back, it’s about looking towards the future. The bombing is in the past and that is where it has to stay to move forward in my life.

I don’t want people to forget what happened and for me it should be remembered for the people that were killed and their families, but for me I don’t want to be the reminder to everybody of what 7/7 is.

I want to get on with my life and take my business forward. 7/7 is part of me but it’s not all that I am.

When people say I am an inspiration, I am just doing what I think is the right thing to do, not for any accolade. I am fortunate enough to still be here. I have a job that I love, a beautiful fiancée and three beautiful children whom I love to the end of the world. I just have to do everything sitting down. It’s not a bad return on where I was 10 years ago.

I’m very lucky to be alive and it would be a huge injustice to the victims’ families if I didn’t do something with this opportunity I have been given.”

E-mail nationwideaccessconsultants@gmail.com Visit twitter NACLTD83 or Facebook nationwide access consultants ltd and Accessible Abergavenny.