Foreword: The 2000s landscape

It was a decade with a bit of an identity crisis, with most people not sure what to call it.

Everything from noughts and oughts to ‘twenty-ohs’ and ‘zeros’ was proffered, with most people in Britain alighting on the ‘noughties.’

If there was ambiguity about what to call the ten-year span, the decade itself was never dull, with terrorist attacks in many countries, including in London and most infamously of all the destruction of the twin towers in New York on 9/11. There followed the ‘war on terror’ in Iraq and Afghanistan.