9/11 20th Anniversary: Live Updates

LONDON—A steel girder that once supported the South Tower of the World Trade Center now sits atop a small hill in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, a portion of the metal polished to high shine by the American artist Miya Ando.

The girder’s journey to London began in 2009, when insurance executive Peter Rosengard read that chunks of structural steel recovered from the World Trade Center were sitting in an aircraft hangar outside of John F. Kennedy International Airport. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey said it would consider requests from cities interested in permanently displaying pieces of the buildings as public memorials or exhibits.

Some 67 Britons died in the 9/11 attacks. Less than four years later, on July 7, 2005, four terrorists killed 52 people in a series of coordinated suicide bombings across London.

“I just knew I had to get a piece of steel for London, and right away,” Mr. Rosengard said.

He secured the backing of Boris Johnson, then the mayor of London, and called the Port Authority to request a piece of steel for the capital. A Port Authority worker promptly told him to join the back of the queue: Thousands of cities had already applied ahead of him.

“I called him every day, I drove him nuts,” Mr. Rosengard said. After weeks of getting nowhere, he jumped in a taxi and again called the Port Authority on the way to Heathrow Airport. “I told them, ‘I’ll be at Hangar 17 tomorrow at 10,” he said. He was let in, and allowed to choose the piece that would, in 2011, end up in London.

The arrival of the steel coincided with Mr. Rosengard’s formation of Since 9/11, an educational charity that teaches the events, causes and consequences of the 2001 attacks to schoolchildren in the U.K. It aims to prevent future generations from being lured into extremism.

Mr. Rosengard told the story of this four-ton tangle of metal on Saturday, a couple of hours before a memorial event commemorating the events of 9/11 began in the Olympic Park. As he spoke, a man wearing a New York City Fire Department T-shirt walked up to the artwork and placed a small bunch of sunflowers at its base. The man looked up at the steel, silhouetted against the east London skyline, then held his gaze firmly on the ground.