Wave of Grief and Political Reverberations Grip Britain After Soldier’s Killing

Carl Court/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images — Tributes lined the sidewalk outside the barracks where the soldier Lee Rigby, 25, was killed.

By JOHN F. BURNS, NYT

LONDON — The sidewalk where 25-year-old Lee Rigby died, beneath a cascade of blows from bladed weapons, has become a place of popular pilgrimage like none other in Britain since the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in 1997 in a Paris car crash.

Thousands of bouquets with handwritten expressions of sympathy rise waist-high along a stretch of green steel fencing topped by razor wire, extending the length of two football fields. For much of the past week, the mourning has gone on regardless of drizzling rain and winds.

From first light each day until past dusk, mourners of all ages, from a spectrum of ethnic and religious groups, have lingered beneath the gaze of uniformed police officers, honoring the memory of a man few of them knew.

It was here 11 days ago, outside the 200-year-old Woolwich barracks in this district along the Thames in southeast London, that two assailants shouting “Allahu akbar,” or “God is great,” killed Mr. Rigby, an army bandsman and machine-gunner who had seen combat in Afghanistan.

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