London Metropolitan Police say they discovered an unexploded World War II bomb in the ground directly next to a shopping mall on Wednesday morning.
The discovery of the shell, which measured 13.5 inches in length and six inches wide, led to the evacuations of a number of adjacent buildings near the Westfield London Mall as well as local road closures, police said.
Police also implemented an "exclusion zone" of more than 1,000 feet as a precaution while they awaited the arrival of "specialist officers who will assess ordnance."
Video from Facebook user Cino Argoub showed a crowd of dozens of people evacuating from the mall. Many of them were corralled behind ropes.
(function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0]; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = "//connect.facebook.net/en_US/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.3"; fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));Lah yjib el khir Bomba fi Westfield london w rani m3ahoumPosted by Cino Argoub on Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Officials from the London Fire Brigade and the London Ambulance Service were also called to the scene, and the item was removed for examination.
"The matter has now been stood down," police said, while warning that congestion would remain in the area for some time.
Unexploded ordnances are a somewhat common, if still shocking, annoyance across Europe leftover from two World Wars that saw thousands of bombs dropped across the UK, France, Belgium, Italy and Germany.
The UK construction industry has even made a publication that tells workers what to do when they discovered unexploded ordinances leftover from WWI and WWII's aerial bombardments.
According to CIRIA, the organization that publishes the guide, an estimated 15,000 unexploded ordnance were discovered and removed from construction sites between 2006 and 2009. Approximately 5% of the bombs were live.