Crossrail was a major project for the previous administration, so while Boris is a keen supporter (he reckons it is a "cracking deal for the capital"), we are keeping a keener eye on whether he pursues this quite as zealously as Ken. This is because the costs are huge, and so the need to keep up pressure for central government investment is vital to whether (and how) it's built. The strength of Boris's support......

Next time you turn down a proffered tête-à-tête with a chirpie cabbie, you could be missing out on a satisfying cultural exchange. Who knows whether your driver is a painter, origami champion or candle-stick maker? Black cab driver Dominic Shannon has spent nine years of his career taking pictures of city life, warts and all. While other cab drivers pass the time by attempting to splash foolhardy tourists standing in close proximity to puddles......

A couple of weeks ago, we were approached by a PR company and invited to partake of a little paid blogging around the launch of a "SECRET THING". Now believe us, paid blogging is hard to come by, so our ears and empty pockets pricked up. However, the utmost secrecy around the THING put us off as we feared we'd be selling our souls for some corporate un-Londony puff and, ultimately, we were right. The......

With the Star Over London airship proving such a success, plans are afoot to give it a permanent mooring above St Pancras chambers. When not in service, the curvaceous dirigible will use the Barlow train shed for a hanger. Do you have a vision for London that's more warped than Captain Kirk's loom? Send your distorted realities to Londonist - at - gmail dot com. And browse our archive.......

Harry Potter may have completed his seven years at school, but younger wizardlings are in for several years of service disruption on the Hogwart's Express. Platform 9 and 3/4 will be shifted later this year to allow construction work on the West side of King's Cross, according to Jon Burden the former Duty Station Manager at King's Cross, who led a tour of the area yesterday. The enchanted platform will be relocated to the......

Highly regarded cycle store Velorution has posted something bizarrely horrible and horribly bizarre on their widely-read Velorution cycling blog. It's a hard to follow rant that seems to be slamming immigrant communities for driving badly and not understanding cyclists, also slamming the traffic police for being from the Essex suburbs and not doing enough for those on two wheels. Trying to sum it up to save Londonist's lovely readers from wading through the original......

Shepherd's Bush + transport woes: discuss. With a brand-new Overground station delayed by short platforms, it now turns out the controversial closure of the Central line station was in fact quite unnecessary. Local MP Andy Slaughter has discovered that the decision to close was made by LU, despite Metronet saying it could remain open during work. Meanwhile, passengers were fobbed off with a porky about it being "impossible to replace one escalator while the other......

We can't really feign any surprise to learn that London's parking is the world's priciest. While we generally favour ambulation via foot, bicycle or (occasionally) Hoverboard, our car-bound chums are forced to hand over £586 a month to park their motor in the City, while the West End isn't much cheaper at £568. Just need to park it for a day? That'll be £34, guv (unless you get in early). Puts idle kvetching about public......

Confounded to discover that your Oyster card was knackered when you tried to hop on the Tube this morning? You're not the only one. A major card fault hit the system on Saturday morning, meaning that cards were inoperable for a five hour period. Worse was to come. When the system lurched back into operation, any cards that had been passed over a swipe machine during the problem - up to 40,000, according to......

Plans for a pedestrianised Parliament Square piazza (a tautology, surely?) have been scotched by City Hall. Mayor Boz has decided to review an £18m plan minted by his predecessor to "do a Traf Square" on the area, paving the southern bit beside Westminster Abbey and putting in extra benches in aid of turning it into a nice spot to gather and graze. The reason for this rethink? Concerns over traffic congestion, an issue that......

What's the Tokyo Look, then? Simpering ads for mascara featuring hot young Japanese models batting their lids while riding the Bullet train? Middle-aged American men crooning bad karaoke to their doe-eyed young companions? Nope. The Tokyo look is inspired by that city's Shibuya district, which offers diagonal pedestrian crossing at busy junctions. Oxford Circus, whose crosstown traffic makes it so hard to get through, may adopt the same system under a new proposal. Currently,......

Taking environmental concerns to the heart of their big day, betrothed greenies, Stefanie and Robert, will be taking their last journey as single people by tube. The celebratory Jubilee Line will be ferrying them from Dollis Hill to Baker Street on Saturday afternoon to get sustainably hitched with a reusable dress, organic wedding cake and a second-hand ring. So stick a handful of recycled confetti in your pocket in you're riding the wedding line......

Google is out and about capturing London for the latest addition to its Street View service. These 360 degree panoramic views are already available in most major US cities, but now Google is capturing everyone and everything on the streets of London. If your’re planning a visit to one of London’s seedier establishments or are a generally dodgy person then you may want to watch the traffic. You could become part of the growing......

The DLR has come a long way since its birth almost 21 years ago. What started off as a relatively modest initiative for getting commuters into and out of the newly regenerated Docklands area has blossomed into a major transport backbone for parts of East London. And yet, despite trundling through its teenage years without too much adolescent drama, it seems that the DLR is experiencing delayed growing pains as it enters its twenties.......

Crayolas, set squares and glue-on sparkles to the ready: a competition has just been launched to design the next generation of Routemaster buses. Voters will of course recall that the much-loved bus was a key plank of Boris Johnson's manifesto, as he tempted bendy-bus loathers by claiming the articulated eyesores would be banished from our streets in favour of a new fleet of Routemasters. Yet during his first two months in office the topic......

Boris has clearly been caught short of a few bob on the long, late night cab ride home. Today, he announced a trial period allowing cab drivers to stop on red routes, in the wee hours, to enable their fares to visit the ATM and pick up cash for their fare, having inadvisably squandered it on that last round of drinks. This move is to improve passenger safety and to help get us home zippily......

Boris may not have been able to save our Post Offices, but he has succeeded in reversing a decision to close dozens of Underground ticket offices. The move, a Livingstone money-scrimping initiative, was opposed by passenger groups amid concerns that safety would be compromised by staffless stations, and Johnson's decision to keep them open was greeted as [cliche alert] a "victory for common sense". As relations between the City Hall incumbent and his predecessor......

As the third anniversary of July 7th approaches, new security measures aimed at preventing another terrorist attack have been unveiled by the Department for Transport and British Transport Police. Airport-style x-ray machines (complete with saturnine operators) are to be introduced at certain Tube and mainline rail stations from this week. The machines will be used to scan passengers bags, and come on the heels of those knife scanners that stop people boarding with a......

Those slightly addle-eyed folk who rant about Government conspiracies, claim that we're all microchipped at birth and believe the Oyster card is a sinister scheme to track our movements may be feeling a little righteous today: Transport for London has been criticised for "collecting data without a clear purpose" when asking kids to fill in an application form for their free Travelcard. Since June, kids looking to jump on the bus or tube have......

It's definitely that time of year. Heatbuster ads have been on the tubes for at least 6 weeks and those announcements about carrying a bottle of water with you (too late once you're in the bowels of the platforms) are resonating blandly on a regular basis. So, it's time for TfL's latest wheeze to cool the Underground down. Cue: GIANT FANS! Genius. Around 40 portable industrial fans will be introduced at key stations to......

Eye witnesses report a massive fire on a railway bridge over Stratford station. People on the platforms are seeing flames and smoke from only a metres away down the track. Apparently nothing going in or out of Stratford Overground but TfL haven't caught up with this on their website yet. We will have updates and pictures from eye witness soon. Also, unrelated, Mile End station is currently closed due to a person under a......

The East London Line may at present be a relatively small stretch of track, but for residents of New Cross Gate it’s becoming a pretty big problem. Closed for extension work until 2010, the line, which previously ran from Whitechapel to New Cross Gate, is reportedly causing interior damage to houses in the latter area. Kirsten Downer, a resident who lives near to the tracks, says there are “cracks in the walls” of her......

Sheltered, London 2008 There have been shootings in New Cross and Peckham this afternoon. Two men are seriously injured. It's not just youths who are dangerous with knives, a pensioner has been sectioned after attacking an 11 year old girl in Feltham with a bladed weapon Cyclists petition for reconsideration of motorcycle bus lane use The Mayor announced a crackdown on the taxi tout trade to protect passengers while Addison Lee decided not to take......

A slice of sponge cake and a hearty round of "Happy Birthday" to the Rotherhithe Tunnel! Not the nearby Brunel-designed Thames Tunnel, (the world's first underwater tunnel, lest we forget) but its quieter, lesser-celebrated neighbour that ferries road traffic underneath the Thames from Southwark to Tower Hamlets. It turns 100 years old today. Opened in 1908 by the future King George V, Rotherhithe was the first road tunnel linking north London with south, and......

Just a heads up that National Express East Anglia services are still disrupted and running a reduced service into Liverpool Street station due to overhead power cables which collapsed onto the line on Monday evening. Ironically, £150m worth of work on renewing overhead power cables between London and Chelmsford was begun by Network Rail earlier this year with a finish date projected for 2012 (like everything else). The line is expected to be back to......

Right now, on the mean streets of Thornton Heath you might be disturbed to see students from Kensington Avenue School walking Ark-entry like, 2 by 2, in what we guess will be less than solemn procession as they'll be legitimately skiiving off lessons for a full 500m round trip. If there's cheering involved, that's because they're part of a national attempt, coordinated by the charity Brake to break the World Record for number of......

Image of parking meters having a day off courtesy of malias' Flickrstream under the Creative Commons Attribution license 50 years on London streets today.......

Westminster City Council has announced that it is trialling a budget parking scheme in its Queensway car park. Using a pricing structure based on that of Easyjet, the hourly rate will vary depending on how full the car park is when the driver enters. When it is nearly empty customers will be charged as little as 20p per hour for the duration of their stay, a price which will rise on a scale to......

Hammersmith and City (Whitechapel to Barking) and District line (Whitechapel to Plaistow) trains are again suspended this morning while the Royal Engineers' bomb experts detonate and defuse the ticking World War II UXB. This is all happening on Diamond Geezer's doorstep and he points out that if only the Big Brother house was still filmed in Bromley-by-Bow the whole telly monstrosity would be shut down by now. Check Transport for London for travel updates.......

An unexploded WWII bomb disrupted tube services on the District and Hammersmith and City Lines last night when it was discovered near Bromley-by-Bow Station in a river by Sugar House Lane yesterday. The Army went in to investigate and the area was evacuated immediately after the discovery. The Newham Recorder reports: It is said to be one of the largest bombs found in East London since the war and may be bigger than the......