About london_pjb

Londoners, it has to be said, have a love-hate relationship with black-cab drivers. Normally, the extent of the love and/or hate is directly correlated to the weather conditions and whether you are in London or some other capital city. For example, find yourself in London …

Any attempt to bring the noble sport of darts to the Olympics was probably set back eight years this morning through the publication of this Bloomberg report. BSkyB plans to charge viewers £9.95 to watch the two darts world champions — Andy Fordham of the …

Once every few months you can be fairly sure that a news item will be released on how much fare-dodgers are “costing” the transport system. Today the Liberal Democrats claim that nonpayers are taking 150m free trips a year. Londonist has never had much faith …

It’s been a dispiriting morning for London, which has seen its reputation in two areas take a battering. First, Londoners’ reputation for lack of friendliness took a hammering when Elliott School in Putney won the Friends Reunited“School Friendship League Table”, and then London’s claim to …

Liverpudlians might have a reputation for moaning that the world hates them, but they can’t hold a candle to Londoners when it comes to complaining about travel. Complaints about commuting, a road block on the M1, or the possibility of a rail strike over Christmas …

Londonist can sometimes see why we journalists get a bad name. A quick surf of even today’s newspapers will see that Brian Drysdale, “48”, driver of the car involved in the rail crash in Berkshire last Saturday, drove onto the railway line, removed his clothes, …

Starbucks has announced that it plans to open four shops A DAY throughout 2005. Londonist nearly collapsed in horror before realising that this was worldwide, not in London. We spent a number of years working outside central London in the early 1990s and the return …

Just as people of a certain age can always remember where they were when they heard that Kennedy had been shot (as comedian Steven Wright put it, ‘I remember where I was, I was on the sixth floor of a book depository….’) so Londonist imagines …

The supermarkets might go mad for pumpkins rather than fireworks; the TV programmes might be flooded with American imports mentioning Halloween rather than bonfire night; but in this dark quarter of South-East London, where electricity is still viewed with suspicion, if not seen as outright …

The Londonist was interested to read that about 200,000 people left the UK this year for more than 12 months, half of them aged between 25 and 44. A total of 513,000 people arrived, according to figures from the Office Of National Statistics (pdf file). …