Later this month our benevolent Mayor will announce plans to introduce a "living wage" for all staff employed by the Greater London Authority and any organisations funded by the London Development Authority, says a report in the Guardian. He will also encourage hoteliers to do the same before the Olympics. Boris has been under pressure to introduce these measures from various groups, to improve the lot of those at the bottom of the food......

Get Dixon of Dock Green on the blower. See if DCI Burnside of Sun Hill is still kicking about ('Tosh isn't, sadly). A lack of security staff for the 2012 Games has led a senior police figure to recommend that veteran officers are brought out of retirement for the Olympics. Having outlined a £600 million pound security plan earlier in the year, officials are now concerned that there simply won't be enough able and......

Boris may be scheming to plant new trees, but it may not be enough to recover the foliage losses London experiences every year. According to Trees for Cities, 9,000 trees were felled in London last year, which would eat away the vast majority of Boris’ proposed 10,000 planting project. Trees for Cities works with local communities to create green areas in urban settings. The independent charity is currently campaigning to secure protection for city......

Another day, another thunderclap of hand-wringing and dire Nostradamus warnings about the 2012 Games. Organisers have been accused of "spending money like water" as costs for the event rise like floodwaters threatening the ageing Thames Barrier. This is the charge made by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, who have pricked their penny-pinching ears up at the well-publicised report by the Public Accounts Committee that the original budget was unrealistic. Costs for key buildings......

Colour us surprised: those original 2012 Olympic costs were totally unrealistic Hounslow residents, consider yourselves warned: a teachers strike this Thursday means the yoof will be on the loose Arrests have been made in a 21-year old murder case Here comes the bat cab! That's, um, a battery-powered cab, not the kind of motor Bruce Wayne would be seen in. Pubs are closing at frightening rate. Do your bit, people - get plastered in......

2012 Games won't benefit locals, claims think tank Take that, Monaco - London now has the world's priciest homes Our Amy's up for three Ivor Novello gongs Lie detector software proves a nice little money-saver for south London council Russian heavyweights to square off at the High Court Which? reveals candidates for London Restaurant of the Year Image courtesy of Orhan* via the Londonist flickr group.......

We've spent enough time wading through the flytipped rubbish on our street or struggling to blast the grime off our bodies following a grubby commute home to realise that London's not exactly the cleanest of places. But is it really the dirtiest city in Europe? In a shameless promotion, travel experts Trip Advisor commissioned a survey asking tourists to rank their likes and dislikes across a number of continental destinations, and London cleaned up......

2012 "Friend-ship" scheme shelved before it sets sail. Is the sun setting on the Square Mile? Grape of wrath: Man slips on squashed fruit and sues M&S for "loss of confidence". We think he's got more chance of turning a profit by sending the video in to You've Been Framed. Stingy NHS won't cough up money for grandmother's sight-saving operation. Costs for parking a plane at Heathrow set to rise. Naturally, passengers will be......

Macabre London: First, man denies murdering model but admits to necrophilia; then a headless corpse turns up in northwest London. We find ourselves suspiciously eyeing other commuters on our Tube ride home this evening. Corrupt London: We know that London is ranked first on all kinds of lovely lists. But we’d prefer to forgo the dubious distinction of being first in rates of debit and credit card fraud. Tonally challenged London: Londonist thinks it’s......

Now, stories from the IT world ordinarily don’t do much for Londonist besides make our eyes glaze over. (We’re sorry, IT people, we’re sure you’re lovely, that your jobs are fascinating, and that we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without you. It’s just that we can’t understand what you’re saying.) So when we noticed this story about a new website created to help IT companies bid for contracts for the 2012......

Urban decay is on its way: ‘pashmina-wrapped lemmings’ are fleeing the ‘great termites nest’ that is London for the safety of the suburbs. We find ourselves alarmed not by stories of marauding youth but by metaphors run amok. 2012 British Olympians to enlist? No, but they may do a stint at an army base. After a little soul-searching, St Bart’s clears itself of wrongdoing in a security breach that left confidential medical records scattered......

Our friends in Westminster have voted that more money from the Eamon Holmes fronted tax on the poor, the National Lottery, can be used to plug the funding gap for the 2012 Olympics. Culture Secretary James Purnell said the £9.3bn budget for the Games (almost four times the estimate that helped win the bid in 2005) is "robust". We doubt it. How has it suddenly become robust? The real lottery here is determining how much......

We're game for these 2012 Olympics and, yesterday, tried to get all excited about the Get Set Roadshow that will be shimmying its way through all 33 Boroughs soon. But then we saw Londonist Flickr Pool contributor, MykReeve's first-hand shot of the thing and were somewhat underwhelmed. Many thanks to MykReeve for being our man on the scene.......

It's tempting to bask in the success of the re-branded O2 and write off the building's seven year existence as useless white elephant de nos jours as a bad dream. Unfortunately, that was no nightmare, and it seems that financially the Millennium Dome never stood a chance. The assembled politicians and VIPs had barely clunked their awkward way through Auld Lang Syne on December 31st, 1999, before the whole project was skint. Newly released......

Londonist is all for environmentalism. We even clothe the Londonist baby in non-disposable washable cotton nappies and take all our groceries home from the organic food shop in a bag made of woven hemp. We wash our hair with a cuttlefish and row everywhere. However, when we heard that a low-carbon Olympic flame will light up the 2012 Games, we weren't impressed. We want a big old dirty flame. This is the Olympics! Let's......

Last week's fire at the Stratford Olympic site was apparently caused by a gas torch (which is not a gas version of an electric torch as we initially thought, but some type of cutting tool which sends out sparks), which lit a pile of insulation material on fire. Hold on there a second. Seriously? A torch? Because, of course, one of the most easily recognisable symbols of the Olympics is the Olympic Flame, which......

The 2012 Olympic Games may seem a long way off, but the pressure is starting to mount on the proposed developments for East London. In addition to building a shiny new stadium, the Olympics is meant to be an opportunity to provide more jobs, improved transport, and 9,000 new homes (of which half will be low-cost). While the Overground is now servicing Stratford and due to hook up to the East London Line in......

The Olympic Park has received a lot of attention lately, unveiling its flagship stadium, promising to start work on it early and suffering fiery blazes which fortuitously destroyed a warehouse due for demolition. This Saturday though, an audaciously different kind of attention will be focused on the Stratford site: imagining the Olympics weren't happening. WE SELL BOXES WE BUY GOLD is an artistic collaboration exploring what the Olympic site means to people and endeavouring......

Well, it's certainly less controversial than the logo. The design for the new Olympic Stadium is something of a zoetrope in the aspirational design launch video which follows bits of the stadium as they fly and crawl through London to Stratford, witnessed by a jogging girl with a coldsore. The bits all spin together excitingly to settle into a massive, goldfish bowl. Or sunken, oval cupcake. After the Games, 25,000 temporary Olympic seats will......

With immaculate PR timing, just a week after London was urged to focus on delivering the 2012 Games on time, the team at Olympic HQ announce that work is starting on the Stratford Olympic Stadium 3 months ahead of schedule. In fact, they're so ahead of their game the news hasn't yet made it into the official 2012 website, although, that tells us other thrilling news: the laying of underground power cables is also......

This weekend, Rowan Walker wrote in the Observer of her torturous but strangely addictive experience of training at the Islington Boxing Gym to raise awareness of the fierce campaign to get female boxing recognised as an Olympic Sport for the 2012 Games in London. According to the International Olympic Committee, "Boxing ranks among the Olympic Games' most illustrious sports" yet only for men, to date. As Walker's article indicates, the number and calibre of......

Hmm. Londonist hasn’t always had happy bouncy things to say about the 2012 Olympics. And it is rather likely that we will come up with some more searing satirical observations before too long. That is what Londonist does. But just for today, it is with vague approbation that we report on one of the side effects of the whole proceedings – the Personal Best scheme. It is true that the idea behind it is a......

Phosphatic rock. A radium-luminised gauge dial face. Radium paint. It sounds like an amateur nuclear hobbyist's shopping list, but these are just some of the scary-sounding radioactive materials found recently at the Olympic Park site in east London. Contractors uncovered the objects whilst clearing a 100-year old waste tip near Stratford last month. A subsequent survey, ordered by the Olympic Delivery Authority, revealed "low level" contamination and hotspots of the highly poisonous heavy metal......

The third of our interviews with the Tory candidates for London Mayor. Previously, Victoria Borwick and Andrew Boff. Warwick Lightfoot has, no doubt, spent a lifetime tolerating jibes about his Tolkeinesque name. He's also acquired an outstanding CV that includes stints as Mayor of Kensington and Chelsea, Special Advisor to the Chancellor and 20 years experience as a councillor. Most impressively of all, he's the first Tory candidate to admit to vomiting on the......

As always, there are a million things to do in London this week. If you fancy a night in though, here are a few things to keep you occupied. On TV, Londonist likes: Monday, 16 July Building Britain (BBC1, 19:30-20:00) The first in the series, Peter Ackroyd's back to take us through the changes in London's skyline and how money and power are influencing how our city will look. Olympic Backlash: Tonight (ITV1, 20:00-20:30)......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 2nd July 1865: One-time Methodist minister William Booth preaches to a large crowd at an open-air ‘mission’ in Whitechapel, founding the ‘East London Christian Mission’, which would later be renamed ‘The Salvation Army’. Tuesday – 3rd July 1981: A punk concert at the Hamborough Tavern in Southall, West London, leads to fighting between skinheads and Asian youths. The riot is just one of many violent ‘uprisings’ to......

There's a mere 5 years, 1 month and 5 days until the start of the 2012 Olympics, and we'll bet you're wondering how you're going to fill your time until then. Sure, there are other sporting events you could watch and cultural events you could attend, but what if you fancy something more Olympic-esque? Then the Cultural Olympiad will be right up your alley. It's not a sporting event, but a festival intended to......

Tessa Jowell and Ken Livingston sat smiling professionally side by side today at a presentation to members of the International Olympic Committee whilst the press carried gleeful stories about their respective divergent opinions of the infamous logo. Tessa Jowell declared herself, rather touchingly, "unusual" on the Today programme this morning because of her view that the logo is "terrific". Ken, on the other hand, was denouncing the team responsible for the epilepsy inducing brand......

BBC publishes Goatse Olympics logo!! If you have no idea why this is a mistake, wikipedia 'goatse'. But, be warned, it's not nice. Early nicknames for the real logo include 'Gay swastika puzzle' and 'Tiswas disaster'. But the leading meme is of 'Lisa Simpson giving head'. Online petition heading on for 10,000 signatories. Over on Facebook, more than 50 groups have been set up to change the logo. First link with thanks to :JW.......

No matter what your opinion of the 2012 olympics, we're now all helpless to stop it and we won't be able to get away from it for five years so in a Stockholm Syndrome-like way we should all come to love our captors and get excited. After a video treasure hunt across the web, today the branding was launched. How was it to represent London? Would it be all beefeaters and black cabs? The......