The police have their work cut out investigating knife crime and youth violence these days so we imagine they're not best pleased at having to track down the gang of 3 teens who eschewed blades in their pursuit of cheap and mindless 'entertainment' and instead indulged in some light felinicide, throwing poor puss Kilo, a former resident of Battersea and recently adopted by HMS Belfast as ship's cat, overboard into the drink. Police have......

Scientists at the Natural History Museum who have been analysing big cat skulls excavated from the Tower of London in the 1930s have today confirmed that there were Barbary Lions from North Africa with magnificent dark manes resident at the Tower of London Royal Menagerie as far back as 1280 AD. This makes them the earliest confirmed lion remains in the British Isles after the extinction of the Pleistocene cave lion at the end......

This might just be an excuse for us to post a cute puppy pic on a Friday, but wouldn't you want to know if your dog hated your taste in music? At a kennel for seeing-eye dogs in Woodford Green, a caretaker noticed the penned-up pups would calm down when she put on classical music. She tested out different kinds of music, and found the little yappers responded best to classical. Now they let......

Intrepid zoo visitor Steve Lowe took his thermal imaging camera to London Zoo and came up with pictures that show interesting things about animals not revealed just by gawking at them in their enclosures. He has now donated the photos to the zoo, where they will be used in education and even in veterinary work. How cool is the fact that a zebra's stripes put out differing amounts of heat? Very! If you also......

Pigeons may be flying rats to Ken Livingstone and thousands of other Londoners - but to some, they are war heroes. And worth a pretty penny in portrait form. Oil paintings depicting the birds who flew back and forth during two world wars, acting as spies and messengers have been sold at auction for astonishing prices. Sold by Bonhams auction house, the eight oil paintings were purchased mostly by an unnamed buyer who placed......

So you're driving along, say, and you hear a strange hissing noise from underneath the seat. Do you (a) pull over and investigate the cause, or (b) slither to the conclusion that a sneaky snake has ensnared itself in your vehicle? Embarrassed of Twickenham opted for (b). She quickly hailed down a passing AA patrol car, the driver of which was able to locate the culprit: a can of de-icer that had lost its......

Here we see a herd of Metropolitanus bestialacus encountering their rare, six-legged cousins the Metropolitanus aureus on the plains of the Serengeti. Indigenous to arid lands, these animals have evolved capacious water cavities along their backs to preserve the precious rainfall. Original background image from Kumasawa's Flickr photostream.......

Firefighters rank pretty highly in our list of bona fide, real life heroes. So, news that a fire crew in Deptford rescued and resucitated a 9 month old Staffordshire Bull Terrier from a fire that started in the basement of a Chinese Restaurant yesterday, just makes us go all moist at the edges. Four people were also led to safety by firefighters from Deptford, Greenwich and East Greenwich firestations but it's the image of......

Battersea Dogs and Cats Home are doing it again; tugging at our heartstrings with a soppy face, melting brown eyes, greying fur and eager to please expression... yes, it's Neil Morrissey - him of Men Behaving Badly infamy - fronting the dogs home's latest adopt a dog campaign. Morrissey led a mass dog walk at the weekend with his own cute rescue pup, Tiggy, to raise awareness of the tragic number of pooches that......

Talia has already covered the more common places to go dancing tomorrow night, but for a more alternative music New Years Eve, then wander over to Kings Cross’ Monto Water Rats to catch Brighton rockers Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster play a special New Years gig with support from Gingerbread Men, The Foxes and a few others. Alternatively, there are still a few tickets available for Super Fury Animals at Royal Festival Hall. The fun starts......

The Christmas turkey is cold and in sandwiches. A few of us have struggled back to work, carrying surplus chocolate to the office in a desperate attempt to stop our expanding waistlines. Which must mean it's about time to start panicking about what to do on New Year's Eve. Aside from rammed pubs, pricey nightclubs and awkward parties in someone's frontroom, the main focus for London will be squarely on the London Eye. Since......

While the turkeys are getting nervous and the butchers are doing a roaring trade in this crucial last week before Christmas, a very unwelcome slaughter has taken place in Letchmore Heath, Herts. Gangotri was a sacred cow at the Bhaktivedanta Manor Hindu temple; she had been injured in what the report calls 'a mating injury' last September and had been unable to stand since then. She was given a fatal dose of barbiturate by......

Bomb scare hoax caller convicted Met mutiny over backdating payrise Pigeon flypast for pet heroes £14m of fake pound coins land counterfeiter in jail Dobbey the Enfield reindeer goes to the pub Image courtesy of Ian Muttoo via the Londonist flickr group.......

Scientists from the Zoological Society of London have bagged the first ever wild footage of the long-eared jerboa. The timid, nocturnal creature can be found, with great difficulty, in the deserts of Mongolia and China. It is now, officially, Londonist's second favourite animal, behind the numbat. We defy you to watch this footage without grinning like a tomfool. How cute is that? Not as cute as this. Very little is known about the elusive......

You'll forgive dear old Londonist for being a touch misty-eyed, but in our day a dog was a child's best friend, a source of companionship and a trusted pal through thick and thin. Times have changed though, and according to the RSPCA there's an increasing problem of pooches being used as status symbols and de-facto weapons, rather than the loveable pets who fetch slippers and chew the Sunday periodical. Last year saw a 42%......

A special two-for-one offer on gig reviews this time. Londonist saw the slightly odd combination of Gorgoroth (old-school Norwegian black metal) at Scala on Wednesday, and former System Of A Down frontman Serj Tankian the next night at the Astoria. Musically they were worlds apart, despite a shared taste for heavy riffs.Gorgoroth are not a band for the faint-hearted. Once arrested in Poland for a "blasphemous" stage show that included naked women on crucifixes and......

28. Urban Legends Of The Underbelly! Urban legends are often vague, friend-of-a-friend tales (FOAFtales) similar to ‘Chinese whispers’, in that they are distorted, exaggerated and through generations of storytelling, they become myth, embedded in our society. For the last fifty or more years there has been a sinister legend pertaining to the London Underground that a mysterious, possibly caped figure, lurks in the cold tunnels, and is known for the ghastly act of pushing......

For my first post to the Londonist I had several interesting digital maps, too many in fact to fit in, so here are a few I had left over. First up it's a city guide, nothing that new but moodmapper.com tries to create a USP by using your moods. Click on the coloured grid to show your feelings and let the site do the rest, an interesting idea. London Transport has a problem with......

Revolting peasants and Scottish heroes, a buried river, and a 1000 years of death, slaughter and destruction. Smithfield surely deserves some kind of cultural centre. And there just happens to be the perfect place to put it, if we act fast… As many readers will know, several buildings of the famous meat-market complex are under threat. The General market, Fish market and Red House are in a dilapidated state and the targets for demolition......

Travis Bickle: All the animals come out at night - whores, skunk pussies, buggers, queens, fairies, dopers, junkies, sick, venal. Someday a real rain will come and wash all this scum off the streets. Below is a genuine conversation this Londonista has had whilst walking through Camden - Drug dealer: (over the hubbub of "skunk, weed, hash, skunk, weed") AK47? Anyone want AK47? Londonist: (to friend, perhaps a little too loudly in hindsight) Bloody......

Depending on how much Internet reading you do, you may or may not be aware that today is Blog Action Day – a day on which bloggers around the web unite to put a single important issue on everyone’s mind. This year it’s the environment. And in honour of this, Londonist could think of nothing more appropriate than to suggest ideas for a greener day in this fair city of ours. 1. Get on......

Well Londonist has run two animal stories into one here, on account of not wanting to look like we’ve gone soft. And to keep all parties happy, there’s a doggy one, and a kitty one. Although the cat one is actually rather sad: the business of an abused and diseased kitten which was abandoned to die at a West London recycling depot gets us as full of passion and anger as the next daft, animal-mad......

21. The Beast Of Barnet For ten years the so-called Barnet ‘big cat’ caused confusion in the London suburbs – a few years before the ‘beast’ of Bexley reared its head, even though both were possibly the same animal, or at least part of the same puzzle. Strangely, in 2001 the press claimed that the elusive wild cat had been caught – after many years of frustrating police searches, fruitless tracking, and numerous sightings......

More than 30 horses were rescued from a burning barn early Friday morning in the Hertfordshire village of Bricket Wood. When firefighters arrived things looked pretty bleak for the horses, trapped in one end of the barn while the fire burned in the other. Fortunately the fire brigade got down to some pretty serious business. They sprayed a ‘water curtain’ around the barn to prevent the fire spreading to other buildings, a digger went......

We Brits love our birds and animals. We love to shrinkwrap their body parts and burn them on bbqs on a Sunday afternoon, we love to take them for long walks in the park and we love to watch their majestic beauty on BBC documentaries with a Sigur Ros soundtrack. What we won't countenance is letting the little buggers run free in our green and grey and pleasant land. They do tend to shit......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 24th September 1917: A zeppelin drops a 50 kilogram bomb that lands just outside the Bedford Hotel on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury, central London. 13 people are killed and a further 26 injured. Tuesday – 25th September 1818: The first human-to-human blood transfusion is performed at Guy’s Hospital. Previous blood transfusions had used animals’ blood. Wednesday – 26th September 1850: The first stretch of the North London......

19. Freakish Falls! During the August of 1920 in Woodford, stones poured from the sky for three consecutive days without explanation. Four years later at Eltham, Plumstead, Woolwich and Shooters Hill a great ice storm battered the area, despite the afternoon being the hottest for two years! The hailstones were the size of eggs, and some jagged in nature, measuring five-inches which fell from the sky, cutting residents who ran for cover. In January......

Gorillas have been getting a rather good press of late in London. The Gorilla Kingdom at London Zoo, which opened in March, has seen huge numbers of visitors trudging up Regent's Park way to gawp at resident lowland gorillas Bobby, Zaire and Effie swing about their new home. Meanwhile, a television ad featuring a sullen simian being sparked into life by the crashing drum break of Phil Collins 'In The Air Tonight' has become......

Being referred to as the father of TV celebrity Sharon Osbourne would no doubt cause Don Arden to throw one of his legendary tantrums from beyond the grave and hang the hapless BBC hack who penned these words from his office window. This after all is the woman who used to send the contents of her children's nappies hidden in Macy's boxes to music executives who'd pissed her off. Arden, whose behaviour earned him......

16. Strange Invaders Whilst residing at his terraced house in Kentish Town, during the 1980s, Christopher Fowler began to notice glimpses of unusual whitish creatures in his back garden. After finally finding the time to fully investigate, and to dismiss such possible hallucinations on his own behalf, Mr Fowler was astounded to discover several albino lobster-like critters, which plagued his yard for several months. A friend of Mr Fowler’s, whilst visiting one evening, almost......