When we heard about the Battersea Power Station was to be open to the public (thanks Annie Mole!) over the past weekend, we rushed down with camera ready. And, yes indeed, the iconic landmark was there to be roamed around in all its massive glory. The folks putting on the show made us check out a presentation on the station’s future and sign a waiver before letting us but they were nice enough to......

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......

On Sunday, Londonist will participate in Food 2.0: Nom, Nom, Nom. Organised by London Blogger Annie Mole, in partnership with TrustedPlaces.com, Nom, Nom, Nom pits food bloggers, TrustedPlaces.com members, food photographers, food journalists, food authors, and everyday cooks against each other in cook-off to create the best three-course meal as judged by a panel of experts. The event will take place at the Cookery School on Little Portland Street. Without giving too much away,......

Come now. Tell us. Have you ever been caught staring folornly at a stone cold fox across a crowded tube carriage? Have you ever acted on a subterranean erotic impulse? Are you and your lover in fact sitting there now, fondling each other and fondly remembering the time you bumped bits on the Jubilee Line, laughed shyly and struck up a saucy conversation? Qype wants to know, nosy blighters. So does Annie Mole (we......

A few weeks back a group of Flickr folk, led by Annie Mole and supported by Trusted Places and the lovelies at Flickr themselves, were given free tickets to run amok in the London Transport Museum with their cameras. The Museum reopened in November last year following a major revamp and what better PR could the place wish for than a load of London photographers taking nearly 700 snapshots, posting them on Flickr and gushing......

He attacked someone at Waterloo Underground station taking pictures. The photographer in question, though, was quick thinking and snappy and took this very clear mugshot of his assailant. British Transport Police are now seeking to find and question him. PC Ben Dawson said: It would appear the victim, an amateur photographer, who enjoys taking snaps of London street scenes, was taking shots on the escalators when a member of the public took exception to......

After masquerading as functional, rational, squared-off and decidedly masculine entity for over a century, the London Underground has this week come out as a woman. A new, sweeping, curvaceous tube map has come to light: it rather resembles a multi-coloured Medusa, or perhaps a mad conductor…but be careful what you see in it as the creator, Max Roberts, is in fact a psychologist. The original map by Harry Beck is of course a work......

If you got stuck on the Jubilee line in this morning's rush hour you'll probably not be best pleased to hear the rumblings of a tube strike bouncing round London. Unions are threatening to ballot members on strike action if safety issues for staff aren't resolved by Transport for London in the next few days. That's issues such as ticket office closures and lone working. Which seems bizarre because those are some of the key......

If you were out and about on the Underground this weekend you might have caught sight of one of these guys on TfL's latest 'don't be a selfish bastard' campaign. Together for London employs a gang of unthreateningly rounded cartoon figures, The Londoners, each promising to be a better traveller: I will offer my seat I won't play my music out loud I won't drop litter There's even a short split-screen film by Mike......

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......

Toot toot! And honk, honk! For the London Transport Museum has finally reopened after two years and £22 million of renovation. Hot on the (w)heels of St Pancras. Typical: you wait years for a major nexus of transport heritage to open, and then two come along at once. The Covent Garden attraction tells the story of the trotting, crawling and whizzing of our city over the past 200 years. There’s also a section looking......

It's possible that some of you, dear readers, may occasionally travel upon our world famous London Underground. And possible that you may have experienced some discomfort while doing so, maybe a little over-crowding, maybe a little lateness, perhaps even the odd denial of service. Some might argue that these occasional 'blips' in your commute might have arisen through the failings of the tube maintenance firm, Metronet (now in administration after a predicted £2bn overspend).......

Local trader Mike Weedon has proposed new toilets to be built in the trendy bar and club-filled area of Islington. The proposal has been taken seriously by Islington Council as imore public conveniences should be available ... but not if they're named after Joe Orton. This infamous homosexual playwright of the 1960s rocked London with controversial plays such as 'Loot', What the Butler Saw' and 'Entertaining Mr Sloane' (a corpse in a cupboard and......

For those of you who are still dubious about London’s public transport system, you may be interested to hear it’s just been rated as the third best in the world. Although station cleanliness and comfy seats may not initially strike you, it is, apparently, one of the most luxurious transportation systems in the world. Carrying 3 million people a day, and featuring a whole host of options from the iconic double decker buses to......

That's right, the DLR has been going for, if you can believe it, 20 years today. This seems like forever for this Londonista's favourite mode of transport around London. So where did it all start? Well Londonist took a little light rail trip down memory lane. Way back in the 80s, it's hard to imagine but the Docklands were a no man's land in London. (No one came in, no one went out.) This......

Everyone remembers the tragedy that was 7/7. In 2005, 4 suicide bombers killed 52 people. A further 800 were injured. Whilst it's still resonant to us, it's even more so for the survivors who today launched legal proceedings after the Home Office refused to hold an independent public enquiry. Lawyers have said that the group of survivors involved want the hearing to 'ensure lessons were learnt in the future'. Oury Clark Solicitors feel the......

Westminster City Council is making a stand against free London newspapers London Lite (owned by Associated Newspapers) and The London Paper (owned by Rupert Murdoch) not because the City Council is tired of the two types of non-news offered in the many, many copies distributed each day, nor are they taking an official stand against the irritating assault course of newspaper distributors outside each major tube and bus station but because there is just......

BBC4 love the tube so much that they're making a night of it: Love it or loathe it, the London Underground has been an integral part of life in the capital for over a century. Arena: Underground is the centrepiece of a whole evening of programmes celebrating the subterranean pitfalls and pleasures of travelling on the tube. Robert Elms presents the evening and promises to drive safely. We were going to talk about Annie......

With this column, we try to bring you a new blog every week. We scour the cybervestry for new species of weblog, like a Victorian naturalist in the forests of Borneo. This week, we've stumbled upon a cracking little site hiding in the undergrowth. London Skyline eschews any nod towards a clever name in favour of doing what it says on the tin - writing about the London skyline. And the author asks a......

Our weekly roundup of London blogs Our find of the week is The Greenwich Phantom, who writes daily about the goings-on in that borough of contrasts. And as phantoms go, he is vociferous. On the demolision of a Victorian building to make way for a new Terrance Conran pier. It couldn't possibly have been approved because it was designed by Conran could it? Honestly - what was Conran going to say? "No - you......

This week, we've noticed that London's media seems to be diversifying into sundry formats. And not only that - the different organs are all bitching about one another. Time for us to wade in... The Times launched a snazzy local web presence last week called 'Cool in your Code'. The site presents polished video snippets about culture and property in your part of London. Assuming, that is, you live in Hoxton or Marylebone, as......

The snow may have brought London to a halt, but the blogorash just keeps spreading. Here are a few of the things that caught our eye out there this week... Thankfully Onionbagblogger's new darts (yes, darts) didn't literally catch our eye, but we did it think it was nice in an age of game consoles that at least one Londoner was enjoying himself the old fashioned way: Ah yes - the darts... 23g of......

Ok, we've had a good cry in the corner and kicked as many shins as possible over this, but time now to take a deep breath and finally get over not being nominated for a Bloggie this year. Michael Caine, Bob Hoskins, Iain Sinclair and Black Sabbath didn't get nominated either so we're in good company (shut up, this is our way of dealing with it). Anyway - we are still very happy to......

You know, Londonist is two years old next month? We just thought we'd mention that in case you'd forgotten...oh, and did we tell you how cool we think these London Underground placemats are? Ok, ok, not very subtle we know. But they are pretty cool (and geeky at the same time, not an easy thing to pull off). Plus they also double as a kind of glass Tube jigsaw, which really appeals to us......

Ok, try not to spit your breakfast everywhere, but London has been voted the best overall city for public transport in the world! According to a survey on Tripadvisor.com one in four respondents reckoned our Tube and bus systems were way better than those in New York (16% of the vote) and Paris (a crappy 12%). We've got to ask: have any of these people ever been to Japan, Singapore, Germany...anywhere? As much as......

If you've just got held up in Central line delays [suspended between Liverpool St and White City by the way], then you should be pointing your web browser at the TFL customer Charter. Instead we'll place a bet that most of you haven't even heard of it. In fact even we forgot about it until a few weeks ago when the ever entertaining Annie Mole reminded us about it. Having recieved £9 of refunds......

TfL are currently reporting severe delays on ALL LINES due to "faulty communication equipment." Seems a bit weird to us, as we were under the vague opinion that different lines used different communications systems. There's no real news on any of the usual outlets at the moment and Annie Mole isn't answering her phone, so we'll just have to wait and see. Probably got something to do with the weather though,......

The millions and millions of Londoners who have been to see The Da Vinci Code (sadly not as bad as we'd hoped it would be) or X-Men 3 (happily, not as bad as we'd feared it would be) or any other major release over the past couple of weeks have been treated to TfL's new advert, showing a day in the life of a young man-about-town as he uses the many forms of public transport......

On Friday, while on our way to see DJ Shadow over in West London (see above), we found ourselves seated opposite one of the Tube Challengers who were racing around Zone 1 (we could tell because he was wearing a sticker that said 'Tube Challenge.com' on it). The guy looked pretty frantic, scouring his Tube map, trying to calculate the shortest route, before jumping off at High Street Kensington and running off into the......

A big thank you to all of the speakers at last night’s Blogging Demystified event at the Apple Store, hosted by Londonist. Equally, a deserved sláinte to the hundred or so people who attended and persevered over the considerable background noise. And a melodramatic Shakespearian bow to those of you who came along to the pub afterwards for some beery postscripts. As hastily organised first-time efforts go, the evening seemed to be a success,......