This Week In London’s History Monday – 10th March 1906: The Baker Street & Waterloo Railway opens, running between Baker Street and Elephant & Castle stations. It would soon become known as the Bakerloo Line. Tuesday – 11th March 1692: The Royal Chelsea Hospital is founded by Charles II. Designed by Christopher Wren, the hospital would also become the model for Greenwich’s Royal Navel Hospital. Wednesday – 12th March 1988: The Bank of England......

January is a toughie. Torn between new year's virtue and that rebellious streak? Well, here are some things to amuse you that at least wont tug too hard at your purse strings. Monday: Witch hunts to start the week at Gresham College from 6pm. Free knowledge. Tuesday: Are you a tech geek? Are you interested in search engines, the internet and web technology? Do you need to make more friends? Well, pitch up for......

Dusting off the snow from last year, every day this month the Londonist team will be pointing you in the direction of a Christmas present that (with a bit of luck) you won't already have on your list. Climb up onto our collective lap and we'll see what we can move from our sack to your stockings.. There's an big market for anything involving the London Underground system when it comes to buying gifts,......

Music, as Bono, Geldof, Martin or any of the members of Screwdriver will tell you, is a tool for peace and harmony. Selling memorabilia, on the other hand, would seem to be the domain of scrapping dogs, hound-like or otherwise. But now we hear that the owners of Elvisly Yours and The London Beatles Shop have settled their differences in a flurry of cheesy song references.* Story goes like this: Beatles guy (Howard Cohen)......

In the early hours of this morning a burst water main on Maida Vale caused chaos as roads, homes and businesses were flooded with rushing brown floods. 40 firefighters were called to the scene to evacuate people, divert and pump out the water. Evacuees were taken to the safety of a local pub. Whether the landlord flouted licensing laws to warm everyone up with a snifter has not been reported. Thames Water engineers stopped......

Halifax Bank harasses woman who doesn't even have a current account with them . High C-charge for gas-guzzlers a step closer. Why do we call them 'gas guzzlers'? We are not Yanks goddamn it. How about 'fuel farters' or 'petrol pumping pollution promoters'? OK, I think we just answered our own question. Pete Doherty goes to jail for a very long time. No, of course not. The BBC are looking for little green corners.......

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......

2. London’s Phantom Hounds Phantom black dogs, or ‘hellhounds’ as folklorists like to call them, are, despite the haziness of legend, manifest the world over. Across the United Kingdom such canid apparitions have been given many names – Striker, Padfoot, Roy Dog, Guytrash, and the most well known being Black Shuck. Most of these fiery eyed beasts appear to haunt rural or at least semi-rural areas, so you might think that London would be excluded......

London Underground’s lost property department is a perennial staple for magazine writers looking for a quirky feature. Time and again, we’ve read about the unlikely sundries handed in at the Baker Street office – from false teeth to surfboards. One of the more remarkable items in the collection is an urn, containing the ashes of a person unknown. The inscrutable vessel was featured on the Arena Tube special on BBC4 a couple of weeks......

We just apologised to LA for sending Jason Statham their way only for him to turn up here again: Hollywood hardman Jason Statham shivered through filming on a chilly East London film set. Crews transformed the cobbled Hoxton street, running next to the arches of a railway line, into a 1970s period set for Baker Street, based on the true story of the 1971 Baker Street bank robbery. The Lloyds Bank raid was hushed......

There is almost nothing more upsetting than a life-size wax replica of a person. Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum, famous since the 19th century for its Chamber of Horrors, now features a life-size wax figure of Christina Aguilera. The songstress's exhibit also features a karaoke-style microphone that allows visitors to sing along with Christina. The wax statue does not move its lips, of course. It just stares at you. The waxwork is costumed as in......

Jackie Danicki begins her blog post on November 24th with the words I am slightly miffed: The kid in the picture above doesn’t look very harmful, right? He’s reasonably well-dressed, anyway. But actually, he is quite a large fellow, and likes to assault random women with the help of an equally vile friend of his. Jackie posted the photograph on her blog and to her Flickr stream as well as passing a copy along......

We love spy-fi shows like Alias, especially the bits about encrypted data being stolen from shielded hard drives stored behind retina sensitive blast doors in bunkers only accessible via corridors filled with lethal security devices. And then when the data is eventually reached it's encrypted up the wazoo and you need the DNA of six senior officer to decode the key... must be a bit like that working on London's anti terror beat. They......

Pounding the streets of London in search of obscure buildings and forgotten sculptures is far too much like hard work with the current sticky weather. So we thought we’d put together a Stalk from the comfort of the couch. Purely as a bit of fun. So, here’s our stalk of Dr Who. Who Lives Where? When he’s not living in the Tardis, the Doctor might be found at a number of addresses in and around......

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......

Formed out of members of Art of Noise & The Auteurs, we first came across Infantjoy while wallowing in 'OMG SARAH NIXEY IS BACK!!!111!!' induced glee a few months ago. Guest starring on their working of 'Silent Night', we were intrigued by this duo who seemed to produce mesmerizing, elegant instrumental music. Almost cinematic sounding, their concept album Where The Night Goes is based on the idea that 'each track takes place at a......

The Bakerloo celebrates its centenary today. After 40 years of ummming and ahhhring, the turd-brown line was finally opened on 10 March 1906. No word on whether the queen has sent a telegram. To celebrate the anniversary, a special plaque will be unveiled at Baker Street today. Top Tube man Tim O’Toole will preside, while customers are assured an unforgettable spectacle. Actors and staff in Edwardian dress will go on to entertain commuters as......

The Baker Street Planetarium is to close. Then reopen as a history of celebrities. If ever there were a sign of the times… Space is not something the capital does well. This Londonista remembers, as a child, being enthralled by the Science Museum’s space gallery. The model rockets, the lifesize lunar module replica, the space food. The actual capsule used by the Apollo 10 crew to fly to the moon and back (and that......

To-day was the most glorious of days. A bright sun shone through the cloudless sky, so as one could quite forget the season, were it not for the countless bunches of holly and mistletoe adorning every doorway, and the fresh chill of the morning. I still marvel at our good fortune, here in Ruislip. Only two years ago, our modest village seemed so isolated. Now I am able to board an electric train bound for......

OK, that pun didn’t quite work, but we’re not the Daily Mirror, you know. Our cack-handed wordplay heralds some news just in about London’s most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes. Early adventures of the former Baker Street resident are to be re-serialised by Stanford University. Starting in 2006, weekly e-mails will be sent to subscribers containing the stories ‘just as they were originally printed and illustrated in The Strand Magazine’. To sign up for the......

Earlier this week the BBC printed this piece of writing by Geoff Ryman. Ryman is the author of 253, a fantastic piece of fiction about the relationship between all the passengers on a single tube train. The article on the BBC encapsulated Ryman's views on the bombings of 7 July and offered some thoughtful and intelligent insights into the aftermath of the events. After reading the article, Londonist contributors decided to draw up a......

For those who haven't left work yet, here's the latest from TFL: 4.55pm Services are currently operating as follows and include service suspensions that were already in effect following incidents on 7 July 2005. Bakerloo - suspended between Paddington to Piccadilly Circus Central - normal service Circle - suspended District - suspended between Edgware Road and High Street Kensington East London - normal service Hammersmith & City - suspended Jubilee - normal service Metropolitan -......

I left my house in West Hampstead a little before 9 O’clock. The southbound Jubilee Line was running a full and efficient service. It was much quieter than usual, I'd guess about a quarter normal capacity. IPODs were all left at home, and few people were reading. Unclaimed copies of Metro lay discarded about the carriage. Vigilance was the watchword. I got off at Baker Street with a view to walking the couple of miles......

The Underground: Services should be running on most lines, but there are no services on the Hammersmith and City and Circle lines. District line will not run between High St Kensington and Edgware Road or to Olympia and its Wimbledon to High St Kensington service will be reduced. Metropolitan line has no service from Baker Street to Aldgate but trains will be running north of Baker Street. Piccadilly line services will run from Heathrow to......

Today is the 'birthday' of London's most famous, fictitious detective and the most celebrated resident of Baker Street: Sherlock Holmes. The New York Sun seems to be the only paper celebrating the anniversary with this article on the Baker Street Irregulars (the contemporary society not the fictitious gang). But there are of course a number of things you can personally do if you feel like celebrating the great detective. Your first stop should be......