Weekly literary event listings plus book reviews, London poems and spoken word happenings.
There’s a day of completely free events for children in Crystal Palace this Saturday. Workshops at Upper Norwood Library are around 45 minutes long where your little ones can learn about illustrating (including comics and manga) from people like Garen Ewing and Derek the Sheep’s …
Tubes, tunnels, bunkers and bolt holes. Buried rivers, bank vaults and prison cells. Pneumatic conduits that once funneled capsules at 40 mph, and the disused tube network of Royal Mail. There’s a lot more to London than we ever see, with thousands of miles of …
Continuing our amble round London’s independent bookshops A new bookshop has appeared in the corner of Bermondsey Square. It’s a beautiful, calm environment where you can sip a drink and nibble on a Konditor and Cook cake and admire the latest exhibition, but none of …
London has a fickle memory for disaster. Could you name the location of London’s most fatal fire since the Second World War? Turns out it was just metres from Tottenham Court Road Tube, and as recently as 1980. An horrific act of arson led to …
Smashing idea, this: a double compendium of 33 short stories, each based on a London Borough. The collection is split across two volumes, which ignore the Thames as usual-divider and instead split the capital into East and West moieties. The result is a hotchpotch of …
Timely publication, this, reaching the bookshelves at precisely the moment that more of us are taking to two wheels thanks to the cycle hire scheme and cycle superhighways. The London Cycling Guide by Tom Bogdanowicz sets itself up as the complete reference for Londoners. Over …
Time for a book amnesty. We all own books we never intend to read again. (Most of them courtesy of Iain Sinclair, if we’re being honest about the Londonist book shelf.) So, if you want rid of a few tomes, here’s a golden opportunity. Donate …
Bestselling Gods Behaving Badly took the deities of ancient Greece and stuck them in a crumbling old house in Hampstead. But the gods could never resist meddling with mortals, and when you spend your days working on a phone sex line (Aphrodite) or running a …
Photo by Kortni Rudge One of our favourite literary events is the Book Swap at the Firestation Arts Centre in Windsor, but because that’s technically out of our usual range we’ve not really said much about it. When we heard that the hosts, publisher Scott …
Earl’s Court street fair 2009 – catch this year’s event on Sunday Earl’s Court Festival grew from a one day street fair into a month long community arts festival, showcasing the best of local talent, local business and local venues. It starts on Friday and …
Coming to a used bookshop (if not landfill site) near you soon, it’s Sarah ‘n Gordon: The Downing Street Years. The recently dethroned Prime Minister’s better half has inked a deal with Ebury to pen a tome about her decade at Numbers 10 and 11. …
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