Last full week before Christmas, we expect your bank account's feeling the strain. All that Christmas shopping and partying taking its toll? If you want to make the most of being out and about before Christmas cabin fever and complete exhaustion set in then we're here to help. Monday: Keep the braincells going through silly season. Go to the free lecture at Gresham College about why our society rewards celebrities, fads and fashions and......

What do you do if you’ve got a gallery full of works by William Morris, one of Britain’s most famous artists, and you’re a cash-strapped borough council? (a) Publicise the gallery and get loads of tourists spending their money there. (b) Hitch a ride on green awareness — Morris was an early environmentalist and the collection is housed in his former home, in magnificent grounds, all of which the borough owns. (c) Suggest giving......

If you've been wanting to join the cycle revolution but are put off by all that aggressive, unpredictable and dirty traffic out there then maybe this weekend's Hovis London Freewheel, which will trundle through nine miles of traffic-free town on Sunday, will help you get on your bike. The number of cyclists on London's streets has apparently increased a stunningly impressive 83% in the last 12 months. Unfortunately, it's too late to register to......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 17th September 1961: Police arrest 1,314 demonstrators at a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) protest in Trafalgar Square. Bertrand Russell is amongst those arrested. Tuesday – 18th September 1970: Guitar legend Jimi Hendrix is found dead in his basement flat in Notting Hill, west London. A subsequent inquest records an open verdict on his death, noting that he drank wine and took nine sleeping pills the previous......

From BBC News: London must become car-free if it is to substantially cut carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new report. Crikey. In response to the findings London Green Party member Jenny Jones said: "I have asked the London mayor to do a feasibility study into creating a car free pedestrian zone in central London linking all the main squares and parks. "We need to show that the car no longer rules in London......

The fifth in our series of interviews with potential candidates for next year's Mayoral election. Previously: Victoria Borwick (Tory), Andrew Boff (Tory) and Warwick Lightfoot (Tory), Sian Berry (Green). Today: Liberal Democrat candidate Fiyaz Mughal. He's competing with fellow LDs Brian Paddick and Chamali Fernando to represent his party in next year's elections. Would you vote for him? Read his ideas below. Where do you live in London and what do you like best......

Part 1: Introduction Mods. Rockers. Teds. Punks. Ravers. Swingers. Skinheads. Suedeheads. Hippies. Yuppies. Rudeboys. Indie kids. Emo kids. Beats. Glam kids. Tribes. Subcultures. Neo-tribes. Groups. Bands. Movements. All of the above, and more, have - despite their points of origin - been magnetically attracted to the capital. To attempt to cover all of the ages of London’s youth might seem an exhausting task worthy of Peter Ackroyd who wrote of his biography of London......

Forget locking up your daughters – lock up your bikes! New statistics indicate that bike theft is up 10% in England, bringing the average to one bike stolen every 71 seconds. Though the thieves are not quite up to snuff, stealing something every 60 seconds like Nicolas Cage with his muscle cars, it’s still a pretty impressive number. The areas of the capital in which you are most likely to be parted from your......

The weekend is so close. In a matter of hours you will be putting down your ploughs, sickles and pick axes, washing the mud off your wellies, putting on a fancy scarf or a cravat and going to do something fun. "But what can we do?" we hear you cry. "Shall we watch Finding Nemo on DVD again?". No, definitely not. No no no. Why not check out one of these events? Are you......

An astonishingly workaday title for a book that features a singing otter, flying dinosaurs and a sheet of electronic tissue paper. Welcome to the madcap world of Paul Ewen, a softly spoken New Zealander with a knack of finding trouble in public houses. It’s a world not unlike that of Michael Hodges, only with less vitriol and more adjectives. The just-published paperback collects together 44 ripping yarns, each set in one of London’s famous......

The ever awesome Urban Digital have been testing a new gadget: In a follow up to yesterday's post, on the Nokia N95's built in GPS and creating GPS track for visualisation in Google Earth, we thought we would try it out on the train back to Central London. We should be doing stuff like this, but then who would drink all the beer? Best leave this kind of thing to the experts: Once the......

Let's get straight into this one: Moving from Inverness to the more polluted streets of Central London could have worse consequences for your health than choosing to live in the contaminated exclusion zone around Chernobyl, the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster. What the fuck? We notice that this only applies to people moving from Inverness - either they breed 'em weak up there or we've already mutated into some pollution resistant breed......

Central London. Saturday 16 December. It wasn't just Soho that was swimming in ho's. An inebriated army of Santas worked their way across town to a chorus of festive chants. 'What do we want? Christmas. When do we want it? Now!" Sadly, this bounty of Clauses failed to deliver a singele present, unless discarded Strongbow cans count. Image from Photo Jo's Flickr photostream. YouTube video from TobiasWarwick......

Already today we've had the return of This Isn't London (something we are all very excited about), a bit of New York that will be forever England and an appeal for tourists to get out of Central London. So here's something that wraps up a cock-eyed view of the Capital, relocates it somewhere else and ensures that tourists will have to go way past Zone Six to sample its charms: Thames Town, Songjiang, Shanghai.......

Lesser known areas of the capital may be in store for an influx of tourists. A report from the London Assembly is urging Visit London to promote attractions outside Central London, and the Chair of the Assembly’s Economic Development, Culture, Sport and Tourism Committee, Dee Doocey, fully supports the findings: "Outer London is home to a range of attractions that are less obvious but just as worth a visit as those that central London......

The Blitz may have been started entirely by accident, it was claimed yesterday. A Luftwaffe pilot may have kick-started the second Great Fire of London by dumping unused bombs on the East End instead of the English Channel. During the war, it was common practice on both sides (for reasons of safety) to jettison surplus ammo in the Channel before heading for home. But Captain Rudolph Hellensleben – recommended for the German equivalent of......

Those of you who dip into, or even contribute to, our Flickr group may have noticed the presence of comedian Dave Gorman amongst the regular contributors. We've even used a couple of his images in the Extra, Extra from time to time (including this one of the Sinner/Winner preacher just a couple of weeks ago). A couple of days ago Dave uploaded the image above of Battersea Power Station to his account and included......

More details have emerged today about Associated Newspapers' contender to thelondonpaper. It's described as a "new free London paper”, and the biggest disappointment is that they haven't chosen to call it thenewfreelondonpaper. In fact it's going to go under the monumentally boring name of London Lite, a ridiculous suffix that AN seem to have stolen from the diet drinks industry and got stuck on. For a start, it's spelled L I G H T.......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. First off, a resounding thank you to Sarah who authored this column so expertly each week and has only abdicated the role because she was forced back to the Big Apple. We’re not sure if they have “books” or “literature” over there Sarah, so this one’s for you… Events Around London: Tonight: The crime......

According to it's website the Pembridge Hotel is "a three star/diamond rated, Central London hotel. Perfect for the tourist looking for a hotel close to Hyde Park, Bayswater, Albert Hall, Kensington Palace and many other famous London sites." It's also apparently infested with bed bugs. Back in October of last year Hotel Chatter.com received an email form a 'disatisfied' Pembridge customer which opened with the ominous sentence "On the night of Saturday 10th September,......

It’s an unwritten rule of the town that anything over 100m tall must be referred to by something other than its correct name. Viz, the Gherkin, the wheel, NatWest Tower, Canary Wharf, the Cheesegrater, the Post Office Tower, the Shard of Glass, etc. etc. The latest proposed tower block is, frankly, asking for it. If this thing ever gets built, The Electric Razor it will certainly be called. What you’re looking at is a......

The decision over what to do over tube running times on a weekend has been going on for what seems like an age now. An initial consultation which took place earlier this year received 54,000 responses, with the majority of people deomonstrating a "strong support for a later night weekend Tube". Of course, in order to do this, the trains would also have to start running at a later time on weekend mornings, and......

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, Dragging themselves through the Negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix... It was with these immortal words, more or less fifty years ago to this day, that the poet Allen Ginsberg first burst onto the American literary scene. The event was the ‘Six Poets at the Six’, a poetry reading held at the Six Gallery in San Francisco.......

Occasionally at Londonist we like to grow our hair long and not shave the various body appendages that any sane person should do in urban environment. 'Jesus sandals' become a mainstay in the footwear department, Janis Joplin an iPOD favourite and lentils start to be all flavoursome. We do this because Londonist cares. That is right - Londonist cares. Londonist cares how polluted our urban environment is. And Londonist wants to do something about......

Our friend Adrian Maddox of the brilliant Classic Cafes site emailed us today to let us know that he's put together a nice big feature in this week's issue of Time Out. The article maps out a Central London cafe tour and was written specifically to celebrate Architecture Week (more of which later). The tour takes in those establishments which are under "clear and present danger" (i.e. they might be gone soon) and kicks......

If you don't 'take' the Observer on a Sunday then you might have missed this article by Miranda Sawyer in the paper's Sunday magazine. The piece was written to mark the twenty-year anniversary of the death of photojournalist David Hodge, who was fatally injured during the Brixton riots. During the article Sawyer tries to assess the area in which she's lived for fifteen years and throws up some interesting facts while she's at it:......