This weekend column is brought to you by the founders of Niceties Tokens, Liz and Pete of Team Nice. 44. Neighbours So do you talk to your neighbours? Some of us do, some of us don’t. Some of us are polite but wouldn’t engage in a street party, some of us prefer to have the wonderful anonymity that London brings. Is being part of a community a good thing or a bad thing? Good......

This week, we sealed an online pact with fellow London website, Kudocities. We've been eyeing their loyal and quirkily questioning community for a while and they've been coveting our prime daily London content. A few flirtations later, and for mutual media advantage, wham, bam, thank you no spam and - hey - we're sitting in a virtual tree together. Our content nestling up against their local Q&A community means Londonist will be better resourced......

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......

Up to 9000 members of the Public and Commercial Services Union, including security staff at the Houses of Parliament, Police Community Support Officers, Traffic Wardens, 999 Operators and admin support staff will be striking - most pointedly - on Budget Day, 12 March, to protest against a below inflation pay offer. Seems union action is rumbling all around London at present. Yesterday we reported on the mobilisation of bus drivers for standardised pay and......

And now for something completely different. We stumbled upon Joey Herzfeld and some of Hooverville at the Carling Academy back in January. Their extraordinarily different sound, great musicianship and stage presence alienated half the crowd and transfixed the rest. Were they mental or brave musical pioneers? We couldn't resist snagging them for an interview purely on the basis of a song called "Cavity Search" and a frenetic gypsy dancing interlude. It went like this.........

So this week, we spent all our money on cold remedies and extra balmy tissues for our beleaguered noses. The plan is to be back and fighting fit by Monday so here are some of the things we could all get up to this week for very little wonga. Monday: Call the BBC Ticket Line on 0870 901 1227 and get free tickets for the recording of Clare in the Community - the radio......

Londonist has learnt with relief that London’s Community Wardens are to be taught to smile. Well, they are at least to be taught stuff other than marshalling resentful kids, scribbling reports on graffiti and harassing shopkeepers who infringe on the pavements 1cm too far. The London Development Agency is to train 200 or so of our boys (and gels) in blue (and red and black and yellow) to be nice to tourists, with a......

It would seem that Mayor Livingstone, famous for courting the unusual, is at it again. He is new-best-friends with the Polish community in London. His jolly japes this time include a Polish reception at Town Hall, replete with pierogi and pickles, and a trip to POSK, the Polish Community Centre in Hammersmith. He is quite the darling of the Polish press, by all accounts. Of course only the very cynical would suggest that it has......

Wonderful, wizard wifi. It keeps the Crackberry addicts happy, the laptop lovers mobile and coffee shops full of latte-quaffing surfers. We've marked out where to find free wifi around town and want to see more little flags on the map so even more of you can enjoy internet access wherever you may end up. However, there seems to be a gossamer-thin line between free and stolen which was crossed just this week - and......

Actually Scotch is not so common in Ealing at the moment. It seems that picnickers in Walpole Park, W5, had a bit of a shock last week when they had their Pimms/lager and lime/whatever confiscated by pernickety Police Community Support Officers (PCSO's). We know not whether the jobsworths in question were thirsty, just plain bored, or the ultimate in over-zealous – complaints have been made, and the ensuing investigation will surely reveal all. Now......

A new campaign has launched today and good luck to the plucky folk literally camping outside City Hall. The latest housing campaign by London Citizens, the group responsible for the Living Wage Campaign, is a call for housing co-operatives to be built on land held in common ownership. 50 tents and hundreds of campaigners from the diverse range of community groups, faith groups and local resident groups involved are currently occupying Potters Field next......

Look, there it is. At the top of the page, on the right. (Unless you’re using RSS, of course.) To join in, you’ll have to register, which took us just 23 seconds. Why not make a game of it, and see if you can break our record. Go on, it’s fun. Registering also lets you use the new commenting system Gothamist have developed for us. Registration helps us guard against spam, and also allows you......

Just out the Van: Next Monday's From Jane Austen to Catherine Tate: The Rise of the Female Comic Writer brings together a panel, including Shazia Mirza, Marina Lewycka and Stella Duffy, to unpick the funny bone of women's writing - how does it differ from men's writing? Is it funnier, gentler or crueller? Are there universal jokes that women laugh at worldwide? And does it ultimately change anything? Monday 4th June, 7.45pm, £8.50, Purcell......

This is the latest version of the Doon Street Tower, a skyscraper proposed by Coin Street Community Builders to sit on the South Bank near the OXO Tower. Designed by Lifschutz Davidson Sandilands, the scheme had previously proven controversial thanks to its loftiness, which would have made it visible from a number of viewpoints including St James’s Park and the courtyard of Somerset House. Complaints came from the usual suspects including English Heritage, the......

Fresh Next Week: This years T.S. Eliot Memorial Lecture is titled Lachrymae rerum: writing about loss. Dannie Abse reads both from Running Late, his latest collection of poetry, and from The Presence, a journal he has been keeping since his wife’s death in the summer of 2005. Alan Jenkins, Deputy Editor of the TLS, reads from his collection A Shorter Life, which includes poems about his mother’s illness and death that have been described......

Fed up of being forced to listen to tinny Akon played through a mobile phone loudspeaker by a loud and frankly intimidating group of school children, more than likely packing knives, high on drugs or, simply, astonishingly mouthy on the bus? Well fear no more. Ken has stumped up cash to provide nearly 400 extra Police Community Support Officers to patrol public transport, particularly in the post school rush. He says, "They will form......

A few weeks back we brought you the tale of a man who, out of the kindness of his own heart, takes people's broken iPods, fixes them for free and passes them on to others. Could there be a nicer man in the whole kingdom? Well, yes there could. His name is Richard Burdett, and he edits a free magazine for homeless people. The Pavement has no big charity backing and is almost entirely......

Event of the week Game On, Science Museum Remember that game on the ZX81 in which you had to manoeuvre a letter X through a minefield of dangerous letter O's? And the equally addictive follow-up, in which the Earth (represented by a series of hyphens) needed saving from a belligerent battlegroup of aliens (menacingly realised as a creeping cluster of hashes)? Ah, happy days. Well, apparently, gaming has developed somewhat since then. And we......

The final bill for the Forest Gate 'anti-terror' raid came to more than £2 million, we've been told today. South West Trains is planning to strip seats out of trains on the most overcrowded routes from London to Surrey and Hampshire in order to 'reduce overcrowding'. Thames Water have set themselves the target of installing water meters in every home in London from 2010. Ken has offered TfL and the Met an extra 375......

Thai PM update: he's here on a private visit as a private citizen (although that didn't stop him using the VIP reception suite at the Thai Embassy). The Lib Dems are demanding that bus deregulation must be reversed and councils given greater powers over services and fares. Southfields Community College in Wandsworth is the most cosmopolitan college in Europe: its pupils speak 71 languages (they don't all speak 71 languages obviously...oh you know what......

You know an article is going to be good when it contains the words 'MP' and 'street dance routine'. Which is why we couldn't resist reading this little gem from the icSouthLondon.co.uk site: He may know all the right political moves in Parliament but MP Stephen Hammond struggled to keep in step with kids. The Wimbledon MP visited a summer theatre scheme in the South Wimbledon Community Centre and wowed onlookers when he joined......

“Black Stars of Ghana! A striker wanted!” cried the commentator for Accra’s Hot FM as half time approached with his team unable to turn the superiority of their possession and play into a goal against a determined and well-organised Togo side in last night’s friendly at Brentford’s Griffin Park. Chelsea’s Michael Essien played a forceful role in what must be one of international football’s classiest midfield quartets, regularly combining with captain Stephen Appiah for......

The Premiership hasn't even started but already there's a lot to say about this season's football in the capital. Tonight sees most of our professional clubs in competitive action as the six Football League sides are joined by Arsenal playing their Champions League qualifier away to Dinamo Zagreb (live on ITV, 8pm) minus the 'keeper (suspended) and half the defence from their appearance in the final three months ago as everybody continues to work......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. August is a quiet month for book launches and the like, so lucky there's a good old fashioned book brawl to hot things up! Yes, it's Greer versus Rushdie. The two have famously never seen eye to eye (Greer went to Cambridge University in the late '60s with Rushdie, and have had several reported......

A tribute to the capital’s alleys, ginnels and snickleways 2. Brunswick Square to Mecklenburgh Square Where? Obscure Bloomsbury hinterland, North of Coram’s Fields. What? A leafy, nameless passageway connecting the northern ends of the two squares. The track is unsigned and little known even by locals. It runs through land once owned by the Foundling Hospital, a charitable children’s institution whose patrons included Hogarth and Handel. The passage separates the so-called Coram Community Campus......

Well, once we've recovered from the excesses of the Chap Olympics, we shall be embarking on the next part of this week's Cultural Crawl. There's so much to see, so much to do, the sun is out and anyway, sleep is for the weak... get out and about and let us know what you got up to on Monday. Take your pick and plan your schedule around the following: Friday 14 July Waterloo Carnival......

The BBC, police and local authorities are considering blanking out big screens across the country after violent scenes at the Canary Wharf screening of England's laboured 1-0 victory (we did say they struggled in the heat) over Paraguay on Saturday. Police were called at 3:30 pm as around 200 of the 6,000 fans gathered in Canada Square threw missiles and fought, an affray some witnesses said began with youths throwing beer over each other.......

Bank Holiday weekend: what are you going to do? There's so much happening (and most of it free) that it's more a question of what are you not going to do. To avoid being overwhelmed by the incredible number and range of cultural things to see and do, and to keep your bank account in check by picking only the free stuff, we've compiled a Culture Crawl timetable for Friday to Monday, so you......

Ah, Monopoly. Londonist owes you a pint. Many a staid Christmas evening has been enlivened by your magic. Everyone wants to be the dog, so large it can eat a battleship; nobody is sure of the rules to ‘Free parking’, or if indeed it has any; predictable jibes will ensue over the ‘beauty contest’ card. And, of course, if only this were real money. With Christmas out of the way, and sales of the......

It's only fair that if we run posts imploring you to vote for us in certain online awards then we should also let you know when we lose said awards... so here we go. A few weeks ago we mentioned that Londonist had been shortlisted for the Yahoo Pick of the Web in the 'Community' category. We didn't hold out much hope for our chances as we were up against a strangely mixed bag,......