It's only June, but it'll take an awful lot to topple Sammy Ofer as Londonist's Person of the Year. Having already pledged £20 million for a new wing at the National Maritime Museum, the Israeli shipping magnate has now ensured the full restoration of the Cutty Sark with a £3.3 million donation. The tea clipper, which was gutted by fire last May, has slowly been put back together, but the small matter of funding......

The founder of Carphone Warehouse is Boris’ new Olympics guru. Don’t drink the water. Well, at least not if you live in Colney Heath. The Cutty Sark is getting there but it could still do with a bit more dosh pretty please. There were horse-mounted naked women in Hyde Park today. To promote the film Godiva of course. And raise money for charity. You can now get mobile bike maps. If you see what......

This is a real corker: Ken has likened Boris to the Black Death. They’ll be wrestling in the playground before this is finished, mark our words. The Good Life has its problems, as the City Banker who quit to become a carpenter has discovered: he’s allergic to wood. Olympic ‘marketing partners’ outnumber the athletes by two to one. The Cutty Sark seems to have a following wind at last. The report on the Kent......

If you go down to the Cutty Sark tomorrow you're sure of a big surprise. Or two. The 138 year-old tea clipper, one of the most recognisable landmarks on the London Marathon course over its previous twenty-six runnings, was engulfed by a fire last May, though thankfully a good part of the ship was already elsewhere undergoing renovation. The repairs required to her are obviously even more extensive in the aftermath and currently the......

Crippled clipper to get cash injection However, local boroughs are still passing round the begging bowl - and does anybody have a spare £250 million stuck behind the sofa to help out West End theatres? Caterwauling Kate's karaoke marathons not entirely popular with new neighbours Department for Transport rapped on the knuckles over Metronet's "spectacular failure" Girl and pa lash themselves to Japanese embassy in anti-whaling protest. Image courtesy of onionbagblogger via the Londonist......

Man had up for lewd of-fence A cloud is cast over our earlier story, as the Cutty Sark in fact now looks set for a cutty in funding. The latest excuse for bus tardiness? Sorry, the bus got welded to the road. Much cheered by this ridiculous tale, bus drivers elsewhere have called off a strike which was planned for Wednesday. We’ve only had it for a week, and now we’re selling it: farewell......

Some good news from Greenwich at last. Six months on from the dramatic inferno the Cutty Sark restoration is making progress. Thankfully her skeleton of iron girders withstood the fire so, aside from the small matter of increasing restoration costs by £15m, she's on track to reopen to the public in 2010. We were almost as gutted as she was when the news broke back in May so we'll be interested to hear the......

Greenwich Indoor Market is fab. There's nothing more enjoyable than a stroll around all the little stalls on a Sunday. Thankfully, plans to knock it down and turn it into flats were scuppered after public out cry (no shock there then). But new plans have been uncovered to revamp it and keep the locals happy. Hopefully, this means that the market will get a nice new roof, and the possibility to open all week......

Yearghh! Swab the decks and raise the middenmast. Ye Cutty Sark to be shipshape again. Secure the hatch. A a binnacle of landlubbin' lizards hatch at London Zoo. Avast! Gorelubber Tarantino visits Wimbledon (scurvy) dog track. Fifteen men on a dead-man's chest. Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum. Yearghhh!! Image courtesy of Peterkellystudios via Flickr.......

If all your mates are off on holiday and work is unbearably dull and hot then here's some home entertainment to get you through the mid-August slump. On TV, Londonist likes: Monday, 13 August Panorama (BBC1, 20:30) If you're avoiding Dawkins on Channel 4 (and we've no idea why you would but it's not about London so we're not going to make a fuss about it but it's on at 20.00 and we could......

Ahhhh, Greenwich Indoor Market. How do we love thee... let us count the ways. 1. The Arts Collective. A whole little street of wonderful artists covering everything from the abstract to modern art to photography. Check out Anna Hillmans 'amazingness' stand. 2. Essential Music. Selling the best music at extra cheap prices. Don't be deterred by the closing down sign: it always says that to trick the tourists into going in. Hehehe! 3. The......

All across the Ist-A-Verse (or at least the American parts thereof), writers and editors are in the midst of enjoying their three-day weekend. But after the week we've all had, we feel like the break is not only needed, but deserved. Just look at everything we've been doing! Gothamist headed into the Memorial Day weekend with a number of tasks accomplished. They worried about Long Islanders giving New Yorkers a bad name. They tried......

Don't just rebuild the Cutty Sark, make it seaworthy too. So says Simon Jenkins. The police are interested in talking to a female flasher. We can't say we blame them. No flashing in West London, as a new type of speed camera is tested. Another big London fire. This time, a Poplar church feels the flames. London, divorce capital of the world? Image courtesy of obrien99 via the Londonist flickr group.......

Daft old casual chauvinist, Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, made a visit to the Cutty Sark wreckage in Greenwich Dock (originally posted by Londonista M@ here) on Tuesday and declared the devastation of one of London’s most important hertitage sites as, “A Bloody Shame”. Although it is easy to make light of such a throwaway soundbite, and we will, it must be pointed out that Prince Philip is the President of the Cutty......

Every cloud has a silver lining, sure the Cutty Sark was destroyed by fire but at least Greenwich now gets a visit from the Duke of Edinburgh. From today the Tate Britain displays a photographic exhibition of British life. A London postman has been jailed after he was found to have amassed almost 3000 items of post in a shed having got behind on his deliveries. London's swift population is dwindling as a result......

If they decide not to rebuild the Cutty Sark, photoshopper Fenring offers this suggestion for reusing the masts and sails, which were safely stored away. Keep sending your distorted images of the capital to londonist - at - gmail - dot com......

The Dean of Southwark, The Very Revd Colin Slee, seems to have gotten a taste for being in hot water. In December he stoutly defended his allegedly drunk bishop who somehow staggered across London from an Irish Embassy Christmas bash to clamber into someone's car, chuck out baby toys and refuse to come out until forcibly removed. In February he used Youtube to call for the legalisation of drugs as a means of stopping......

Fire has gutted the Cutty Sark. The blaze is now out, but the famous tea clipper appears to have been reduced to a charred shell. This is a significant loss to London. The fire started just before 5am. The cause remains unknown, although authorities are treating it as suspicious. Pictures on BBC news suggest that the prow remains intact, and some sections of the hull may be salvageable. All masts and decking appear to......

And so the big day arrives with a bang! I'm up early and cycling through quiet city streets already dappled with sunlight, cameras slung around my shoulders. I switch to public transport to make my way over to the Red Start in Greenwich Park and due to various DLR difficulties don't make it there until a while after the mass start. I wander leisurely past the Royal Observatory enjoying the view and the buzzing......

The RMT Union has announced a three day tube strike next week by Metronet workers. Next week, the City of London will become Europe's largest wifi hotspot. Tony Blair blames a distinctive black culture for the recent spate of knife and gun crime. A new Cutty Sark exhibition has opened in Greenwich. Image courtesy of Orhan* via the Londonist flickr group.......

We’ve had to break the rules a bit this week. Normally one of the basic requirements of Getting Off Our Arse is that we need to investigate a bit of London that we’ve not really explored before. However, on this occasion we were far too hungover to venture far, or attempt anything even vaguely adventurous. (That’s the last time that this Londonista spends the early hours of the morning attempting to teach ‘British drinking......

Like small children, tourists and big dogs, cars don't really belong in London. Sure, they have their uses but they do take up a lot of space, are noisy and tend to move very slowly along the streets. creating bottlenecks at crucial points in the transport infrastructure. We need them and perhaps even like them, but we know, deep down, that they just don't belong inside the M25. Greenwich Council has grasped the fact......

Seven men are currently in custody after a football-related pub brawl in at the Cutty Sark pub in Thamesmead over the weekend resulted in the death of a 52-year-old man. Diane Abbott and Mayor Ken have warned that London needs more black teachers in order to "to harness and develop the talents and skills of all the city’s diverse communities". If London's suburbs were apples, "many of them would be bruised and past their......

Another bumper crop of things to do and see this weekend, in particular all the Big Dance events taking place around town - more details here. But for the non-dance related things to see and do, the Culture Crawl starts here... Friday 21 July 1001 Nights Now at the British Museum. An evening of Arabian fairy tales re-told through the stories of migrant workers from the Middle East in Britain today; this is an......

Ken insists that the Wembley "fiasco" is a lesson learned for 2012 and not a precursor of fiascos to come. The result of the tube strike ballot is to be announced today. Sadly the protestors in Tony's Cafe in Hackney have been evicted. The Cutty Sark's fate has finally been decided. It will "be raised on a glass canopy and an exhibition hall is to be built underneath the great hull". Are you the 'London......

Well, here we go again. Londonist's not-inconsiderable powers of augur and haruspex (plus a machine-like publicity campaign) have alerted us to the imminent release of JK Rowling's latest grimoire. Stores will be open long past the witching hour tonight as millions of children and special adults clamour to get their hands on the sixth and penultimate book of the series. And, we confess, Londonist will no doubt be there too, with all the dignity......

There are some parts of London that just don’t know when to stop. Greenwich has already got a shipload of interesting and beautiful things to visit such as the ruddy big Cutty Sark, the Royal Observatory, the Old Royal Naval College which is now the University of Greenwich and Trinity College of Music and the almighty, river-spanning foot tunnel. For a brief while, it looked like it might have the London Eye too. And......

With the race for the 2012 Olympics becoming a very close run thing it's time for the London committee to pull out the big guns...literally. This week the Royal Navy aircraft carrier, HMS Illustrious sailed up the Thames and it was flying a London 2012 Olympics flag. What a 22,000-ton battleship has to do with London hosting an international sporting event, we're still unsure, but we can tell you that Defence Secretary John Reid......

Continuing the alternative transport theme, high on Londonist's list of "we really must do that one day" is to take the Thames Clipper to work. For just £3.25 (including Travelcard Discount), it is possible to take the 6.35am from Greenwich rather than the 6.33am from Lewisham. A pleasant cruise up the Thames then replaces a crowded train journey offering the company of chavs from Thamesmead and a view of Millwall football ground. Most of......