It starts tomorrow, folks. The London Festival of Architecture runs for a whole month and comprises some 600 events and installations. Previously, we selected a few ticketed events so you could book early. Today, we present a few highlights that run for several days and don't require any planning on your part. Just turn up. We'd encourage you to take a closer look at the full listings too, as we can only highlight a very......

The arthritic pygmy goats of Clissold Park will be hobbling for joy. Hackney's favourite place, as voted for by borough residents in a 2007 poll, and venue for the yearly Stokefest fun, is set for a £8.9 million revamp. We brought you the news of Cedric the rabbit last year, whose ears were flapping with excitement about the park winning a significant lottery grant. Well, Hackney Council have ponied up another £4.1 million, and......

We're considering giving our notice at Londonist Towers and upping sticks for a new home. Specifically, we want to move into Jean Prouvé's Maison Tropicale. The prefabricated bungalow, standing on the front lawn outside Tate Modern, is in London as part of the excellent Prouvé retrospective at the Design Museum. Dating from the 1950s, the Maison was an attempt at creating lightweight, flat-pack housing for colonial authorities that could easily be loaded into a......

If so, you’re probably better poised than we are to win a contest kicking off today. So listen up artists, armchair critics, and wannabe designers: HarperCollins, in collaboration with the Saatchi Gallery, are sponsoring a competition to design a book cover for the forthcoming The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal, Sean Dixon’s debut novel. To all our artsy readers: opportunity knocks (though we’re not making any claims about fame and fortune). The collaboration......

We really didn't know what to expect. An invitation from one of the participating students brought us here, but since Fine Art shows have been the most disappointing part of months of degree shows on Brick Lane over the last couple of years, our hopes weren't high. Some of it was disappointing with works that were either lacking in visual merit, or others which showed promise with their presentation of clever ideas but were......

If you're looking for the perfect London centrepiece for your lounge then you might be in luck. Cockney Designs are selling a range of coffee tables topped by an authentic London street sign. The signs are from the City of Westminster and were created by design guru Sir Misha Black. The road names avaliable are constantly changing and rare so if you see one you like, leap on it straight away. You can order......

The London Art Fair opened to the public today in Islington. It's a massive art trade fair with modern and contemporary art to buy. There were many smart, be-scarved or brightly tie-d artsy types manning stalls looking bored or eating sandwiches and lots and lots of interesting art to ponder, point at and take photos of, which is apparently acceptable (I'm taking a photo to see if Flavia likes it, yah....). This is a......

Boris Johnson is backing a plan to bring Routemasters back into action, with electric motors and no emissions, and the reintroduction of drivers and conductors on each bus. With characteristic swiftness, Ken Livingstone has taken opposition to the plan and Londoners are once again torn between the two views on the possible return of the famous big red bus. For a brief set by Autocar magazine, design company Capaco came up with the electric......

Four years, countless consultancy fees, umpteen broken promises and many millions of pounds later, Clissold Leisure Centre in Stoke Newington is finally re-opening this weekend. For those who've not followed the saga, here's the story in brief. In 2000 the Centre opened amidst a brass band's worth of pomp and publicity, the very model of a modern, major, New Labour endorsed Lottery-funded Millennium project. Come early 2004, the facility was closed, having accumulated a......

The fashion world has been in a glitzy hooha this week as Karl Lagerfeld, AKA The Count (cue: one, one supermodel; AH HA HA HA HA!") jetted in to much celebrity fawning for a posh nosh ding dong at Nobu and the first ever Chanel show in London. Those who know are hailing the Brit chic collection as beautiful, sumptuous and decadent and intimating design influences from the original Duke of Westminster, the Tudor......

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.. Heat things up in the bedroom of your metrosexual love with saucy, designer duvets from London based......

You may remember that we're not exactly lukewarm about this place. We were even up for finding love here. I guess you could say we're fans. Nothing has changed with a change in exhibition: Sleeping and Dreaming is marvellous and you must go. For a start, it's free. Nought pee. You can just swan through the doors, turn left and there you are. But that's where it gets dark and you immediately start watching......

Girls from Greece with a thirst for knowledge looking to study sculpture will soon have a new home. Central St Martin's College of Art and Design is taking up residency in King's Cross to the delight of residents. Not everyone, however, is so enthused as the space for the new campus is currently home to three night clubs. The Cross, the Key, and Canvas are all due to host their final nights on New......

A Putney cottage designed by Erno Goldfinger has been illegally destroyed. Arbus Ltd, of Croydon, applied for permission to pull down the building in 2002, but was refused. Living up to his surname, Director of the company Rajiv Laxman paid little heed to the order and the building’s Grade II listed status, demolishing the cottage anyway. He’s now been ordered to pay £11,000 and forced to rebuild the property using the same design and......

To celebrate the rebranding of the Platform for Art initiative as Art on the Underground, TfL are giving away specially commissioned posters at 5 Zone 1 tube stations all next week (bound to be a bunfight on Monday though, be prepared). Among the artists is Turner Prize nominated Mark Titchner and poster designs include a fictitious A-Z map and some snow capped mountains. 25,000 of each design have been produced and will be stacked......

Amidst calls for their boss' resignation, it's reassuring to know that some London cops haven't lost sight of the big issues facing modern policing - namely, getting "ethnically diverse" mascots on our streets. "PCSO Steve", whose beat covers primary schools in and around Sutton, has spent the past couple of years attending community events and glad-handing celebrities and politicians. Now before you get all high-horsey about the money wasted on PCSOs, we should point......

A week after opening for the Queen, St Pancras International is finally ready for the likes of us. The station has been restored beyond its former glory. Britain's answer to Central Station is ready for business. Everyone knows by now that the sumptious Euston Road frontage to the station was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. But what else in London did the Great Scott design? Time to dust off our old 'Stalks' series,......

There’s plenty of tomes on the market describing our city’s buildings. A search on Amazon for the term ‘London architecture’ yields 1070 results. Into this crowded marketplace - one of the few not designed by Horace Jones - steps the London Atlas of Architecture. It’s a highly visual guide with up to eight photographs per page and plenty of maps. Section one is a chronology of architecture, spanning 1800 years from the Roman wall......

Hitler notwithstanding, testicles customarily gather in pairs. Yet London only has one - the glass bollock near Tower Bridge known as City Hall. The less said about its daily ejaculations, the better. This gonadic deficiency will soon be redressed, thanks to a new scheme from Hamiltons Architects and Development Securities. They’ve received planning permission for this bulbous office block in Hammersmith. The ten-storey scheme will squat next to the Hammersmith and City station, and......

Well, it's certainly less controversial than the logo. The design for the new Olympic Stadium is something of a zoetrope in the aspirational design launch video which follows bits of the stadium as they fly and crawl through London to Stratford, witnessed by a jogging girl with a coldsore. The bits all spin together excitingly to settle into a massive, goldfish bowl. Or sunken, oval cupcake. After the Games, 25,000 temporary Olympic seats will......

With immaculate PR timing, just a week after London was urged to focus on delivering the 2012 Games on time, the team at Olympic HQ announce that work is starting on the Stratford Olympic Stadium 3 months ahead of schedule. In fact, they're so ahead of their game the news hasn't yet made it into the official 2012 website, although, that tells us other thrilling news: the laying of underground power cables is also......

I'm sure someone clever once said, “all work and no play, makes Jack a dull boy”... and we all know how hard Londoners work. It seems only fair that we should have a little playtime too. In this post I’m going to share with you my current three favourite online games – a little light entertainment to take your mind off that impending deadline. My favourite at the moment is the tremendous... Bloxorz... on......

Tutankamun's coming to town! First we had Anubis and now pyramids are popping up all over London. Created by Brazilian pop artist, cheeky looking Romero Britto, with the help of 1500 school kids, the biggest - a colourful 45fter - was unveiled at Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park yesterday whilst its smaller sibling, just 25ft, will sit outside the O2 on Peninsula Square, guarding access to the first major exhibition at the sweetly named Bubble......

View Larger Map So what happened to all those lovely new towers we were promised? The Shard, the helter-skelter, the cheesegrater and their friends have been around as designs for years. But where have they got to? If you've checked the City skyline lately, you'll notice it's all cranes. Things are finally happening and everything's in place for a new-look London for 2011. Here's a tour of five of the more prominent sites, all of......

For a publisher based on Broadway, New York, The Little Bookroom seems obsessed with the pockets of oddness that permeate our city. A few years back, they published City Secrets London, a bumper book of anecdotes about the capital. Their latest guide The Traditional Shops and Restaurants of London does exactly what it says on the tin. Literally, given the vintage canister that forms the jacket design. The 300-page book is about the size......

It may not be the strangest sight that Nelson has descried from his perch this year, but the Lomography London Lomowall in Trafalgar Square would no doubt raise an inquisitive eyebrow from the good Admiral. Part of this year's London Design Festival, the Lomowall consists of hundreds of thousands of photos, taken with the cult Lomo camera, stuck onto plasterboard and arranged in a 350 metre long maze across the Square. The snaps have......

London has as many hotel projects underway as the whole of Spain and five times as many as the second busiest city in Europe in terms of hotel development, Moscow. Surprising, innit? This is the opening message of the latest temporary exhibition at New London Architecture, that wonderful and free gallery on Store Street. By focusing on just one building type, Away From Home - New Hotels in London reminds us of the huge......

Michael Murphy is an American architect and illustrator living in London. Growing up in San Francisco and attending university in the desert states of Arizona and New Mexico before working in Dublin and London, Michael has a singular vision that’s uniquely his own. With the recent release of his London series of Giclee prints, we thought now would be a great time to have a chat with Michael about his art. Rather than Londonist......

If Londonist were really rich we'd be out every night doing LOADS of fun stuff. We'd be going to see all of the cool things at London Design Festival. We'd be drinking beer out of plastic cups and dancing at the Get Cape, Wear Cape, Fly gig. But we're not. Instead all our money goes on rubbish stupid bills and... actually not much else. So here's what we're going to do instead. Here's a......

We talk about festivals all the time here on Londonist: food festivals, theatre festivals, religious festivals, dance festivals... we can't help it. London is a festive place. The latest festival that we bring to you today is the London Design Festival, starting this Saturday and lasting for ten full days of talks, exhibitions, parties, books, magazines, tours, walks and... stuff. This is the fifth year for the festival and it just keeps getting bigger......