Hammersmith and City (Whitechapel to Barking) and District line (Whitechapel to Plaistow) trains are again suspended this morning while the Royal Engineers' bomb experts detonate and defuse the ticking World War II UXB. This is all happening on Diamond Geezer's doorstep and he points out that if only the Big Brother house was still filmed in Bromley-by-Bow the whole telly monstrosity would be shut down by now. Check Transport for London for travel updates.......

Exactly what caused last Thursday's explosion in a residential street in South Harrow is still being investigated. Some of the evacuated residents have now been allowed to return to their homes but police forensic experts continue to examine the site of the incident which demolished one house and badly damaged 2 others last Wednesday. Emmad Qureshi, 26, was killed in the explosion. A teenage girl and another man remain in hospital. The intrigue around......

The cause of the explosion that ripped apart a Victorian terrace in Stanley Road, south Harrow, on Wednesday continues to baffle the authorities. The body of a man who died has been removed, and with no trace of a gas leak thus far discovered, police are now investigating whether the blast was detonated deliberately in a quite brazen, albeit successful, act of murder. As more details emerge, some warming anecdotes have come to light.......

16.40 UPDATE: With no trace of a gas leak to be found, Scotland Yard are saying this explosion might be murder. 10.00 Firefighters are still on the scene of a major suspected gas explosion which happened around 21.40 last night, on a residential street in South Harrow. The blast completed wrecked a house and 2 flats. At this stage, one man has been found dead and two more people are in hospital. At the height......

Um, we’d check before you travel if you’re planning to let the train take the strain over Easter. Miracle pensioner walks unscathed from exploding building.. There are still plans afoot to get that traditional East End sport, baseball on to the agenda in 2012… …which latter is apparently to leave us a stunning legacy. Is Travelodge taking over the known universe?. The Sun sets on Wapping as Murdoch moves to Broxbourne in Herts. St.......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 29th October 1986: The M25 ‘London orbital’ motorway is officially opened by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at a ceremony at the last section to be completed (junctions 22 and 23 in Hertfordshire). Tuesday – 30th October 1883: A group known as the Fenian Dynamiters detonates a bomb on the Metropolitan Railway, injuring 62 people. Wednesday – 31st October 1971: An IRA bomb explodes on the 33rd floor......

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......

This week ended with the launch of the seventh and final Harry Potter installation. But while the world was consumed with Pottermania, it's important to remember that there were more serious things going on in the world, too – two of them in -Ist cities. Sampaist was shocked when a passenger jet crashed into the center of Sao Paulo, killing at least 200 people. The airplane, an Airbus A320, skidded off the runway at the......

If you've been stuck in traffic or severely delayed for work coming in from West London, that's because of a controlled explosion of a suspect package at Hammersmith. At the time of writing, the situation is now concluded: it was not a dangerous package but obviously, London is on high alert and this kind of action is what we need to expect after last Friday's variety of bomb scares. Traffic in and out of the......

The Harrow campus of the University of Westminster has suffered a second fire very early this morning in what has turned out to be a very bad weekend for the place of learning. Late on Friday evening, after a day of panic and worry in central London, close to 100 firefighters were called out to the Watford Road campus in Harrow, north west London in order to put out a fire in a three-storey......

The top two floors of an office building near Scotland Yard have collapsed following an explosion. The campaign office of Labour Deputy hopeful Hazel Blears is on a lower floor of the building. Reports suggest the upper floors were undergoing renovation, and only one person has been injured. According to the BBC: Eyewitness Barshan Ganwari said he heard a "huge noise" or "a blast" and saw "people running away" from the scene. Justin Linger......

The blanket of damp that's been thrown over London this week can't stop the senses from believing that another long hot summer is just around the corner. Surely April was just a taster for the main event: sweltering offices, ice creams in parks, long cold drinks on pub pavements and music music music. The tunes will be everywhere in the summer, with festival season sending happy campers back to the capital each weekend and......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 14th May 1842: The first fully illustrated weekly newspaper, the Illustrated London News is launched, costing sixpence. It was still being published weekly as recently as 1971, but its publication frequency has since declined. Tuesday – 15th May 1981: Zara Phillips, the daughter of Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips, is born in a private wing of St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. She is currently the world......

Chan Marshall, the enchanting enigma otherwise known as Cat Power, bravely strides onto the stage of the Kentish Town Forum, to play her London comeback gig, following a well publicized breakdown last year. It is immediately obvious that the life-saving short spell spent on a Miami psychiatric ward has transformed the woman once famous for a crippling shyness and an ongoing battle with her demons. Firstly, she's hardly recognizable. Her hair is pulled back......

Life on Mars sequel to be set in London in 1981. Gene Hunt returns. Oxford St reopens after electrical explosion. Welsh chap to run 262 miles to start of London Marathon. Ken wants knife detectors in schools. And a mural depicting murdered teen Billy Cox is at the centre of a row in Clapham. Image courtesy of mirrorgirl via the Londonist flickr group.......

The stuff you find on the tube: An unpublished novel by renowned author Jeanette Winterson has been found at an Underground station in south London. The Stone Gods, by the writer of Oranges Are Not The Only Fruit, is not due to be published until September. Martha Oster, 27, said she was "amazed" when she found the 134-page manuscript lying on a bench at Balham station on Wednesday night. Penguin claim it was accidentally......

Last week the 2012 organisers were promising that the London Olympics would be the greenest yet. Normally we'd scoff at such a claim, but it looks like this time no one is talking out of their hat. By building part of the Olympic village on a radioactive dumping ground things will be very green. And glowing. Documents seen by the Guardian say waste contaminated by an isotope of thorium, a nuclear fuel which can......

More details have come out from the trial of the men involved in the July 21 failed bomb attack: Ms Baro told the court: "I was in such a panic. I did not know how a bomb worked and I thought we were going to die now." She said she noticed the person next to her was wearing a rucksack then she heard a bang and something came out of the bag and fell......

Texas is thawing, the Northeast is freezing, and a sort of natural order seems almost restored to the Ist-A-Verse. Almost. Londonist HQ—that is to say, the city of London—was battered by heavy winds, making it a bad time to be a twelve-meter (nearly forty-foot) tall snowman. Still, not everyone decided to keep warmly covered. Meanwhile, back indoors, the Big Brother racism is now causing all kinds of headaches for international diplomats, and Londonist got into......

Dhiren Barot who admitted conspiracy to murder last month, "planned to pack limousines with gas cylinders and also use a radioactive "dirty" bomb": "There were plans for the detonation of a radiation dispersal device, more commonly known as a dirty bomb, the use of a petrol tanker to cause an explosion, and an attack on London's rail or Underground network, including the Heathrow Express, of an explosion on a Tube train while in a......

It's surprising how much Londonist skin ends up covered in ink - and we're not just talking about the days that M@ leaves his pocket protector at home and has a Bic explosion. We quite like having needles shoved into us (just not in the 'Hey look I'm a wanker' Pete Doherty way) so we're looking forward to this year's International London Tattoo Convention: The list of artists who will be setting up stall......

This Day In London's History 1874: An almighty explosion in Regents Park And a chance to quote from 'The London Collection'. Written by Londonistas and out now! ...the animals of London Zoo were rudely awoken by the most powerful explosion ever recorded in the capital up to that point. For reasons never fully explained, a barge laden with gunpowder and petroleum had detonated beneath Macclesfield Bridge – one of the northern entrances to Regents......

A 29-year-old father of two has been shot dead in Chalk Hill, Wembley as he was taking his children to school. The man who climed the Eye yesterday was finally talked down after seven hours and promptly arrested. The winning image in the Nokia Citizen Journalism Awards 2006 is a shot of the No.30 bus in Tavistock Square taken just after the explosion on 7th July. Prince Charles opened the Jameel Gallery of Islamic......

This day in London’s History 1974: Explosion at the Tower of London For such an old fortress, the Tower of London has seen very little actual conflict. One exception happened on this day 32 years ago, when a suspected IRA device exploded in the mortar room of the White Tower. One person was killed and 41 were injured, including 14 children. No one was ever arrested for the crime, and no organisation claimed responsibility.......

As memorial events continue across London this morning and ahead of the silence at noon we've taken a break from the regular posting to reflect on what happened on July 7 and to remember in our own way those who were killed or injured a year ago today. Our rolling coverage of the day makes for sombre reading, but continuing down to re read the comments that streamed in it's hard not to be......

This day in London’s History 1966: Arrests at Vietnam Rally in Grosvenor Square. Some 4000 people gathered to protest against the Vietnam war and things turned violent as scuffles broke out at the demonstration outside the US Embassy. The general secretary of the Communist Party, John Gollan, asked demonstrators to call it a day, but instead they knocked a police officer from his motorbike and set fire to petrol that leaked from the bike. This......

The BBC are reporting that King's Cross railway station has been evacuated over fears a fire in a nearby building may spark an explosion. There's currently a 200m exclusion zone around the construction site near the station which caught fire at around 8:30 this morning. The station was evacuated at around 11. One person has been taken to hospital with burn injuries. East Coast main line operator GNER was forced to turn around trains......

We found it hard to imagine how last year's Big Brother could have been topped; OK, Science or Eugene should have won, but it provided reliable entertainment and too many coffee-machine moments to mention. This year's hasn't quite reached those highs, but we feel it's still in the process of bedding in - like some evil plant, a mandrake, maybe - and is just coiling itself up and building pressure before the big explosion,......

One man has been killed and another three injured after a firebomb attack on the shop they were working in yesterday: A man threw what police called a "lighted object" into the convenience store on Clapham Road, near the Oval, south London, on Thursday afternoon. One man was pronounced dead shortly after arrival at St Thomas' Hospital, a second man's condition is critical and the other two suffered minor burns. Police are looking for a......

Bloody typical. The minute that we find something interesting about the new Wembley build and the powers that be are already trying to fix it: Power cables designed to carry up to 4,000 volts at the £757million stadium are being replaced after water leaks... An engineer at the North London site said yesterday: “If there was water in the power supply on match day there would have been a risk of a big explosion.”......