Harry Potter may have completed his seven years at school, but younger wizardlings are in for several years of service disruption on the Hogwart's Express. Platform 9 and 3/4 will be shifted later this year to allow construction work on the West side of King's Cross, according to Jon Burden the former Duty Station Manager at King's Cross, who led a tour of the area yesterday. The enchanted platform will be relocated to the......

Londonist eye witnesses were alarmed yesterday when their quiet lunchtime pint in Camden (alright for some, eh?) was disrupted by "more than 30 police vans and unmarked police cars driving past with their lights flashing. It was quite surreal." Turns out the Met were on their way to an all out rout of Blackstock Road. An incredible 600 officers in riot gear targetted 19 premises on the busy shopping street near Finsbury Park, apparently......

Where's your sense of humour, blokes? Can't a fat, hairy-chested guy fake being crucified while wearing pink boxers anymore? Well, he can't in the tube. London Underground censors just banned posters for Fat Christ, a play showing this week at Islington's King's Head Theatre. They fear the ads in Angel station, showing the mock crucifixion of the play's writer, Gavin Davis, are "likely to offend ethnic, religious or other major groups." The author, though, apologizes......

Every month, the folks at Fancyapint? get together to vote for their top ten favourite pubs. These are recently visited pubs that for one reason or another (the ambience, the booze, the company) stuck in their collective memory. Kindly, these booze-savvy Fancyapinters have decided to share their latest picks with Londonist and all our readers. Cheers! Here’s the current list from Fancyapint? in no particular order of merit. They assure us that all ten......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 11th February 1826: The University of London is founded. It would later be known as University College London (or UCL). Tuesday – 12th February 1554: Lady Jane Grey and her husband Lord Guildford Dudley are executed at the Tower of London. Wednesday – 13th February 1247: A major earthquake causes considerable damage to London. Curiously, it is reported that the quake was preceded for three months by......

Had TfL existed in his time, the great Samuel Johnson may well have amended his famous aphorism to read "a man who is bored of London needs to hop on the number 19 bus". In its perambulation from Battersea to Finsbury Park, the 19 cuts a swath across the capital's economic and cultural barriers, revealing the world within one city that modern London manifests. Vogue has certainly been impressed by the number 19. The......

24. Haunted Roads For Halloween! Despite London’s congested roads and the daily chorus of thousands of beeping horns, ghosts of the cities roads are in fact sporadic. Look through any catalogue of phantom hitchhikers or ghostly vehicles (for example http://www.roadghosts.com/) and you’ll notice a distinct lack of activity within the capital pertaining to tarmac terrors. Why this is we’ll never know – maybe it’s simply down to the fact that elsewhere in the country,......

Reality TV has found a new audience with the broadcast of a splendid new show, Model Mosque. Shown on the Islam Channel, the programme sees mosques from around the UK (of which there are 1,500 official ones) going head to head to be awarded the title of Mosque with the mostest and to receive £35,000 worth of consultancy. Viewers vote by text on the weekly knockout rounds - the final is on 25th November. Londonist......

We like a funny story on Londonist, and this has had us tittering into our tea mugs all day. One David Gay, of Finsbury Park, is up in the dock accused of using stealth cameras to film up ladies’ skirts. Voyeurs are of course fundamentally pretty sad creatures, and the idea that someone has the power to see into areas which are private or sacred to another individual is, frankly, dead creepy. Clearly this guy......

A lot of interesting conversations take place in the toilets. Ladies queue for the lavatory and start discussions about just about anything. Men indulge in a subtle, extremely complex sort of code when standing at the urinal, trying to continue an in-depth analysis of the weather. And art... people talk about art in toilets. No, really, they do. This Londonista was locked into the Ladies toilets of Hackney Empire in May this year in......

Free music is where it's at. Fact. But free music combined with a campaign against racism gets a nice fat thumbs up from us. This weekend sees the annual Rise festival hit London and this time round it's going two days. If you're over on the outskirts of London, near Dagenham, then Saturday will be your bag. From 4pm, Dagenham's Central Park will be transformed into a concert venue as part of the long......

...Arsenal will even throw in a football match for free! Seriously, though, tonight represents an excellent opportunity for those who can't normally get a ticket to watch Arsene's finest, but would love to have a butcher's around their new stadium and didn't fancy forking out over £50 to watch Portugal beat Brazil the other week. Arsenal host Cardiff City tonight in an FA Youth Cup quarter final which might typically have been held at......

We've always been slightly amused by the word 'oyster'. Following the pattern of trickster and punster, it should refer to one who delights in shouting 'Oy!'. Which is exactly what we say to Transport for London. Today, the BBC revealed that 18,000 people per day are not using their oyster cards correctly, and are thus charged full fare. Shashi Verma, director of Oyster cards, has this to say: If people use the system as......

So, as most of us know by now, there was transport 'chaos' this morning. Not least on the tube – according to the TFL Realtime Travel News page 10 out of the 12 lines on the underground network were knackered at 9am today. Credit to London Underground though. They could have used this morning’s light dusting of snow as a predictably lazy excuse for all of the problems, but they’ve risen above that. Instead......

We've had an elephant and a mammoth, but now London has a vulture! This ones real too! Eleven more tube station will become step-free by 2011 including Vauxhall and Finsbury Park. There are conflicting reports over what Michael Jackson actually sang at last night's WMAs, but whatever it was, no-one seems to have liked it. It's been a bit of a struggle with the press so far, but the new production of The Sound......

It's time for another Londonist Culture Crawl though in the current hot weather, the temptation to slump into a sticky puddle of distinctly uncultured gloop is rather overwhelming. Nonetheless, for those armed with enough Friday 7 July Being the first Friday of the month, go along to Tate Britain for the July Friday Late. This Friday is the return of the South West Fest Party - an annual celebration of the SW1 community. Music......

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......

Remember on The Day Today when Chris Morris covered stranded train passengers going feral? It came close to happening over the weekend: More than 200 people were trapped underground for two hours when a Tube train got stuck between stations. Police were called at 0115 BST on Tuesday, after a Victoria Line train stopped between Highbury and Islington and Finsbury Park in north London. London Underground tried to get it moving again, but it......

A manhunt is underway for the guman who opened fire on two men outside Finsbury Park station last night, wounding a female bystander in the process. Its thought the same person is responsible for an earlier shooting on Upper Street. Network Rail wants to distribute its own free afternoon newspaper across 10 of its London stations. The 'sex theme park' for the West End is official. Amora - The Academy of Sex and Relationships......

Saturday July 8th sees the 6th Rise Festival taking place at Finsbury Park, Mayor Ken's freebie anti-racism gig; so maybe the one day in the year when he'll have to be nice to the Americans. Lord Coxon of Camden is headlining along with The Buzzcocks, The Wailers, Sway and, erm, Roy Ayers. No doubt a few other acts to be announced, perhaps we could recommend some of the fine bands featured in our juke......

Londonist gets invitations to all sorts of things, in all sorts of places. Last night's outing was to hear a series of oral histories from those who experienced the 1956 Revolution in Hungary at the Hungarian Cultural Centre, Covent Garden. It got us thinking... what other cultural centres can be found in London? For such a big place filled with so many international people, languages, cuisine and arts, there must be loads of places......

Police said they are treating the death as murder and appealed for people who were in Barking Road on Saturday afternoon or evening to come forward. Police launch a murder investigation after a 100-year-old woman dies in a fire at her flat. Morwen Rees, 57, of Llanpumsaint, was last spotted at 1140 GMT on Saturday, 11 February, after being dropped off at Carmarthen train station Police believe she may be in London as she......

Browsing through the ever-excellent Things Magazine this morning we came across a link to Cinema Treasures, a site "devoted to movie theater preservation and awareness, uniting movie theater owners and enthusiasts in a common cause - to save the last remaining movie palaces across the country." As it's primarily a US site we turned right to the page marked UK and found the London cinemas that are listed there. There's quite a few... and......

Today Abu Hamza will make the trip from Belmarsh prison, where's he's been held since May 2004, to the Old Bailey where he'll face charges relating to the incitement of murder and hatred as well as as one under the Terrorism Act (but none of impersonating a pirate). The former imam of Finsbury Park mosque is due to attend the first day of his trial today to face a total of 16 charges which......

Remember Rentaghost? That’s right, the kids show from the early ‘80s, in which spooks and ghouls and freaks and fools were available for hire, and proceeded to act very camply. Perhaps electronic artist/architect/handyman Usman Haque has a 21st Century version of the service in mind, having found a way to artificially give you the heebie-jeebies. As highlighted on Boing Boing, he’s requesting volunteers from the London area to take part in a simulated spook-out.......

Yesterday we introduced you to Tom Marlow and Gavin White, two very insane brave and imaginative souls who decided last year that it would be a good idea to cycle to every Underground station in London (including the disused and abandoned ones) as well as swim in every outdoor and unheated pool, pond and lido in the capital to boot. When we left them yesterday they'd just stopped for a well-deserved chicken burger at......

Something's changing in Londonist Towers. Something's in the air. Perhaps it's a subtle shift in the midichlorians, perhaps it's that there's a new Turin Brakes album out but we're beginning to stockpile bottles of Tequila and Rizla papers and trying to find the number of 'that bloke we met down the pub' the other day. Look out the window and, yes, it's raining. Of course. Festival Season is upon us. So whilst some will......

The Clash's performance at the Rainbow Room in 1977 has been voted the Best London Gig Ever by Time Out. The Finsbury Park gig, which also included The Jam, Buzzcocks, Subway Sect and The Prefects as support, came top of the 100 strong list compiled by "journalists and contributors". The 'middle aged journos reminiscing about their youth' factor may have contributed to the Clash wining, but second place went to a much more recent......

Boy oh boy, we just love spy stories here at Londonist, and this one is particularly good because it involves a Frenchman, sideburns, nosey old women and the word "Londonistan". The Telegraph article revolves around the life story of one Pierre Martinet, a former French spy whose book (the catchily titled La DGSE, Action Service, An Agent Comes Out of the Shadow) comes out tomorrow. The book apaprently gives a "hands-on account of the......

It seems the prize for 2005's most ridiculous excuse may have already been won after Abu Hamza refused to appear at the Old Bailey today because "his toenails are too long". The former Imam of Finsbury Park mosque was due to appear via video-link from a special room at Belmarsh prison (his current residence) to answer charges of terrorism, but refused to leave his cell complaining that he couldn't walk. Hamza's defence counsel said......