In another desperate attempt to do something useful about curbing youth crime and tackling gang culture today the Home Office published "The Gangs: You and Your Child". It's an attempt to help parents identify whether their kids might be involved with gangs and deliver sound advice about what to do about it. A bit like when they used to tell you to hide under the kitchen table with some tinned food when the bomb......

It turns out that, contrary to popular media opinion, politics is alive and well with our great capital's young. Last night we squeezed into the State of London Debate, an event at Central Hall Westminster hosted by Boris Johnson and his team. A ticket did not guarantee entry and luckily we got there in plenty of time because the event was full to the brim with Londoners, young and old, anxiously waiting to ask......

Though landlords are a difficult lot to summon sympathy for – sorry, you want us to pay how much for our itty-bitty windowless flat? – our heart (nearly) bleeds to learn of this role reversal: landlords gouged by tenants. Truly? So it would seem. Cannabis factories have gained a foothold in west London rentals – the police shuttered 36 of them last year in Hounslow alone – and the losses incurred by property owners......

A quarter of all 'youth gangs' reside in Lambeth. Now there's a statistic to make the Borough's residents sleep easy at night. According to Auntie, an unpublished report has linked 40 gangs to the area, one with over 2,500 members. That's not a gang, that's a Union. With increasingly more depressing reports coming through every day on the nature of gang / youth violence, and increasingly more hysterical attempts to find a London shaped......

Black fashion week at the V&A. Police to hold talks with gang leaders. Why don't any of the articles on this topic explain why the police don't just arrest the gang leaders? Speaking of arrest, Eubank's about to receive a call from the boys in blue. Eurostar ads cause offense. Meet Honorary Constable Tizer, a 13-year old feline in the employ of Lambeth North. Image courtesy of tezzer57 via the Londonist flickr group.......

This weekend column is brought to you by the founders of Niceties Tokens, Liz and Pete of Team Nice. 24. Llamas As Team Nice and the Niceties Campaign is a year old, last week we spoke of niceties tokens, which is the mechanism that started Team Nice. So this week I thought I would speak a little bit more about Team Nice. Team Nice is an ever-growing group of people (currently just under 1,000)......

Londonist likes enterprise. The idea of making money in a creative and unusual way. The bob-a-job scout, the travelling tinker, the wandering minstrel, these are fun and hard-working figures who deserve their honest crust. The other part of this poorly contrived syllogism is that Londonist hates sitting in traffic jams. Especially in London. All those fumes and all that rage all concentrated into one urban corridor. Bad news all round, really. So therefore Londonist......

Woodpeckers in Kew destroy a once record breaking flagpole. All manner of protest is going down at Heathrow. Another thing for London to be proud of - we have more than 170 gangs! If you go to Hounslow, watch out, you may be sucked dry by mosquitoes. In Wanstead and Woodford, more than half of residents are frightened of using public transport at night. Image courtesy of ~Misty~ via the Londonist flickr group.......

If Mr. T had a jibba jabbering British equivalent, what might he do if he and his trusty sidekicks were busted and broken apart? Terry Adams, leader of the notorious Adams crime family (aka the ‘A Team’), might be able to tell us – from prison. On Friday, Adams was convicted of money laundering and sentenced to seven years in the clink. At the height of their power, in the late 1980s, they were......

Solution to gangs idea # 456: A group of mothers is using text messages to fight truancy and help keep youngsters away from gang culture. Parents with children at Addington High School in Croydon, south London, took action after a spate of stabbings. If a child is seen out of school their mother is sent a text message alerting them to where and when they were spotted and if they were safe. What if......

New exhibition at St Pauls tackles human trafficking. Orpington golf course ripped asunder. Could it be toy car man exacting his revenge? London has 169 gangs. A quarter have murdered. More embassies attempt to duck out of C-tax Image 'SouthBank' courtesy of Orhan via the Londonist flickr group.......

The snow may have brought London to a halt, but the blogorash just keeps spreading. Here are a few of the things that caught our eye out there this week... Thankfully Onionbagblogger's new darts (yes, darts) didn't literally catch our eye, but we did it think it was nice in an age of game consoles that at least one Londoner was enjoying himself the old fashioned way: Ah yes - the darts... 23g of......

We think this originated in a tabloid but we spotted it on a PSP forum via Digg: They were supposed to be guarding a wall in danger of collapsing in Chingford, East London, during last week’s gales. Thirteen people were killed by storms nationwide — including a two-year-old crushed by a falling wall in North London. A builder took the snap of the cops. He said: “They were oblivious to everything else.” The Metropolitan......

Come out to play... but that's only meant for kids, right? Not always...The phrase seems to have been adopted by the gay community in Sidcup, where parents are too nervous to take them to the local chidlren's playground because gay men have been loitering there to pick up one another for al fresco sex in the bushes and disturbing the otherwise idyllic innocent playtime of South London's infant population. There are many parents who......

We know New Yorkers can be brash, but this is ridiculous: "They were armed with two imitation guns and a meat cleaver, and bound the youngster's mother hand and foot and gagged her." He said that despite searching the place for cash, they could find no trace of it and decided to kidnap the child instead. Forcing the youngster to kiss his mother goodbye, his American captors then drove him to a flat in......

An 18-year-old woman has been charged with assisting one of the men involved in the attempted bombings of 21 July. Ken has been busy today trying to overturn his four-week suspension for likening a Jewish reporter to a concentration camp guard. Oh great, another London property boom. Just what we need. The New Gangs of London video game is getting mixed reviews. Thanks to the High Court you will now still be able to......

Peckham Academy school and nearby Harris Girls' Academy in East Dulwich are to reopen this morning after threats of 'gang violence' last Friday meant they had to be evacuated. Escalating trouble between rival gangs in the area (the Ghetto Boys from Lewisham and the Peckham Boys) resulted in the stabbing of 29-year-old Jason Gayle-Bent in New Cross last Sunday. On Friday afternoon police were told that "one group would be lying in wait to......

Was it Ian Brown who sang ‘Corpses in their mouths’? We always wondered what the hell he was on about, but now it seems King Monkey had a sage-like prescience. According to the BBC (with some extrapolation by us) Londoners may be walking around with bits of Alistair Cooke in their gobs. Yes, Alistair Cooke, the late broadcaster. His remains are amongst hundreds that have found their way into British hospitals…and thence into UK......

Watch your step this weekend: there is a veritable feast of festivals for Londoners starting from tomorrow until the last person stands partying on Sunday. You're very likely to just trip over one. Cardinal Place Carnival This new shopping and dining area in Victoria is putting itself on the map as a chic and unique place to spend your money and eat well. It is very definitely not a shopping centre and attempts to......

Sony is pissed that someone managed to release an unfinished version of upcoming PSP game Gangs of London out into the wild: An internal beta of Gangs of London, a forthcoming spectacle of urban violence on the PSP, has been leaked onto BitTorrent sites across the net... Sony Computer Entertainment UK urged gamers to avoid downloading the game -- not because it's illegal or morally reprehensible, but because the game is so full of......

Mohammed Abdul Kahar, the 23-year-old who was shot in the Forest Gate raid has said that that the policeman who shot him gave no warning...but they did have eye contact. We both had eye contact, he shot me straight away. I just saw an orange spark and a big bang. I flew into the wall, slipped down. There was blood coming down my chest. I knew I was shot. Londonist has since spoken to......

Bob Murrill, the head of the Met's organised-crime unit, has said that London's criminal gangs are "out of control'". The Olympic Delivery Authority has managed to secure freehold of land that is part of the Stratford City development project at no extra cost. The Cruise spent four hours talking to fans (and taking mobile phone calls of course) outside the M:I III premiere last night. Apparently Nelson will have his arm x-rayed today as......

Sir Ian Blair flies out to New York to lecture on the threat of 'home-grown mass-assassins'. Delicious opportunity for satire ensues. Meanwhile, his Met minions have 'mapped' the networks of criminal gangs operating in London. Sadly, it won't be available as a Google Earth plug-in. Perhaps they used it this weekend, when 200 officers raided The Fridge in Brixton, on a drugs bust. Eleven people were arrested. Bromley continues to collapse in on itself.......

There are 170 criminal gangs in London, half of which are involved in violent activity and they're responsible for more than a third of the capital's murders. A four-storey terrace house in a residential street in Woolwich was raided by police yesterday. The house was home to 800 cannabis plants. Five arrests have been made over last month's cartoon protests. One man is up in court today charged with inciting murder. London is going to......

London 2026: We remember a time of chaos. Ruined dreams. This wasted land. But most of all, we remember The Road Warrior. The man we called "Jeremy". To understand who he was, you have to go back to another time. When the world was powered by the black fuel. That world crumbled. The cities exploded. A whirlwind of looting, a firestorm of fear. Men began to feed on men. On the roads it was......

Well, here we go again. The release of another instalment of video game ‘The Getaway’ has been announced by Sony. And this time, it’s portable The Getaway: Gangs of London is to be launched later this year on the PSP format. Flawed but fun, the earlier PS2 titles offered excellent opportunities for London-based mayhem. Forget about the creaky storyline. We’d make up our own missions, like ‘You must steal the tank, and shell your......

The latest defection from LA to join the gangs of Hollywood ex-patratriates gobbling up the primest of London prime real estate is Neve Campbell. The film actress is currently in London rehearsing the Robert Altman directed, Arthur Miller scripted play Resurrection Blues at the Old Vic theatre in Waterloo. The Old Vic is no stranger to asylum seekers from Hollywood: no less than Kevin Spacey runs the place as Artistic Director and keeps up......

London is to get an extra £22 million next year to tackle climate change and improve the environment. My Pal the Psychopath says today's Sun, describing the "astonishing video"of George Galloway in a 20-minute meeting with Saddam Hussein's son Uday in an Iraqi palace. It's not all work, work, work: police charge the ex-assistant manager of the Wandsworth high street branch of Lloyds TSB with corruption and theft as part of a two year investigation......

Looking ahead, there is the Christmas season of bloat and binge just around the corner for most of us, and beyond that, the traditional New Year period of fasting, repenting and reduced calories. Most popular of all items to give up for the New Year is smoking - and the business of quitting is almost as lucrative and controversial as the business of smoking itself. Should quitting smoking be a publicly funded issue? What's......

You, our faithful Londonist readers, did so well with the previous installments of this little game, in which we have asked you to identify the London location of videos featuring Kylie, Coldplay, and the Chemical Brothers, that we thought we'd give you a bit more of a challenge. (As always, post answers or other reactions in the comments.) Madonna, Madonna, Madonna! We don't even need to make a joke. You can come up with your......