Sore at missing out on the £50 million pad up in London's own Billionaire Row that was sold last month? Well, here's the good news - another one's just come on the market. Steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal has decided to up sticks from Bishops Avenue in Hampstead, after Barrat Homes were given permission to build a block of luxury flats right next door. Britain's richest man apparently didn't fancy contending with one of the......

As Camden is recognised as a musos’ haven, Ken pledges cash for the rebuild. Silly bitch niece is banged up for life for killing her poor 100 year old aunt. Over her inheritance. Doherty is putting it around (his guitar, of course), with gigs here and there. Kings College is developing some good news for diabetes sufferers. London Fashion Week carries on in spite of Londonist apathy: apparently Conran’s a hit. Piccie courtesy of......

A major fire has broken out in Camden Town. Part of the Canal Market, Chalk Farm Road, caught fire around 7pm. As dense black smoke billowed out from beneath shutters at least four fire engines and a surveillance helicopter rushed to the scene. Nearby shopkeepers rallied together bringing buckets and extinguishers. The market appeared to be closed and there is no indication of any injuries. 7.50 This is a major, major fire. At least......

This weekend column is brought to you by the founders of Niceties Tokens, Liz and Pete of Team Nice. 33. Office Robots Following on from the theme of Office Culture and the influence this can have on how nice we are to each other… this week I started thinking about the actual role we do all day, every day… Now, I realise that lately it's been a very easy thing to take shots at......

If you're the forward-thinking type who likes to read Londonist on your BlackBerry or iPhone while heading to or from work, yet resent having the myriad delights of John Q Stranger's armpit swabbed over your face on yet another overcrowded carriage, some good news: the government has promised an extra 100,000 seats across the country's rail networks. Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly confirmed that a 10% increase in rolling stock is planned, with around 600......

OK, so we admit we've got a soft spot for our city's firefighters and a morbid fascination with their latest incident page but it is genuinely good news for all of us that the London Fire Brigade is officially "performing strongly" according to the Audit Commission latest assessment. The Commission looked at all fire authorities in England and London was especially praised for its outreach and education work - remember Controversy? Also, their relative......

2008 is Beijing's Olympic year so we're expecting plenty of 2012 related news, rumblings and international comparisons bouncing round the internet. On the last day of January, our Games have already made the headlines 3 times this week: When overall costs trebled at the end of last year, the Lottery stepped in with a mega loan to the Olympics. This week, Tessa Jowell announced it might take 10 years after the event for any......

Hammersmith & Fulham Council isn't joking with their latest measure to improve the welfare of residents. After petitioning, residents of Perham Road are going to get relief from a constant barrage of pigeon poo through the deployment of hawks in the area. It seems to be working, so far, and the council will continue hiring hawks to keep the peace for the foreseeable future. For those of you fearing for the lives of our......

Londonist asks that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Franco’s Take Away 67 Rivington Street EC2A 3AY Nearest Tube: Old Street 0207 739 0231 6.30am-5pm (Monday-Saturday) Expect to Pay: £5 or less for a substantial amount of food Rating: 7 out of 10 Despite its seemingly hidden location (and Erol Alkan’s musing), this Italian (cum East Ender) sandwich bar is hardly any secret. Indeed, random queues can form......

Quirky, hi-tech, London-loving (and loved by London), finger-on-the-pulse journalism…no, we’re not talking about Londonist here, but rather one of its forefathers – the Illustrated London News. The world’s first ever illustrated newspaper, the ILN was a feature on the news stands of London since its launch in May 1842 ‘til very nearly recently (it seems to have been produced until 2002). It would appear to have been a victim of its parent company changing hands......

Office shag sees uniformed officer sacked even though he kept in touch with his colleagues by phone and radio whilst he enjoyed his internet date Rumblings in the House over transport security and funding for the Olympics. De Menezes inquest may take months The faithful defrauded But to end on good news, lightbulb amnesty at B&Q! Image courtesy of DICKSDAILY via the Londonist flickr group.......

Hallelujah! Heathrow, Stansted and London City airports are lifting the one bag restriction from today! The era of squashing what you can into a carefully measured single piece of hand luggage or resigning yourself to checking in your bags and the inevitable lengthy scramble at the carousels at the other end is almost over. Security teams at 19 airports in the UK have been deemed capable of checking more than one bag per person,......

Move over Queenie. The Mayor has his own seasonal message. As you might imagine, it’s all good news. London is now the business capital of the world. Two million extra passengers a day are carried on the buses than in the 1990s. Crossrail funding is secured. Cycling has doubled. We’re chairing the C40 group of cities fighting climate change. And so on and so on. Although he begins by saying that 2008 will be......

Having closed its doors in 2004, and playing host to squatters in recent months, there's finally some good news to report about the Commonwealth Institute in west London. The disused building is to be the welcome recipient of £20 million development plan, with hopes to turn it into an art gallery (yay!), museum (double-yay!) or "centre for a corporate foundation" (erm, possibly yay - we're not sure what that means). This should hopefully mean......

We feel churlish bringing it up again, but not so long ago Heathrow was voted the world's least favourite airport. As we head into the crunch Christmas travel period, it could surely use a slice of decent press. So is there any good news to come out of TW19? Is there 'eck. Word reaches us that key workers at Heathrow are to be balloted for a strike. The Unite union has asked the airport's......

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......

Blues skies aside, winter is upon us - the halcyon days of summer a distant memory; thermals and visible breath a present reality. Therefore what better way to raise darkened spirits during these darkened days than going to the comedy and loosing yourself in laughter? We at Londonist certainly think this is a great plan (we’ve been on a not-so-secret comedy revival mission for years), and good news for us, Stewart Lee is playing at......

After last week’s news that our ambulances are the best in the country, Londoners should be pleased to hear that there’s now another reason why, if you’re going to have medical trouble, you may as well do it in the capital. Londoners’ chances of surviving a cardiac arrest outside the hospital have more than trebled in the last five years, according to a new report by the London Ambulance Service. About one in six......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 17th September 1961: Police arrest 1,314 demonstrators at a CND (Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) protest in Trafalgar Square. Bertrand Russell is amongst those arrested. Tuesday – 18th September 1970: Guitar legend Jimi Hendrix is found dead in his basement flat in Notting Hill, west London. A subsequent inquest records an open verdict on his death, noting that he drank wine and took nine sleeping pills the previous......

The London arts scene got some good news today. The National Portrait Gallery and The V&A are amongst 43 galleries across England to benefit from a whole load of cash from the Wolfson Charity grant: over £4million in total. So what does this mean for London? Well the V&A has been given the most cash. £300,000 is going to go towards helping with issues such as access and sorting out public areas and there......

Lily Allen’s bouncy song "Smile" has obviously had no effect on the meanest people on the planet: US Immigration Officials. The pop star, aged 22, was detained at Los Angeles International Airport for five hours while questioned about the caution she received in June for an alleged assault she committed in London. The bad news is that her work visa was revoked. The good news is that she was not strip searched, nor did......

It's often easy to forget the Liberal Democrats these days, despite the opportunity to write alliterative headlines like that. In the last few days, it must be hard to try to top a new Labour Prime Minister swanning off for a ride in George Bush's motorised buggy, or his Conservative rival escaping the floods to Rwanda, only to return to be dogged by criticism and demands for peerages. But as Boris and Ken start......

Earlier this week we told you about Galaxy Zoo, where ordinary web users help astronomers by classifying the galaxies they capture in their telescopes. But Londoners are an exploratory bunch, and after sorting a few dozen of the Milky Way’s neighbours you might ask what you could see if you went outside and looked up at the sky yourself. We’ve got good news and bad news for you on that front. The bad news......

Unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand since Blair morphed into Brown, the government has now put housing at the forefront of the political agenda, having realised that the current lack of residential units being built is totally inadequate. At the frontline of this campaign is the need to build more homes in brown-field sites in our cities so that we can edge towards those housing targets of about 200,000 a year.......

It's been a weekend of high sporting drama and noticeably less rain, but for drama of a smaller, more traditional scale, here's a bit of old-school street theatre to start the week... Punch and Judy is unarguably formulaic and predictable - Punch will beat his wife Judy with a stick, an alligator will make a cameo appearance, a policeman will be tricked and a comedic string of sausages will be a key prop throughout.......

Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson, MP for Henley, journalist, historian, author and everyone’s favourite upper-class twit is being considered as the Conservative candidate for London’s mayor. After being questioned on whether he would like to run in 2008 against Mayor Ken, Boris enthusiastically harumphed, "Being Mayor of London would be a fantastic job and anyone who loves London would want to consider the possibility very carefully." He went on to state that he does......

It’s that time of year again. No, not summer (have you looked outside today? Blech), but the annual We Live In A Damned Expensive City survey that makes us all feel like flinging the two pennies we have to rub together out the window of our high-rise shoebox flats. This is otherwise known as the Mercer Human Resource Consulting’s 2007 Cost of Living study. The bad news is that London has risen from the......

Good news from the groundswell Music Free Buses… and Trains Campaign which has been lobbying Transport for London to impose a blanket ban on the use of mobile phone MP3 players without headphones on buses. TfL recently incorporated a modest "Keep your music down" sign on the Central Notice on every bus (see here because we bet you’ve never noticed it before) but suddenly they’ve upped the ante and are going to scare the......

The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg (yes, Bloomberg as in that media conglomerate), is in London at the moment to look in greater detail at why so many international firms are moving their M&A activity and their currency trading to our very own City - away from his home turf. US firms - especially the ones that earn fat fees from such business - aren’t happy about the shift, with consultants McKinsey having......

If you were wondering who to blame for yesterday's misery on the tube network then look no further as London Underground have quite happily hung the culprits out to dry: Metronet had not carried out necessary work overnight such as using special trains to clear snow and ice from tracks, an LU spokesman said... "Cold weather and a threat of snow were forecast and Metronet chose not to undertake the necessary prevention work overnight.......