Back in April we reported that retail sales were looking healthy early on in '08. Seems the trend has continued, with spending in central London last month up 8.7% compared to June 2007, while the national figure dropped by 0.4%. Continental visitors flush with sterling-thumping Euros, along with heavy discounting and aggressive mid-season sales from department stores, have helped retailers to healthy profit margins, though the research firm KPMG cautioned that the trend doesn't necessarily......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 31st March 1990: Violence erupts as hundreds of thousands of anti-poll-tax protesters take to the streets in the West End. An estimated £400,000 of damage is caused to property as cars are overturned and set alight. Hundreds of arrests are made. Tuesday – 1st April 1965: The administrative area known as Greater London is formed, amalgamating and consuming parts of central London and the home counties. Wednesday......

The freebie sheets are to get a bit of artistic credibility: they are to be recycled into sculpture. For some strange reason Ken is sending some bus drivers on a trip to Beijing. Some of London’s buildings are to get a green makeover. Shameful: London women earn 23% less than London men. Even more shameful: 4 in 10 children live in poverty in Greater London. Mothering Sunday suggestion no2 courtesy of Robert Brook’s flickr......

32. The Spirit Of Christmas Christmas ghost stories told by a crackling fire are a rare occurrence in the modern age, so let me chill your spine with a few yarns relating to festive phantoms of the wintry city. The first haunting is said to occur on Christmas Day at the Cadogan Hotel, Sloane Street, and concerns the ghost of actress Lillie Langtry, once a mistress of Edward VII. The spook is not a......

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......

25. More Road-Related Horror! Lord John Angerstein’s coach has been sighted pulled by four headless horses, in the vicinity of Trafalgar Road, travelling onwards to Vanbrugh Hill in southeast London. Why the horses appear headless no one knows. On the Bayswater Road near Hyde Park, another phantom coach and horses is said to travel, without sound. But the most astonishing vehicle to haunt Greater London has to be that of a spectral bus, sighted......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 22nd October 1809: The Croydon Canal, linking Croydon to Deptford via Forest Hill, is opened. Requiring 28 locks to overcome the gradients of the route, it would never become a commercial success, and would be closed just 37 years later. Tuesday – 23rd October 1731: A fire breaks out in Ashburnham House in Westminster, damaging much of the Cotton Library – a renowned collection of Middle English......

The third of our interviews with the Tory candidates for London Mayor. Previously, Victoria Borwick and Andrew Boff. Warwick Lightfoot has, no doubt, spent a lifetime tolerating jibes about his Tolkeinesque name. He's also acquired an outstanding CV that includes stints as Mayor of Kensington and Chelsea, Special Advisor to the Chancellor and 20 years experience as a councillor. Most impressively of all, he's the first Tory candidate to admit to vomiting on the......

It turns out that Thames Water is doing more at their Crossness facility than just processing sewage from nearly two million Londoners each day. To give you a very unpleasant visual image to go along with that statistic, apparently that's enough sewage to fill 20 olympic size swimming pools every hour. They also own and manage the Crossness Nature Reserve in Bexley, one of the last remaining grazing marshes in Greater London. It's home......

Stand back London - Ken's powers are about to be upgraded: More powers are to be given to the mayor of London in a bill flagged in the Queen's speech. The Greater London Authority (GLA) Bill aims to bolster the mayor's leadership in order to "meet future challenges". The challenges include staging the 2012 Olympic Games, providing more homes for Londoners and combating climate change. Rumour has it that Ken will be lead in......

Today Ken launched his Valuing Older People initiative, designed to challenge "stereotypes of older people and provide a framework to develop a city in which older Londoners have the support they need to lead active, healthy and independent lives." The campaign was launched with the help of Richard 'famous for playing the most stereotypical pensioner ever' Wilson. Ken's a busy man: The Times takes a look at the Mayor's £1bn plans for the Oxford......

Love it or hate it, Pimlico School is going to be pulled down. The Brutalist secondary school building in SW1 has been simultaneously revered and reviled for years, in similar ways to London's other Brutalist buildings such as the Greater London Council Traffic Island, the Royal Festival Hall and Trellick Tower. While some of these stark, clumpy concrete buildings survive endless criticism relatively intact, others face a jazzed-up reincarnation or complete annihilation at the......

Dull, suburban Middle Englanders, if the stereotype is to be believed. And it is. According to a survey by AA insurance (why?), if you live on an Acacia Avenue, you’re likely to fit the following profile: Their recipe for happiness involves never moving, never divorcing and never changing job. They have three bedrooms, and a garden, on which one in five has a shed and one in 10 a gnome. They earn on average......

This afternoon Ken Livingstone announced his GLA Group Pandemic Flu Response Plan, designed to "detail contingency arrangements that are to be implemented in the event of an influenza pandemic to ensure the continued operation of services provided by the Greater London Authority and its associated bodies, the GLA Group." Or, in plain English: what we're going to do to keep London running if/when bird flu hits. Here's a few things we learnt from our......

Bit of an eco two pronger this one - first up is the news that while big companies are encouraged to do all they can to recycle, smaller firms are being sidelined: The London Assembly's environment committee has published a report claiming smaller businesses are being all but ignored in the drive to promote the use of recycled products... It is totally unacceptable for the Mayor, LDA and London Remade to focus only on......

As a pre-silly-season warm up, it doesn’t get much more absurd than a tense standoff between two warring factions of pigeon-feeders in Trafalgar Square. Seriously though, it’s true. Apparently ‘Save The Trafalgar Square Pigeons’ are getting mightily miffed with the ‘Pigeon Action Group’ over who has the legal right to feed the filthy flying rats in Trafalgar Square between 7:30 and 7:40 every morning. And now Ken Livingstone is getting so fed up with......

Tottenham Hotspur FC wants to create a 'cutting edge' £30 million training centre in Bulls Cross, Enfield. The problem? The 56-acres of land they're looking at developing is believed to be home to a protected rare species of bat called the barbastelle. (The barbastelle's other claim to fame is that it's one of the ugliest type of bat, but let's not hold that against them eh?) No communtiy of barbastelle's has ever been seen......

Harrison Richards had the chance of a lifetime yesterday to do something that most Londoners would love to have a go at themselves: he put on a hard hat, heavy boots and drove a bloody huge crusher into the Greater London Council Island Block, otherwise known as "that frigging horrible octagonal concrete eyesore that sits in the middle of the traffic island just outside Waterloo like an embarrassing toothless incontinent great-aunt who just won't......

It's five miles outside the Greater London border. It's five miles inside the M25. The clincher for us is that it's on the Metropolitan line. Just. Right at the end there, next to Croxley. And so it is that Londonist doffs its cap to Watford's stunning achievement in reaching the Premiership when they crushed Leeds United 3-0 in the Coca Cola Championship playoff final at the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff on Sunday. Last night......

The British National Party are the epitome of what is wrong with British politics today. Just watching their skin-headed, xeno/homo/everything-phobic candidates standing at the vote count in their little Union Flag waistcoats makes Londonist's resident Politico, Nick, want to hang up his rosette in disgust. Londonist feels that the BNP deserves to be ignored by the media, thus depriving the party of oxygen to fuel their intolerant fire. However, we just can't resist the......

Hey, did you know that every building in London has been targeted by aircraft-mounted lasers? We certainly didn’t. But now at least we know why Londonist’s TV set keeps switching channels unexpectedly. It’s all part of the revolution in 3D mapping. While everyone’s been salivating over Google Earth, other initiatives have been waiting in the wings. And not just waiting. Here’s one that uses wings. Aerial mapping company BlueSky has announced a new 3D......

Seems like the American Robin isn't the only non-native bird to be settling in town these days. The results of the RSPB's Big Garden Survey are in and the Hendon and Finchley Times is proud to announce the increase in the numbers of rare species spotted in the borough. Over 1400 borough residents took part in observing the local flight-life on 28th and 29th January, noticing an increase in sightings of ring-necked parakeets, red......

This weekend is one of a selected few when London's City Hall gets opened up to the public. Home to the GLA and dear Ken since 2002, opinion on the asthetic pleasure of the buliding is always under discussion. We think it's pretty snazzy and hear the view across London from the top is pretty spectactular even if they have rather pretentiously named the top floor 'London's living room'. Opening between 10 and 5pm......

An interesting little story buried away in the pages of the icSouthlondon site would seem to suggest that the borough of Lambeth is about to go seriously broke. The story dates back to the 80s when a Government loan was taken by the Greater London Council. When the authority was wound up in 86, that debt was passed to something called the Inner London Education Authority which only lasted until the end of the......

One hundred years is a deucedly long time in the life of a great city. And much has changed, as this selection box of statistics shows. Figures are for greater London, unless otherwise stated. The first number indicates the 1905 value, the second shows the 2005 figure. Population (Greater London): ~6.8 m; ~7.5 m Population (Inner London): ~4.5 m; ~2.8 m World ranking (by population): 1st; 19th Murder rate: 8 per million; 27 per......

Here's the press release in full as we couldn't find much about this online yet: New research reveals that commitments made in the London Plan to improve housing for disabled people are not being implemented by London boroughs, says John Grooms Housing Association. JGHA, the leading provider of wheelchair accessible housing says that failure to implement the London Plan at a local level is letting down the 37,000 disabled people in the capital living......

Young Londoners can badger Ken at the launch of the Young Londoners Network at City Hall later today: London is home to 1.61 million children under the age of 18 – more than one-fifth of the total population of the city. Research from the Greater London Authority has demonstrated that London’s under-18s take a real interest in the way their city is run, and have lots of intelligent ideas about how to improve it.......

We just got the following press release: People’s Question Time-Londoners’ opportunity to question the Mayor and the London Assembly The Mayor of London and the London Assembly are inviting Londoners to come to Hendon Police College on Wednesday 23 November at 7pm, to take part in People’s Question Time. Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, said: 'People’s Question Time is an opportunity for Londoners to raise their concerns about life in the capital. Since the last......

Another week, another big tower. This time, Coin Street Builders (the guys behind the Oxo Tower rejuvenation) have announced plans for a monster of a residential block on the South Bank. Looking something like a cross between Tower42 (NatWest Tower) and the Tate Modern’s brooding chimney further downstream, the 168 m stack would nestle behind the National Theatre, on Doon Street. Along with the proposed Beetham Tower at Blackfriars, these plans signal a potential......

Another pile of 1970's 'brutalism' looks set to tumble. Malbray Ltd. are planning to redevelop the groaning heap of concrete that sits atop the Westminster Bridge roundabout, to create a 913-bedroom, 15-floor hotel. The current six-storey monster was built in the early 1970s as an extension to the Greater London Council offices, but has sat unloved and empty for several years. (Except, of course, for the good guys in Ultraviolet, who used it as......