Careless talk costs jobs: one of Boris’ aides is forced to resign for a throwaway racist comment. There’s a bit of a mess over the way forward for South East London’s healthcare. A woman pulled from the Thames on Friday night lies critically ill in hospital, her identity still a mystery. Practice for the rowing squad? About a quarter of the building materials needed for 2012 are to be transported by water. Hampstead Heath......

The Mayoral race has been quiet recently. Londonist suspects that it is the calm before the shitstorm. According to a recent poll, Boris is only one point behind Ken. A sign that campaigning is going to start making a dent on the Winehouse news in the London Lite is that Boris, from the blue corner, has launched a new Back Boris website. The photo gallery shows us that recently the campaign trail has taken......

Firefighters rank pretty highly in our list of bona fide, real life heroes. So, news that a fire crew in Deptford rescued and resucitated a 9 month old Staffordshire Bull Terrier from a fire that started in the basement of a Chinese Restaurant yesterday, just makes us go all moist at the edges. Four people were also led to safety by firefighters from Deptford, Greenwich and East Greenwich firestations but it's the image of......

The Christmas turkey is cold and in sandwiches. A few of us have struggled back to work, carrying surplus chocolate to the office in a desperate attempt to stop our expanding waistlines. Which must mean it's about time to start panicking about what to do on New Year's Eve. Aside from rammed pubs, pricey nightclubs and awkward parties in someone's frontroom, the main focus for London will be squarely on the London Eye. Since......

Of course, the best way to do London on the Cheap this week is to visit friends and rellies and plough through their festive supplies of food and drink, play silly games, watch a bit of frothy telly (see Londonist Stays In for top tips) and fall asleep mildly pissed. When you get cabin fever however, here's a few ideas for low level expenditure entertainment that doesn't involve church or carol singing. Christmas Eve:......

This Sunday TfL take over the North London Line. Yes, the service also known as the loony line and infamous for fare dodging and criminal activity on unmanned stations is getting a rebrand. Goodbye (good riddance) Silverlink! Hello London Overground. The long neglected, feared and cursed service that links Stratford with North London and pootles all the way around the West to Richmond is being brought into the TfL fold. It's even getting coloured......

Now, you know us. We wouldn't normally play along with some company's marketing schemes and compromise our editorial independence. Not us. No never. Well, hardly ever. Occasionally, a company dangles something in front of us so tasty that we can't help but bite. If we said it involves dragons, Hampstead Heath and photoshopping skills, then I think you can forgive us for our little dalliance. Penguin have just launched a new community site for......

You know the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness is truly here when shiny brown conkers start showing up everywhere. This Sunday they'll be swinging from strings and used as potentially lethal (well, knuckle bruising) weapons by all and sundry: it's Hampstead Heath's Conker Championship! This is doubly exciting. Firstly, Conkers is a stupidly excellent game that makes us feel all nostalgic and olde Englishe. Secondly, Hampstead Heath just isn't mentioned often enough on......

The bell-ringing flasher of Colliers Wood. The bossman's friend at Stamford Bridge. The knife-sporting Wizard of Sutton. The bleeding canker of Hampstead Heath. Amy Winehouse. Image courtesy of nevermorepro via the Londonist flickr group.......

The fourth in our series of interviews with potential candidates for next year's Mayoral election. Previously: Victoria Borwick (Tory), Andrew Boff (Tory) and Warwick Lightfoot (Tory). Sian Berry is the Green's candidate for next year's elections. Unlike the Tory rivals we've previously interviewed, she is a strong supporter of the congestion charge. She's the only person we've ever known to use the words 'The North London Line is good'. And she's also got a......

16. Strange Invaders Whilst residing at his terraced house in Kentish Town, during the 1980s, Christopher Fowler began to notice glimpses of unusual whitish creatures in his back garden. After finally finding the time to fully investigate, and to dismiss such possible hallucinations on his own behalf, Mr Fowler was astounded to discover several albino lobster-like critters, which plagued his yard for several months. A friend of Mr Fowler’s, whilst visiting one evening, almost......

Kate Monro is working on a book about that most intimate subject: how people lose their virginity. She's interviewed Londoners old and young, male and female, gay, straight, Muslim and Roman Catholic, able and non-able bodied. And she's always on the lookout for, ahem, a new angle... Why are you so curious about how people lost their virginity? I’m nosy! No, seriously, it came to me in a light bulb moment. A friend and......

10. Scareships Just previous to the First World War, as Germany prepared to release the Zeppelin air ships, a spate of phantom airship sightings took grip on the world. London was just one city in the UK to become besieged by the mysterious aircraft that had no definitive origin. Were they the first UFOs? How did such craft seem to vanish or escape pursuit? Here's a chronicle pertaining to the capital: 9th May 1909......

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......

All across the Ist-A-Verse (or at least the American parts thereof), writers and editors are in the midst of enjoying their three-day weekend. But after the week we've all had, we feel like the break is not only needed, but deserved. Just look at everything we've been doing! Gothamist headed into the Memorial Day weekend with a number of tasks accomplished. They worried about Long Islanders giving New Yorkers a bad name. They tried......

What price a corner of Hampstead Heath? Harry Hallowes has got one for nowt. Well, not nothing. It cost him twenty years of squatting and a 2 year legal tussle with frustrated swanky flat developers and the Land Registry. However, it seems that Harry’s finally earned the right to call his exclusive, secluded plot of heath land home. Now that’s perseverance paying off. Harry started sleeping rough on the heath when he got thrown......

Two views of Downing Street, 1926 and 2007. It's part of the amazing work being done by the Flickr group 'Wonderful London', who seek to recreate all the panels from the book of the same name by St John Adcock (1926/7). This particular pairing was made by group admin Simon Rigglesworth, who thanks a 'PC Luton' for providing access. Prime-ministers come and go (eventually), yet the little street rarely changes. Thanks to the protection......

With weather like this, there's nothing like a little bit of a walk, followed by a little bit of food, followed by a little bit of a walk, followed by some more food, followed by--well, you get the point. So the amazing sunshine has Londonist wondering--where to walk and where to eat? Middle Eastern Food in Shepherd's Bush: A blue badge guide takes you on a two and a half hour tour of Uxbridge Road,......

This week - Borat visits the USA (Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan) and British rom-com set on Hampstead Heath, (Scenes of a Sexual Nature). When we saw the posters for this on the tube, with five star reviews from the News of the World and the Mirror, we were ready for this to be shit. Turns out it's ok though, who'd have thought? All of the reviewers......

This Day in London's History Best stay at home today. 16 October seems to be a date of doom and/or gloom for the capital. (And, incidentally, it's also Davina MaCall's birthday.) 1834: Disastrous fire at Westminster. What Guy Fawkes et al. had failed to do 200 years earlier, a bundle of old tally sticks managed in 1834. The outmoded accounting tools were set for disposal. Dickens sums up what happened next: It came to......

At his press conference yesterday Ken agreed to back changes to the London transport and air quality strategies to allow the 'low emission zone' scheme to be established. A few people living near Battersea heliport are not too happy about the racket. There have been a few changes to the 2012 construction timetable. There was a record number of people found driving under the influence in the capital last month. It was the World......

This day in London’s History 1381: Peasants’ Revolt reaches Blackheath. Wat Tyler, Jack Straw, John Bull and several thousand other aggrieved workers assembled on the great heathland south of Greenwich as a prelude to London’s biggest ever poll tax riot. The mob entered the city on the following day and began breaking things — Savoy Palace, John of Gaunt’s home, the Archbishop of Cantebury’s neck… The revolt was finally quashed a couple of days......

Who do you think will win then, Badger or Michelle? We'll find out who Sir Alan Sugar will be poking his digit at for the last time tonight at 9pm on BBC 2, as the second series of The Apprentice reaches it's conclusion. London's representative in the series (Ansell grew up sarf of the rivah, but has since decamped to 'London-on-sea') crashed out in episode 4, after a nasty experience with chickens, pizza and......

Goldfinger. Bah-Bah BAH! He’s the man…who should have used thicker toilet paperrrrr. So went the iconic sixties Bond theme. (Or was that the man with the golden pun? No matter.) Goldfinger is that rare example of a man who left his mark on both the silver screen and the west London skyline. For those who are puzzled right now, the famous Bond villain was actually named after a real-life architect, one Ernő Goldfinger. Ian......

Weirdly enough there's two articles in today's papers about how Britain is "in the grip" of an ice skating craze. In the Independent Jonathan Brown and Lucy Phillips are reporting on the "ice phenomenon" by conjuring up images from literary masterpieces such as Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, ("the author uses the love-struck Levin's prowess as a skater as a metaphor for passion as he vainly attempts to woo Kitty at Moscow's Zoological Gardens,") and Tom's......

It's mushroom season, when our woods and undergrowth are bursting with mycological delights. Go for an autumnal stroll on Hampstead Heath, Epping Forest or any of our other semi-wild parks, and you can't help but notice those crazy alien forms skulking under bushes or clinging from trees. Tasty fry-up, 'mind-expanding' psychedelic, shelters for little gnomes - mushrooms have many associations and uses. But which ones are edible? Can we just take what we want?......

Remember the Hampstead Heath pond swimming debacle from earlier this year? Well if you read the website and followed the court case now you can watch the film too. Yes, City Swimmers is a film made by a team of North London film-makers, TV and radio professionals which aims to celebrate "open water swimming" as well as providing a record of the group's campaign. The film will feature Hampstead Heath obviously, and will aim......

What the Bellamy is going on with our fauna? Over the past few weeks, we’ve brought you tale after tail concerning the increasingly exotic nature of the capital’s wild animals. To recap, we’ve had the Beast of Bexley, the crocodile-turtle type thing in the River Lea and a plague of red-eared terrapins in Mill Hill. And most recently of all, we highlighted the Amazonian giant centipede (Scolopendra gigantean), which ‘shocked’ Islington resident Aaron Balick......

A big park for posh people? A mountain-biker's paradise? Inspiration to some of England's greatest painters and poets? Or a sordid playground for fornicating couples and sodomists? Whatever your opinion of Hampstead Heath, you're probably right. The 800 acres of grasslands, meadows, woodland, ponds and bogs are truly all things to all people, and stand as a verdant reflection of London's diversity in minicosm (being too large to count as a microcosm). The Heath......

Londonist is working this morning with something of a skeleton staff after the double whammy of everyone leaving for Glastonbury and getting very very drunk last night. Now you don't get that kind of admission in The Guardian, although it would have explained about a decade of spelling mistakes. A few of us then are braving the morning and writing through our solstice hangovers to bring you the very latest giant table and chair......