These days, refer to Skylon on the Southbank and you're name checking the Royal Festival Hall's swish, new, panoramic outlook restaurant. But, of course, it was named for the cigar shaped monument that once poked up here, as part of the Festival of Britain. Seems 1950s nostalgia's catching. Last week, English National Ballet presented Festival Ballet at RFH remembering their own Festival of Britain nascence. Now, there's a campaign to garner public opinion on......

Though this story would have been more appropriate for Valentine's Day, this love letter from long ago was returned a week late for that lovey-dovey deadline. Still, this sentimental stuff tugs at our little heartstrings, so we're happy to report that a stolen love letter, dumped in a garden at an empty house in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire, and picked up by police has been returned to its author, who is still alive at 98.......

While pigeons are getting a bit of stick today, heartwarming news of sparrows getting new homes at London Zoo courtesy of prisoners in Spring Hill prison balances the scale somewhat. After a long absence, sparrows have come back to London and are being housed in ten brand new bird boxes built by prisoners at Spring Hill prison in Buckinghamshire. The question "Where have all the sparrows gone?" crops up again and again in nostalgia-tinged......

After a quick break travelling the US, this Londonista is back to normality bringing the weekly roundup of whats happening in London. Monday night sees Oakland metal stars High on Fire grace UL. Tickets are available for £12 each on the door or from See tickets. Reformed 90's Brit rockers Shed Seven grace Shepherds Bush Empire, with a few tickets left at £17.50 each, if you really must indulge your nostalgia. Finally, Scritti Politti plays......

Rapha makes clothing for serious cyclists - the couriers, the racers, the hardcore fundraisers pedalling over the Andes. They are also organising one of the most unusual events we've had the privilege of hearing about: this Saturday is the second Rapha Roller Race Culture Clash which is "a four-way clash between teams of bicycle couriers, cycle journalists, media folk and a ‘dark horse’ Dutch team made up of unnamed riders." And before you try......

No, it's not some 'attack of the giant cathedral eating spiders' B-movie filmset but the return of Maman, the giant spider sculpture by Louise Bourgeois, which originally stalked the Turbine Hall when Tate Modern opened in 2000. Bourgeois herself is now 95 and, given that much of her work is based on introspection, nostalgia, the exploration of her psyche and her parents (the spider, Maman, is of course a tribute to her mother) this......

This week - The East German Stasi listen in on a writer's life (The Lives Of Others) and Disney rape our minds (Wild Hogs). First up, The Lives Of Others, a film written and directed by a man called Florian Maria Georg Christian Graf Henckel von Donnersmarck. It won the Oscar for best foreign language film this year for that name alone. It beat Pan's Labyrinth to the prize, a film that we thought......

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......

Futurepunk. What’s that then? Yet another sub genre in the Goth/Industrial school of music? Could well be! It certainly seemed to cause a stir with the industrial crowd as The Purple Turtle in Camden was exceptionally busy for a Thursday evening, and The Purple Turtle feels so much more like a venue rather than a pub which hosts live acts every once in a while. Dark, Dingy, Cider flowing in large quantities – perfect......

A misremembered memoir sounds rather melancholy and a bit... arthouse. Unless, of course, it is the misremembered memoir of writer, broadcaster, Duckie co-founder, performer and Celebrity Fit Club contestant Amy Lamé. In her hands, the potentially sentimental nostalgia of an autobiographical one-woman show becomes something far more bizarre and biting. Add songs, sandwiches and strangeness and all the accolades it received at the Edinburgh Festival this year, and you've got a hit at Soho......

Event of the week Game On, Science Museum Remember that game on the ZX81 in which you had to manoeuvre a letter X through a minefield of dangerous letter O's? And the equally addictive follow-up, in which the Earth (represented by a series of hyphens) needed saving from a belligerent battlegroup of aliens (menacingly realised as a creeping cluster of hashes)? Ah, happy days. Well, apparently, gaming has developed somewhat since then. And we......

It is a mark of adolescence to (pretend to) get rid of the toys of childhood - a sort of clearing of the decks for the bulkier and distinctly less fun items that come with aging like boyfriends / girlfriends, student loans, mortgages, babies, pensions, the urn for your ashes and so on. However, it is a mark of adulthood to rediscover the toys of childhood and clasp them to your brooding, nostalgia-ridden bosom......

This week, we have a film about Irish Republicanism (The Wind That Shakes The Barley), a nonsensical thriller with Demi Moore (Half Light) and a movie about true-life legend of patriot fighter-hero, Huo Yuanjia (Fearless). First up, The Wind That Shakes The Barley, a film that won director Ken Loach the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes film festival. As discussed at the end of last week's Friday Film News, there has been a......

Just a mini Troll this week, fans, as we're addicted to the Big Brother (every damn day, 9pm C4) crackpipe and neglecting such things as eating, sleeping and, indeed, moving. Shahbaz hiding all the food was one of the funniest things we've ever seen, all the while muttering about how "it's all their fault" and "send me to Coventry, will you" and "nobody loves me boo hoo hoo". We are hoping against hope that......

This week marks the start of the new Big Brother (Thur 9pm C4). We're fairly sure this will split our readership (hello, Mrs Trellis of North Wales) right down the middle; BB is a love-it-or-hate-it proposition. TV Troll hated it until undergoing a Damascene conversion last year, so we understand both sides of the relationship with Endemol's postmodern, controversial show. Those on the "it's a sign of the End Times" bandwagon will be utterly......

With world cup nostalgia beginning to surge across the media you might have been watching all that retina-etchingly vivid footage of Mexico '70 and thought to yourself, "I wonder where that promising young lad, Pelé is now?" Well, dear Londonist reader, wonder no more! The world's equal best footballer of the last century (it's complicated... ask Fifa and Diego Maradona) is making himself available to shake you by the hand in the capital this......

This post is written from a personal point of view, eschewing the Ist 'We' for once, because it expresses what is most decidedly a minority view within the Londonist camp. I disagree entirely with what Alex wrote below; here's why ... Confession time: I'm a lapsed boatie. I still have the calluses - they never go away - and the drawer-full of self-designed t-shirts - complete with "hilarious" nicknames - to prove it. Why......

Cybercandy in Covent Garden is one of Londonist's favourites. We used to buy stuff from the website all the time, so imagine how pleased we were when they set up their first 'real world' candy store a couple of years ago. Now, whenever we return to the office, our pockets bulging with strange looking Japanese confectionary, cans of raspberry favoured coke and lots and lots of cinnamony things (oh, how we love the cinnamony......

A public-spirited chap called Carl Court has provided the BBC with a dossier of photos that reveal the shocking state of many railway stations in London and the South-east. London stations that get named and shamed include London Bridge, Battersea Park and Charlton. It's depressing stuff, a record of a network crumbling under the combined burdens of public disregard and official neglect. In related transport news, it's hard to explain why we missed this......

Some of us might recall, with wistful nostalgia, the ‘halcyon days of email’. In those days of yore, email was as harmless as gossiping on the phone, as novel as watching TV on an iPod, and as reliable as the Northern Line. Importantly, it was also something you could spend a lot of time doing in the office, whilst still giving the vague impression of ‘working’. However, at the end of 2000 the age......

Take a look at this image. What do you see? Do you see a woman with tampon attached to the side of her head? What do you mean 'no'? Ok then, so it's a woman wearing headphones, something that, if you believe this Transport for London page is a 'turn off'. Now TfL don't mean that in a sexual way (although we can definitely see why a woman with a tampon on her head......

It's been a long time since a record has divided Londonist as much as One Way Ticket To Hell And Back, the latest from The Darkness. Perhaps it's because we're made up of so many spods and rockers that as soon as it appeared on My Space everyone wanted a say. What is it, Sunday already? So here we are at the kick off. Who wins? You decide. ‘One Way Ticket To Hell… And......

I like nothing better than spending the day down a disused mine shaft under Northmoor trying to work out what happened to my daughter... oh hang on that was Bob Peck's perfect Sunday. Like Ken I'm not constrained to living for the weekend - although sometimes the problem with working freelance and from home is that I have to spend the occasional Sunday working through a soon to be released DVD box set of......

Or as Warren Ellis so succinctly put it "And STAY Out, You Piece Of Shit". Blair wouldn't go that far and described his former work and pensions secretary as a "decent and honourable man..." who just happens in this instance to have acted in a not very decent but thoroughly dishonorable way. Unlike say Daredevil whose blindness led to an increased ability in his other senses Blunkett seems to have only developed the special......

The Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern is massive, possibly the biggest indoor display area in Britain. You forget quite how big the cavern is until you walk through the door. There’s something reverential about the space, the floor sloping away under your feet, the metal beams strapping the walls into place like industrial crucifixes, but today we’re not here to admire the architecture. Each year an artist is set the challenge of transforming......

The Proms are almost over, although the last week is something of a mixed bag. Of course the big ticket, the one you'll need to get in line early in the afternoon for if you hope to get into the arena, is the Vienna Philharmonic on Wednesday and Thursday. Zubin Mehta conducting the Rite of Spring is alone worth a very long queue in the rain, and the participation of Katarina Dalayman is frosting......

Let's just dive right into the cess pool this week shall we, with a look at the reviews for Dukes of Hazzard...we need a laugh. Now you don't get a medal for predicting a one star review from James Christopher in The Times. It's a "a ghastly nightmare" according to Jimmy, "a catwalk of threadbare nostalgia, expensive smashes and craven greed", during which "several thousand police cars accelerate into trees or belly-flop into the......

To be honest, the build-up to the FA Cup Final on Saturday hasn't quite reached 'frenzy' status yet, but at least it seems to be progressing beyond 'mildly agitated' and 'a bit miffed'. Sigh....how Londonist yearns for the 'good old days', when the whole country seemed to be holding its collective breath waiting for the big event and every other programme on the telly included the words 'cup final special' in their title. The......

With the threat of a return to a Conservative government hanging over us once again we've been reminiscing about the bad old days and in particular Margaret Thatcher: the woman who stole our milk, but never our hearts. Of course it wasn't all sinking fleeing Argentinean battleships and snuggling up with the likes of Pinochet. Without Thatcher Spitting Image would have been without a leading lady and the miner's strike at least gave us......

In a move that screams "we're the government, ha ha", Labour has announced that it will not be releasing a London manifesto, claiming its national manifesto contained enough references to the capital. Anyway, let's see what the ruling party sees fit to draw London's attention to. Once again, crime is centre stage. It's certainly an important issue, but is it really such a top priority to Londoners? Our main parties seem to think so.......