Four weeks till Christmas! Argh. Funds are all focused on present buying and getting through the party season but we still want to go out and about because the heating isn't working properly at home. We can't afford to go and see Gandalf drop his trousers in King Lear but, thankfully, there's lots of cheap and interesting stuff about as usual. Monday: Start the week with an event truly in the spirit of London......

Steve Rider. The last person you'd expect to be connected to a CS gas attack. Except, perhaps, Pliny the Elder. Mayor plans more pedestrian areas. Thames, Serpentine to be paved over. With nougat. The Thames Gateway management team are 'weak'. In other news, the 2012 Olympic Delivery Authority are 'pious'. Christmas will cost us £700 each. Watch our for further expense on St Swithin's Day, which next year will set you back £12, a......

The name of the band Korpiklaani means 'forest clan' in Finnish, so perhaps it isn't so surprising that the band started their set at Camden Underground an hour or so late. Our theory is that they got lost on the Tube, distracted by the leafy promise in such place-names as Oakwood or Wood Green or Green Park, only to be met with bitter disappointment upon venturing aboveground. What really matters is that Korpiklaani eventually......

Protest over national vs. regional chains, the never-ending debate over the place of cars and bicycles in our metropolises, professional sports scandals, remembering a solemn day, and being issued a search warrant - it all happened across our sites this week! Another banner week at Chicagoist started off with daily reports from food writer Lisa Shames on her attempt to eat only locally grown and raised foodstuffs all week as part of a farmers market......

From BBC News: London must become car-free if it is to substantially cut carbon dioxide emissions, according to a new report. Crikey. In response to the findings London Green Party member Jenny Jones said: "I have asked the London mayor to do a feasibility study into creating a car free pedestrian zone in central London linking all the main squares and parks. "We need to show that the car no longer rules in London......

Emma Hutchins' one woman show embodies its own ethos of "having it all". Written and performed by the woman herself, she rises to the occasion delivering 3 familiar yet absorbing Bridget Jones-esque monologues and throwing in some Japanese Butoh for good measure. Ambitious? Yes. Misguided? Certainly not. Butoh is a dance form where each move is initiated by emotional truth. Isobel's entrancing, effortful progress from prone to standing to intensely, baby pigeon steps forward......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 13th August 1977: Hundreds of protesters clash with police at a National Front march in Lewisham, south-east London. About 400 Socialist Worker Party members had gathered to try to prevent the National Front march, but had been prevented by police, leading to attacks on the police themselves and over 200 arrests. Tuesday – 14th August 1821: The funeral procession of Queen Caroline, wife of George IV, makes......

Londonist ask that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Santoré 59-61 Exmouth Market EC1R 4QL Map Average Lunch Price: £9 Rating: 9.5 out of 10 Some months back the entertainment section of Crumbs for Men magazine featured a rave review about Santoré, a phenomenally yummy pizzeria at Exmouth Market in Clerkenwell. Then, when Santoré began home-delivery, ontoLondon duly made a jubilant note. Now that Londonist is pondering what’s......

A tribute to the capital’s alleys, ginnels and snickleways. 36. Marble Arch Underpass Where? It's an underpass. It passes under Marble Arch. Like, dur. What? This haphazard collection of tunnels was constructed in the early 1960s, to improve pedestrian access to Hyde Park. Ha! It’s a choice of two evils – brave the heavy traffic or plunge into the depths. We asked an aged and wise hermit on the corner of Edgware Road for advice.......

The Save Sloane Square campaign has apparently Saved Sloane Square. Backed by Knightsbridge celebrities, the campaigners opposed plans by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea to turn the area into a busy crossroads. Despite the uber-posh location outside the often jammed tube station, the square itself is a forgotten place, lonely and stranded by traffic. The council wanted to replace the square with two public spaces that would extend the pavement areas. However,......

Today TFL launch their latest spurious health promotion/congestion tackling campaign “Why not walk it” urging London motorists to leave the car at home and take Shanks’ pony to their destination. Londonist sees straight through this ruse. We all know that motorists just won’t. It’s well established that people love their cars and, given the choice and adequate free parking, will drive them to the corner shop. Only the Portuguese walk less. FACT. So this......

This Day In London’s History 1937: A Japanese aircraft lands at Croydon Airport, setting a world record for the fastest flight from Tokyo to London. In the 1930s there had been considerable interest in establishing records for long distance flights, and a prize had been offered for the first flight between Paris and Tokyo to take less than 100 hours. However nobody had yet won this prize, despite many attempts, including one that failed......

Today was the day that the thriving community of East End gardening enthusiasts who’ve been cultivating the Manor Garden Allotments since 1924 were expecting to have to lie down in front of the bulldozers, a la Arthur Dent, in a last ditch attempt to avoid the total obliteration of their flourishing and fruitful Hackney Wick veggie paradise. But, having failed to secure planning permission for an alternative location in Leyton (mainly due to the......

This Day In London’s History 1962: The first ‘Panda crossing’ is opened on York Road, opposite Waterloo Station. Since the 1930s, pedestrian crossings in Britain were marked by poles bearing orange glass domes known as ’Belisha beacons’ (named after Leslie Hore-Belisha, the Minister of Transport at the time). Traffic approaching these crossings was required to stop and give way to any pedestrians who were waiting to cross the road. At around the same time,......

Anyone walking past Holborn Tube is sure to have all kinds of leaflet thrust upon them. But if you were passing by last Friday, you might have ended up with something worthwhile. A group of postgrads from St Martin's have put together a handy map of zone 1 showing just how short the distances are between stations. The idea is to encourage more people to walk, rather than take public transport, and thus do......

Artist and curator Robert Gordon McHarg III founded the Subway Gallery last year and on 6th of June 2006, the gallery joined the rest of London's art scene. While some galleries like to say they are underground, this one is undeniably so. It's in a pedestrian subway, still open to the public, still used by many people trying to get from one side of Edgware Road to the other. It's, like, totally underground. The......

A tribute to the capital’s alleys, ginnels and snickleways 21. Cecil Court Where? Short pedestrian route between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane. What? In the heart of glitzy, neon tourist-town, it's heartening to find such a contrasting bastion of antiquity. The shop fronts have not, we're told, been altered in more than a century. All of which made this the perfect location for filming recent period piece 'Miss Potter'. The Victorian frontages belie......

The ICA are teaming up with the Royal Opera House to transform Trafalgar Square from a pigeon inhabited tourist trap into something a little classier next month: Inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, FLOCK is a new interactive installation specially commissioned by the ICA (with the support of ROH2 at the Royal Opera House) taking place on Trafalgar Square. FLOCK is a free event, creating a “virtual Swan Lake” where members of the public will......

This was not a very happy week for the -ist network as one of our own, Phillyist co-editor Star C. Foster, passed away early in the week. Her wit, intelligence, and good nature shone through the site, making Phillyist an immensely fun read. She was loved by many and will be missed by all. Phillyist paid tribute to her this week with a heartfelt letter to her and an obituary. And now, the awkward......

The BBC are paying some attention to one of our own bugbears - the fact that Borough High Street just doesn't work: It is the gateway to the City of London, shrouded in history and referred to in respected literature. So why then, when you walk along Borough High Street are you more likely to spend your time dodging bins, street signs, other pedestrians and cars? The Southwark branch of the charity Living Streets......

Saturday 2nd of December has been declared Very Important Pedestrian Day: Two of the most famous shopping streets in the UK will be traffic-free for the first time to help Christmas shoppers. Both Oxford Street and Regent Street in London's West End will be free of vehicles on Saturday 2 December. Ohhhhh that sounds like a good idea. Londonist of course does all its Christmas shopping online, but we'll happily wander the car free......

A tribute to the capital’s alleys, ginnels and snickleways. 14. New Turnstile Where? Refurbished shortcut at the back of Holborn Tube station. What? The most recent and blandest of several 'turnstiles' in the area - Great Turnstile and Little Turnstile are the others. These alleys once contained gateposts to prevent livestock escaping from the grazing areas now known as Lincoln's Inn Fields. No sign of the posts, or the sheep, remains today. In fact, there's......

Halloween is Tuesday, which means this weekend is really the time for all of the –ists to celebrate. And whether they’re designing super-spooky costumes or talking about the super-spooky upcoming elections, we’d say that they’re doing a fine job of it. Austinist knows that few things in life are scarier than zombies, people with way too much money, and politicians who try too hard to be funny. Slightly less scary, depending on whom you......

Gavin Grant, a 22-year-old Milwall striker has appeared before the Old Bailey accused of conspiracy to murder 24-year-old Jahmall Moore who died last year after being hit by four bullets as he sat in his car in Harlesden. In the early hours of Monday morning a motorcyclist and a pedestrian both died when the bike ploughed into the man as he was crossing a main road in Golders Green. Apparently the "London-inspired property mini-boom"......

A 16 -year-old boy charged with the murder of the schoolboy Kiyan Prince will appear in court today. A 27-year-old woman was killed in Holborn on Saturday evening after a bus on Southampton Row, 'ploughed into traffic lights' and then mounted the pedestrian island where she was standing. The Home Office announced yesterday that an official at Lunar House in Croydon had been suspended over sex-for-asylum claims and an investigation is to be carried out.......

Shopgirl is a great looking film, elegant and cool with some top notch performances from all involved, but unfortunately it has a shallowness at its heart that prevents it from being quite as good as it should be. It's a very long time now since Steve Martin was a wild and crazy guy and from LA Story on he's adopted a more restrained and sometimes downright pedestrian persona for a series of fair to......

The body which represents West End retailers has made public its plans to improve the area by cutting traffic and creating more pedestrian areas. The New West End Company unveiled its 'stretegic study' called Choices for a Better West End (PDF) at the end of last week at an exhibition in John Lewis on Oxford Street. The exhibition (which is free and runs until the 18th) outlines "innovative and exciting ideas on how the......

My my, those red adverts are just about everywhere now aren't they? Staring up at you from your copy of the Metro, in your face on the tube platform and frenetically tapping away at your subconscious as they roll past you on the side of a bus. For those who have no intention of destroying their knee joints as they slalom past dog turds and hooded youths, these ads are an irritant. But they're......

Anyone who went to last year's Raindance Festival in October had a hell of a fun time. The eclectic line up, including premieres of instant classic movies such as Old Boy, Dead Man's Shoes and Coffee & Cigarettes, put shame to the more pedestrian London Film Festival that followed. We're already looking forward to Raindance 13 but in the meantime we are heading east... The Raindance East Film Festival fosters local talent by providing......

So they're thinking about moving Marble Arch again. The idea is to shift the arch to Hyde Park, near Speakers' Corner in order to make it more accessible to tourists as part of the 100 Open Spaces project. As the BBC notes, at the moment the Arch can only be reached by subway (or, as The Times puts it, "a warren of dingy subways often inhabited by beggars"), and Londonist has often witnessed tourists......