While the crowds were enjoying the many splendid fireworks around London on New Year's Eve, there were some people not looking at the sky exploding with colour and going 'Ooooh!' but instead looking at wounds, blood pressure monitors and puddles of sick. The London Ambulance Service and St John Ambulance teams were working through the busiest New Year's Eve celebrations since the Millennium Eve night and between them dealt with 1,825 calls. With a......

Londonist asks that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Betjeman’s 44 Cloth Fair EC1A 7JQ Nearest Tube: Farringdon 0207 600 7778 12pm-3pm for Lunch(Monday-Friday) 6pm-9pm for Dinner (Monday-Friday) 12pm-11pm for drinks (Monday-Friday) Map Expect to Pay: £10 or more for lunch Rating: 8 out of 10 Across the street from celebrated Club Gascon (with a list of accolades out its coulis) and hardly more than a belly roll......

Londonist asks that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Queen Boadicea 292-294 St John St EC1V 4PA Nearest Tube: Angel 0207 354 9993 11.30am-Midnight (Monday-Thursday) Midday-2am (Friday-Saturday) Midday-11pm (Sunday) Map Expect to Pay: Under £10 for lunch Rating: 8 out of 10 Ooh wait. Do we have time for one more pub lunch before 2007 comes to a close? Well then, allow us to mention Queen Boadicea. There’s......

This is the story of a very strange Sunday that started with eight audience members sitting in shop doorways and concluded at a dining table set up on the busy St John’s Road near Clapham Junction. We went through a lot together – a phonebox, a cashpoint, a wedding in a piss-sodden alleyway, a funeral in a car park and then this surreal Sunday lunch. We were family by the time Barry broke his......

17. A Letter Supports The Legend In Episode 7 of The Saturday Strangeness, we briefly covered the Brentford Griffin – the murky yet wondrous tale of a winged creature allegedly sighted over the capital; a legend that was quirky yet fleeting amidst confusion, panic and deception. Now, whilst such a creature may well have been nothing more than fanciful rumour, we would like to share with you a letter, submitted to Fortean Times magazine,......

11. Spring Heeled Jack: A Chronicle of Chaos “But most of all did he dwell upon some mysterious blazing entity that shook and laughed and mocked at him.” Beyond The Wall Of Sleep – H. P. Lovecraft Supernatural? Invader from space? Prankster? Hysteria? Spring Heeled Jack’s notorious crimes that littered 19th Century London remain to this day one of the capital’s most bizarre series of crimes. Here is a brief catalogue of the weird......

Seeking somewhere new to have a picnic lunch? Perhaps you're an MP in need of an oasis of calm? Or a Vauxhall clubber who's lost their way on the north bank? St John's Gardens provides the perfect place. A small but perfectly-formed garden in Millbank, its high trees, huge flowerbeds, formidable fountain and generous smattering of benches make it a lovely summer spot and only a hop and skip from Parliament or the river.......

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.......

8. The Incomprehensibles ‘Zooform phenomena’ was a term coined by Fortean zoologist Jonathan Downes to categorise ‘creatures’ which even cryptozoology – the study of hidden animals – dares not to investigate. These are the forms which have animal characteristics, yet are quite simply too bizarre to be flesh and blood. Take for instance the Mantis Man of London, a weird apparition that visited a ‘Jim’ on the night of January 16th 2004 as he......

Londonist asks that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Kurz & Lang 1 St John St EC1M 4AA Map Average Lunch Price: £5 Rating: 7 out of 10 Londonist recently paid a visit to German fast food eatery, Kurz & Lang, where we sampled the “wurst” meal: Bratwurst, sauerkraut, potato cubes, and a slice of rye bread. All for five quid, it was good value for money. We......

Craving Vietnamese food in the city? Well now you can satiate your noodle soup desires at the restaurant Pho found in Clerkenwell. Unlike its brethren congregated along Kingsland Road, Pho stands out as the only Vietnamese restaurant amongst the more upmarket dining options on St Johns Street. Pho has a decent number of tables though always appears full anytime past seven during the week when its open. After that you'll have to queue and......

You see a hearse with a coffin laid out nicely in the back coming towards you. You see several cars containing the mourning family and friends of the deceased following the hearse at a slow, respectful pace. Do you a) take off your hat and bow your head as the cortege passes? b) pretend not to see it and carry on as you were? c) whip out your little notebook, start recording all the......

LondonRemembers has turned plaque-tracking into something of an extreme sport. Its mission is to hunt down and record every plaque, memorial and dedication in London. Each entry is mapped, and includes photos and biographical notes. It’s a godsend for local historians, genealogists and anyone who likes poking into the capital’s lesser-known oddments. Most of the legwork, research and data entry was done by one person – Richenda Walford. We just had to meet her.......

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......

Sulphur hexafluoride floods the Tube at St John's Wood!!! Oh, it's harmless. Images of children living in squalid conditions give commuters something else to think about. You could travel overground, like Shilpa Shetty who will enter the London Marathon. While the Tour de France will be greeted with flower power. And John Inman has now been laid to rest. Image courtesy of Lewis Foad via the Londonist flickr group.......

A tribute to the capital’s alleys, ginnels and snickleways 20. Faulkner's Alley Where? Runs parallel to Turnmill Street, between Cowcross Street and Benjamin Street. What? Wooooo! Spooky, eh? And so it should be. This little shortcut is 350 years old, predating the Great Fire. This part of Cowcross Street would have then overlooked the River Fleet, which today lies buried beneath the Metropolitan Line tracks. Back then, herds of cattle would have been herded daily......

The first time The Arcade Fire played a gig in London we used words such as wonderful, genius, joyful, uplifting, indescribable, and danceable. If you missed out or simply want to see a man in a crash helmet being used as a drum again, then you probably want to get credit cards to the ready this morning. The Montrealers have announced a whole week of dates starting at the end of January where they'll......

It's been a great year for abandoned buildings - having stood empty in various parts of London, defunct power stations, derelict archive buildings and now an abandoned abattoir have been filled with art and opened to the public, turning the unloved and unused into something unforgettable. The latest in this line of site-specific work is Soul-etude, a performance installation specially commissioned for the second year of Feeast, the Festival of Central and Eastern European......

The Londonist Culture Crawl. Basically - don't sleep. Friday 15 September Starting today and continuing until 30 September, the London Design Festival takes over the Truman Breweries in Hoxton and infiltrates other parts of design-friendly London. London Design Festival, 15 - 30 September, details available here. Some books are so full of wackiness, the eccentric characters, surreal situations and mind-bending twists and turns of the tale overflow from the page and onto the silver......

London's literary hotspots are Bloomsbury, London Fields and... Battersea. Just how literary this particular part of town tucked away in the shadows of Clapham Junction is shown off to full effect in the SW11 Literary Festival. Starting on 11 September and ending 2 October, big names will flood the area for readings, book signings, workshops, literary lunches, quizzes and... stuff. This festival is described as an "opportunity to meet people who write books, who......

So we enter Endgame. Architecture week and the London Architecture Biennale (LAB) draw to a close this weekend. And we still haven't figured out how to pronounce 'biennale'. Here’s our pick of the final flourish. Friday Walks: A bevy of novel guided walks are available on Friday. The Borough Market Experience (£5, 9am) tours the Victorian marketplace, highlighting both its ancient roots and its modern refurbs. Shakespeare, Social Space and Design (£7, 10.30, George......

London Architecture Biennale and Architecture Week got off to a fine if sweaty start this weekend. We’d particularly recommend ‘Transit’, an Iain Sinclair-narrated short film by Emily Richardson, in catacombs beneath Smithfield Market - spooky, thought provoking and surprisingly deserted when we visited. Here’s our pick of the many events happening over the next couple of days. And don’t worry about missing the football. They’ve thought of that… Monday Blueprint Big Breakfasts: The chance......

Never one to rest on His laurels, God Almighty has instructed one of his voice boxes to move with the times and make going to Church on a Sunday less of a drag: The Reverend Robert Harrison of St John's Church in Hillingdon, west London, said traditional service times were out of touch. Parishioners can now attend half-hour slots between 0800 GMT and 1230 GMT. This means you can now watch The Heaven &......

There can be few buildings in Europe to match the splendor of the Palace of Westminster. Millions of tourists, some of them off-worlders, flock to the landmark each year, even if few actually enter. But a couple of weeks back (and sorry to keep going on about it) Londonist did just that. Our tour of the houses of parliament inspired us to find out more about the architect, Charles Barry. Was this his only......

In today's New York Times the fantastically-monikered R.W. Apple Junior (Associate Editor of the paper) has written an article designed to answer that age old question: "Where does a visiting New Yorker or Parisian - or for that matter a country squire in town for a night or two - turn for a first-class English meal?" (A country squire?) The article is of course inspired by the now infamous comments of Mr Jacques Chirac,......

Graffiti has been a bit of a recurring theme in London this year. Grafitti on the tube, grafitti on the street, grafitti as art...now it's posh pop grafitti. The inhabitants of St John's Wood, those who live near a certain legendary recording studio to be exact, are having a bit of a moan because they feel that the 'spontaneous tributes' left by the fans of a popular Sixties beat combo are an "eyesore". According......