...that the government’s gone a bit loopy, actually. They are still banging on about developing the optimistically titled Thames Gateway region into some eco-wonderland filled with gainfully employed and happy eco-bunnies. Yvette Cooper was due to, er, ‘clarify’ exactly how this can be achieved and for how many spondulicks at a brainstorming forum today. Now Londonist knows that London needs a bit more housing, and is all for the creation of well budgeted, environmentally-friendly utopias......

O2, it seems, are cornering the market in progressive mobile gadegtry, already having the monopoly on the shiny smart iPhone and now the pilot phase OyPhone. Sorry, "Oyster Wallet" is the much more sensible and meaningless name for TfL's latest technology wheeze which puts your travelcard in your mobile phone and today, 500 Oyster users begin trialling the Nokia 6131 handsets with Oyster embedded. Barclaycard are also in on the trial, charging up the......

It happens at the worst of times, always. You'll be in that changing room of Topshop, jeans straddled around your hips, or on that tube platform, waiting for a train with a requisite five minute delay and then it strikes you - the urge to pee. Out of your comfort zone (the zone of knowing where the nearest cubicle is), the fear magnifies tenfold. You could surreptitiously enter that local restaurant, and negotiate the humiliation......

Our much feted and stylish monarch opened the all-new and yet all-old St. Pancras terminal today after a 10 year revamp (of the station that is, not the Queen). The station is (as of next week) to be home to Eurostar after a 5.8 billion pound upgrade of the railway line between London and the coast (which now means trains can actually go as fast as they do on French soil instead of going shstikoff-shstikoff-shstikoff-all-the-way-home).......

I have to be honest, I never listen to London pirate radio... it's not that I don't approve; it's just not how I access my music. I guess I’m more of a Pandora.com and Last.FM type of guy. I do approve of pirate radio though, people getting together playing music for themselves and their friends has to be good right? So... londonpirates.co.uk is a site worth a look, I love the gallery section with......

Attention, sufferers of controller-thumb and Wii-wrist: the London Games Festival is here to make your condition even worse. From the 22nd of October to the 2nd of November organisers will be laying on talks, music and exhibitions celebrating the culture of gaming. Many of the events are geared towards those in the industry, but there’s also plenty to please the civilian gamer, especially in the festival fringe. And we can’t help but approve of......

The breathlessly international Bicycle Film Festival is seven years old this year and it is rolling into London with a string of cool films and even cooler parties and exhibitions, from Wednesday 17 October to Sunday 21 October. Films about two-wheel transport range from modern-day radicalism in Canada to gruelling fundraising cycle hikes over the Alps, from the factory floor in America to changing lives in Ghana, a helmet-camera tour of several international cities......

A glimpse of the future for London rail travel was unveiled today at Hitachi’s depot in Ashford. (And this dumb-broad Londonista thought they just made tellies and stuff). We are to get a bullet train (which some droll spark has named the ‘javelin’ in honour of the Olympics – geddit?) as of 2009. The aim is not only to whisk sports spectators from downtown St. Pancras over to the main-goings-on at the Olympic stadium in......

The BT Digital Music Awards 2007 are being held on next Tuesday (2 October) at the Camden Roundhouse in London and we've got a pair of tickets for you to win to attend this special event. Artists such as Klaxons, Calvin Harris, Chemical Brothers and the Manics are all competing against to win one of 20 awards designed to recognise UK artists that have embraced digital technology in an exceptional way. The ceremony will......

Anybody who's spent an afternoon walking around Upper Street, iBook in hand, trying to log on to Islington council's "Technology Mile" service may smirk, but a new report says Londoners are the most wifi-happy people on the planet. According to the Wi-Fi Hotspot Index, networks set up by the likes of BT and The Cloud in London account for one tenth of the UK's wireless usage, and just over 1% of the worldwide total......

Camden Town may be changing with the relentless advance of corporate chain stores (no, not those kind of chains) and glass and steel canalside developments but the Council is upholding the area's reputation for cyberpunk techno-progressiveness. It's launching webcasts and podcasts to be more accessible to the teched-up community and encourage local residents to get involved in local democracy. So, has it recorded a punchy, motivational and trendy radio show with a slurry call......

Don't you love it when the fair comes to town? The lights, the candy floss, the 'hook a duck', the grenades, the rocket launchers, the assault rifles! Ahh, takes you back to childhood! Your father lifting you onto his shoulders, getting so full of sweets that you throw up after going on the dodgems, examining the latest in targeting technology, watching footage of fuel-air explosive destroying an Afghan town, feeling the reassuring weight of......

Even with the public transportation odds stacked against them, fans of both electronic music and innovative design would do well to make their way to Phonica Records in Soho tonight for the official launch of Yahama's Tenori-On. Essentially a 16 x 16 grid of touch-sensitive LED buttons, the Tenori-On is a step sequencer that places an emphasis on the creation of sound through vision. As the performer touches the device's buttons to trigger sounds,......

Lights go on... lights go off... lights go on... lights go off... Contemporary life hums, buzzes, whirrs and recharges with electricity that we take for granted. It's always there - coming out of our wall sockets, stored in our batteries and flowing around us in cable after cable, concealed in every wall and under every floor. BOiLEROOM is a theatre company with a fantastically eclectic line-up, bizarrely well-suited for the kind of stories and......

Londonist has been chortling all day at the latest antics of Westminster Council.It would seem that they are so desperate to rid Soho of its last few bastions of (real) sin (as opposed to fake sin) and close down the remaining three clip joints that they have resorted to texting all who stray within 30 metres of one of these establishments – in the hope we guess of starving them out. They have after all......

Sadly, Londonist is not fabulously wealthy, although we have high hopes for becoming so in the future. After all, eventually someone has to win all that money in the lottery, right? However, if we had more money than we knew what to do with, and we were also having a bit of trouble hearing, now we know where to shop. A hearing aid supplier based in Balham has designed a hearing aid worth a......

Londonist loves Facebook, and we knew we weren't alone. The rest of London seems to agree with us. Last week, London beat out Toronto for the top geographic network on the hugely popular social networking site. According to the Guardian, as of Friday there were 790,615 members in the London Network. By our reckoning, today there are 819,908 London members, compared with 708,268 in Toronto, the next most popular network. The jump of 29,293......

Fresh this Week: Amr Gharbeia and Hari Kunzru consider the internet as a space for free expression and censorship at this event tonight. Amr Gharbeia is a leading Egyptian blogger, currently facing a legal campaign to block his website along with other blogs and human rights sites in Egypt. Hari Kunzru's novels and non-fiction engage with the theme of new technology and his recent writing highlights the complexities of internet censorship as a source......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 2nd July 1865: One-time Methodist minister William Booth preaches to a large crowd at an open-air ‘mission’ in Whitechapel, founding the ‘East London Christian Mission’, which would later be renamed ‘The Salvation Army’. Tuesday – 3rd July 1981: A punk concert at the Hamborough Tavern in Southall, West London, leads to fighting between skinheads and Asian youths. The riot is just one of many violent ‘uprisings’ to......

Like an invisible web of impossibly magic pockets of the internet hovering in London’s heavens, weird and wonderful WiFi proliferates enabling us tech-savvy, laptop bearing citizens to maintain our social networking and blog addictions pretty much 24/7. Unsurprising news, then, that wireless networks in London have almost trebled in the last year. We’re outstripping New York and Paris with the rate of growth of our WiFi hotzone with public access hot spots up by......

New York and London have always had a bit of rivalry going on, about who's best. In recent times, London seems to have got the edge - New York's Mayor, for example, expressed worries that London was moving ahead as the world's financial centre. And frankly, we know that our chocolate's a hell of a lot better. But now Mayor Bloomberg has gone further. Announcing his new plans to combat climate change, he commended......

One of Londonist’s favourite web 2.0 communities, last.fm, has just been bought up by American firm CBS for a rather tasty $280m (£142m). Whilst it may not have been sold for as much as other social networks (such as News Corp's £294m MySpace purchase and Google's $1.65bn buy-out of YouTube), it does mean that last.fm can stay in London and still keep its open source nature. Dave explained what Last.fm is all about much better......

Email. Who could live without it these days? Well, according to the World Internet Usage Stats more people than you might think! Only 40% of Europe is online and only a measly 4% of Africa. The latter stat is shocking when you count up all the scam emails that we receive every day promising us untold wealth through lottery wins, letting money "rest" in our accounts and righting the monetary wrongs of evil dictatorships.......

Imagine the sights and the smells of the world’s largest and most expanding city. A city full of promise, the streets paved with the fragments of young men and women’s dreams. And other people's filth. This is Dickensian London during the serialisation of Oliver Twist, 1837-1839. See Fagin and his band of merry child thieves cheerily skipping though the streets, picking pockets and singing away as if they knew that Anti Social Behaviour Orders......

With all that went down this week, we thought we thought we'd cheer everyone up by giving everyone a double dose of dogs. It was a rollercoaster ride of emotions this week at DCist. Like the rest of country, we were floored by the news of so many dead coming out of Virginia Tech, and with so many of the victims and their relatives from the D.C. area, we felt it important to pay......

Londonist loves a good recycling story.We found out today that there are apparently 75 million old mobile phones hanging around in the UK. Surely something a bit better than "keep it in a drawer and forget about it" can be done with all those old Nokia 3210s? Apart from using them as impromptu weapons in case of a break in, of course. And think about old computers as well - we're hanging onto our......

Quick! Where‘s your Oyster card? Haven’t got one? Not for long. London's mayor is to give away 100,000 free Oyster cards, which offer cheaper travel on public transport. Ken Livingstone said the cards had revolutionised travel in London, speeding up buses and Tubes and reducing queues. Since the financial merits of having an Oyster card aren’t really debatable anymore, the only thing left to ask is: are you for an increase in the widespread......

Hanging on to their promise to be the "greenest games ever" the Olympic Masterplanners are organising a wildlife search and rescue operation to save the aquatic inhabitants of stagnant Pudding Mill River, Stratford, from the impending bulldozers. Fish will be coaxed out of this grotty stretch of water and transplanted to the cleaner and livelier climes of the River Lea. Well, when we say "coaxed" what we mean is "stunned". Electric eels, anyone? Yes,......

Working mothers have begun using webcams to keep an eye on their sproglets playing the day away in childcare while they slave the day away at the office. Whatever happened to eyes in the backs of mothers’ heads? Today’s technology has obviously weeded out that gene in more modern women. Our mothers took every opportunity to remind us of their freakish back-of-head vision. But for the hip, young mamas who want to ensure that......

Just out the Van: Margaret Atwood leaves the telepresence book-signing robot at home and joins fellow authors Andrew O'Hagan and Erica Wagner and publisher Stephen Page, Chief Executive of Faber & Faber, to discuss the brave new world of authors, readers and publishers in the age of new technology. Digitise or Die: What is the Future of the Book? is part of the London Book Fair. Tuesday 17th, 7.30pm, £9, The Southbank Centre. In......