The London Zoological Society have managed some more ground breaking footage with a film of these pygmy hippos in the wild. Londonist wants one of these. At least someone’s happy about the rain: the freesheet house will apparently be all the stronger for it. Football’s coming home. Well, Becks is, anyway. And Posh. Better to be a big fish in a small sea ‘n’ all that. Life is boring without the booze: a sober......

Help is on the way for those affected by the fire in Camden Market. Thus far, £750,000 has been allocated to help rebuild the charred Canal Market. This is great news for the 90 market stalls, six shops, and the Hawley Arms, which were all damaged in the canal-side inferno. The London Development Agency has set aside £250,000 in a recovery fund for business grants and promtion to get tourist traffic back to Camden......

March already? How did that happen? The perils of having our head buried in a book so much of the time, no doubt. If we must emerge this week from our cosy little book-enclosed chrysalis, it’ll likely be to head to the following events. Monday: The RSL-sponsored TS Eliot Memorial meeting brings together award-winning poets Alice Oswald and Kathleen Jamie for an evening of readings from their work. Both have been lauded for the......

‘It’s new and it’s bloody scary,’ says the tourist blub. ‘C’est nouveau et terriblement effrayant,’ it repeats in French. Well, you try sounding menacing in that language. ‘Eine neue, unheimlich gruselige Sensation.’ That’s more like it. We prefer the German, especially as ‘die London Bridge Experience’ carries an apt definite article. London’s new tourist attraction beneath guess-which bridge opened its doors yesterday. (After two days of PR misery when power failures scuppered the media......

There are moments where London can be proud of its diversity. This is just one of them. The London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival - the annual feast of the best gay cinema - is shortly upon us. This year's gathering in the capital will be the 22nd time it has been held in London, and each year it seems to attract more films and popularity. Our sizable gay community and London's film and......

You may remember a couple of months back that we spent the night in a haunted plague pit. We certainly remember. Oh, how we remember. Since our little adventure, the complex of warehouse space has been converted into London's latest museum and tourist attraction. Housed in the excavated vaults and tombs of the bridge itself, The London Bridge Experience will offer two distinct attractions under one roof – or, in this case, under the......

Words: useful little critters, no? Without them we’d be, well, a lot of things, but most certainly out of a job. From puns to poetry, improv to irony, books to blogs, we pretty much revel in all that language has to offer. But no, we will neither confirm nor deny reports that we’ve stayed home on a Friday night for a heated game of Scrabble. What we will confirm, however, is that we greet......

The London Art Fair opened to the public today in Islington. It's a massive art trade fair with modern and contemporary art to buy. There were many smart, be-scarved or brightly tie-d artsy types manning stalls looking bored or eating sandwiches and lots and lots of interesting art to ponder, point at and take photos of, which is apparently acceptable (I'm taking a photo to see if Flavia likes it, yah....). This is a......

BA are to withdraw sponsorship of the London Eye from next month. The airline says its 'sponsorship priorities have changed', and it no longer wishes to support the attraction, which it has sponsored since the wheel's inception. So who's going to take over? Well, it was revealed today that Boris has a £1 million campaign fund to play with. Might we see straw barnets atop every pod? How about Wagon Wheels, those wholesome chocolatey......

34. Phantom Assailants: Part Four Continued from episode 31… The London cat-rippings of 1998 continued into 1999. Even more bizarre was the RSPCA voice that stated, after several months of methodical research into the strange deaths, that vehicles were to blame! An inspector analysing the decapitations claimed that foxes, badgers and dogs had also been the cause, although I’m unaware of any animal native to England that kills in such a fashion. The vehicle......

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......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 17th December 1983: An IRA car bomb explodes near Harrods in Knightsbridge, killing six people (including three police officers) and injuring a further 85 Christmas shoppers. Tuesday – 18th December 1890: The world’s first ‘deep-level’ electric tube line opens, connecting Stockwell and King William Street. As we mentioned last year, the City & South London Railway would later become a part of the Northern Line as we......

Buttery spread brand Flora, sponsor of the London Marathon, has decided that its bread is better buttered elsewhere. After a 14-year association with the event, Flora has indicated that it will give up its sponsorship following the 2009 race. A delightful investment opportunity for those of you with £12 million lying around! Promoting itself as a heart-healthy butter alternative by placing its name on the hundreds of thousands of, presumably heart-healthy, runners doggedly completing......

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......

Whilst we, the London punters, expressed overwhelming support for action on throw-away shopping bags last week the big high street retailers have been mewing at the London Assembly opposing an outright ban. Under DEFRA's new waste strategy the major UK supermarkets and other large retailers are committed to reducing the environment impact of carrier bags by 25% by 2008. Whatever that means. But they're reluctant to back a ban as it diminishes choice and......

Huge clouds of smoke can be seen over Bow, east London, visible from as far as Queen's Park. A disused warehouse on Waterden Road has caught fire and according to the news emerging right now, there are 15 fire engines and between 40 and 75 firefighters attending it. Waterden Road passes through the Olympic site and as you can imagine, people are anxious but remaining calm. The smoke cloud is drifting southwards towards Canary......

All cars must pay the congestion charge if they enter the congestion zone. That's £8 a day unless you are driving a taxi, a police car or one of those little buggies that runs on jam. Of course, Londonist sidesteps having to pay the charge by bounding around the city on the back of a giant mechanical deer. However, a number of enterprising individuals are registering their cars as taxi cabs in order to......

Okay, first of all, the bad news: both the opening and closing previews at the Barbican's London Korea Film Festival are already sold out. Boo! If you were hoping to check out Park Chan-wook's latest I'm A Cyborg, But That's Okay, or the Cannes-pleasing Breath (pictured left) by Kim Ki-Duk, then you're out of luck. The sell-out is testament to the reputation for excellence that Korean cinema has gathered in the last decade, and......

Hooray! It's nearly Halloween! Jack-o-lanterns a plenty, scary masks and annoying trick or treaters who get hyped up on way too many e-numbers (and probably a few cans of cider nowadays). Still, there's so much stuff going on this year, you'd be a fool to stay inside hiding under your sofa this 31st October. It just wouldn't be Halloween without the Rocky Horror Show. So Everyman Cinema snapped up this spooky treat. Dress up,......

Music, as Bono, Geldof, Martin or any of the members of Screwdriver will tell you, is a tool for peace and harmony. Selling memorabilia, on the other hand, would seem to be the domain of scrapping dogs, hound-like or otherwise. But now we hear that the owners of Elvisly Yours and The London Beatles Shop have settled their differences in a flurry of cheesy song references.* Story goes like this: Beatles guy (Howard Cohen)......

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......

Fresh Next Week: Born in 1949 in what is now Croatia, Dubravka Ugrešić made a controversial figure with her trenchant opposition to nationalism, both Serbian and Croatian. Her latest book Nobody’s Home tours Europe and America, finding that as the former Eastern bloc has thrown itself whole-heartedly into Western-style modernisation, the West itself is, ironically, beginning to take on some of the characteristics of the old Soviet state. Thursday 4 October, 7pm, The London......

Londonist has learnt with relief that London’s Community Wardens are to be taught to smile. Well, they are at least to be taught stuff other than marshalling resentful kids, scribbling reports on graffiti and harassing shopkeepers who infringe on the pavements 1cm too far. The London Development Agency is to train 200 or so of our boys (and gels) in blue (and red and black and yellow) to be nice to tourists, with a......

Londonist doesn't care about London Fashion Week. Not really. But we're a blog about London and it's pretty big so we thought we'd write something about it. Here's some of the things that might happen over the next week: Mobile phone shops will see a rise in profits as Supermodels break them in fits of rage. The lettuce leaf and grape diet will be born. People we don't know and whose name we can't......

This chesty old hoare-nut comes round time and again. What's the most emblematic edifice in the capital? To end all debate, Londonist went in for a more scientific approach than petty arguing on a forum. We visited all the London web sites we could think of. In each case, we noted down which structures the site features in its logo or banner. The one chosen by the most websites wins. So was it Tower......

The Telegraph talks about our foreign rich people and how they'd look on Booth's poverty map. Including this wanted Russian oligarch. The London Eye - who would now dare pull it down? Memorial service marks 10th anniversary of the death of The People's Princess. Gawd rest her soul. Flickr image from Malias' photostream.......

The London arts scene got some good news today. The National Portrait Gallery and The V&A are amongst 43 galleries across England to benefit from a whole load of cash from the Wolfson Charity grant: over £4million in total. So what does this mean for London? Well the V&A has been given the most cash. £300,000 is going to go towards helping with issues such as access and sorting out public areas and there......

When Westminster City Council took on the free newspapers London Lite and The London Paper, Londonist was fully supportive. Tired of the masses of papers scattered around the city at the end of each day, the Council asked that Associated Newspapers (owners of London Lite) and Rupert Murdoch's News International (owners of The London Paper) take responsibility for the amount of rubbish they were creating and install 150 newspaper recycling bins around Westminster and......

Now I'm the king of the swingers Oh, the jungle VIP I've reached the top and had to stop And that's what botherin' me I wanna be a man, mancub And stroll right into town And be just like the other men I'm tired of monkeyin' around! Theatre producers The Steam Industry may not have designed their live stage version of Disney's The Jungle Book to turn in to a singalong event but once......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 6th August 1937: Barbara Windsor is born in Shoreditch in central London. She would achieve fame as an actress, notably as a ‘saucy strumpet’ in the Carry On films of the 60s and 70s and later as a major character in Eastenders. Tuesday – 7th August 2001: The Department of Health pays £27 million for a private Harley Street heart hospital, re-nationalising it and bringing it into......