We fell in love with Black Cab Sessions the moment we first heard of them. How could we not? Taking a drive around the best city in the world (okay, we're biased, yes) in a design classic with some of our favourite bands rockin' out in the back seat: it's exactly how we'd like to spend a lazy afternoon. Since we generally are unable to scrape together enough coins to even steal sideways glances......

The National Gallery have announced their rediscovery of a portrait of Elizabeth Carter in a private collection. The painting, done by John Fayram circa 1735-1741, shows Carter as the Roman Goddess Minerva (or the Greek Goddess Athena, if you prefer), goddess of wisdom and war. The portrait will be part of of an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery called Brilliant Women: 18th Century Bluestockings, which is running from 13 March to 15 June.......

Ahh, art or money? It's something we ponder daily here at Londonist. (Can't we have both?) The big question is also being asked over at the Old Vic by none other than Kevin Spacey and his mate Jeff Goldblum in Mamet's Speed-the-Plow. We're also pondering how to get our hands on tickets for this sure-to-sell-out show. Previews run til Saturday; the show's booking until April. Also Opening Photography fans should pop along to the......

Whilst the Sex Pistols and The Verve were hawking their wares for the proper reviewers, Londonist was hightailing it down to the Empire for an early start. Since The Broken Family Band cashed in the cool Cambridge climes for our dirty old town, we can now legitimately claim them as our favourite London band (no doubt to howls of protest from the other Londonist writers and possibly the guys themselves). TBFB (for all you......

Residents of Stoke Newington, you should be proud. Local proprietor Kirit Ved is flying the Stokey flag all the way up in Birmingham where, at a glittering ceremony, he has just been named Independent Newsagent of the Year 2007. VED News, on Church Street in N16, was singled out by the judges for its impressive range of newspapers and magazines from around the globe. Reflecting Hackney's polyglot populace, Mr. Ved stocks titles from the......

As reported last week, Monday should see you going crazy to hear that one good song (are there others) by Peter Bjorn and John at the forum. More importantly make sure you get there in time to see support act Those Dancing Days. We caught them at Water Rats on Saturday and are pleased to report they combine cuteness and moodiness with alarming grace. The much loved Beirut play an instore at Rough Trade......

The National Archives show that back in 1967 there was a "grave security breach" when a diplomat, Mr Murray MacLehose, left the details of correspondence between Prime Minister Wilson and US President Johnson concerning the Vietnam war in a bank on Regent Street. It probably went a bit like this - Johnson - Are you sure you don't want to come and fight for the free world in Vietnam? Wilson: No, really, we're ok.......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 22nd October 1809: The Croydon Canal, linking Croydon to Deptford via Forest Hill, is opened. Requiring 28 locks to overcome the gradients of the route, it would never become a commercial success, and would be closed just 37 years later. Tuesday – 23rd October 1731: A fire breaks out in Ashburnham House in Westminster, damaging much of the Cotton Library – a renowned collection of Middle English......

Some new research has been published claiming that Elephant and Castle will become a top retail destination in the next 10 years. Now, we're as optimistic as the next blog, as demonstrated by our views on the 2012 Olympic logo. But, even for us, this seems quite a stretch. While the odd stall outside the shopping centre adds a bit of character to the place, the centre itself is a bit of a dive......

We're adamant that this week we're going to pretend it's still Summer. We're not content with sitting in watching the telly. We want to go out and play. But if we're going to do this every night this week, we're going to have to do it for very few pennies indeed. Here's the free stuff we've found this week: Tuesday: We tried really hard but we can't find you any free theatre for Tuesday.......

Londonist has a case of the spookies – deathly headstones in deathly places. More specifically, Sutton Cemetery. According to This is Local London, bereaved relatives frequenting their loved one's resting place have been confronted by not-so-subtle wooden support stakes and yellow post-its informing them of the instability of the headstones, which must then either be shored up or replaced. A spokesman from Sutton council explains these actions are a response to the rising number......

18. The Cheetah Of Shooter's Hill Over the years many ‘flaps’ of ‘big cat’ sightings have hit the headlines, from the so-called ‘beasts’ of Exmoor and Bodmin, to the more recent Bluewater leopard Bexley ‘big cat’. However in south-east London during the early 1960s, the Shooter’s Hill ‘cheetah’ scare was on everyone’s lips – back during a time when such cats were considered extremely mythical and were often misunderstood and wrongly identified, but were......

Tired of watching the cohort of British heroes cast rudely aside at the world's premier tennis event each year, London has finally given our boys a fighting chance by creating a tournament that surely offers Tim Henman (pictured), Andy Murray and his doubles-specialist brother Jamie their best ever hope of hoisting individual silverware aloft in the capital. They've only got three dangerous foreign types to overcome this Saturday in Betfair Turbo Tennis and you're......

Sting and Co bring The Police to Wembley Arena on Saturday 20th October to finish off their European tour before jetting off to North America. Tickets go on sale at 9am tomorrow, but expect them to go quickly. Madness plays the O2 on Friday 14th November as part of a quick UK arena tour. Tickets are on sale at 9am tomorrow morning. Kanye West brings his “Glow in the Dark Tour” to London in......

Happy Father's Day! For those of you who have dads, are dads, or know dads, this one's for you, from all of us at the Gothamist network. It was a week of bizarre, embarassing headlines at DCist. The trial of the local administrative law judge who sued his cleaners for $54 million over a pair of missing pants left everyone shaking their heads. Then the capital city was nearly brought to its knees, twice, by......

Londonist ask that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Canela Café 33 Earlham Street WC2H 9LS Map Average Lunch Price: Ranges from less than £2 to more than £10 Rating: 7.5 out of 10 Just up from Covent Garden, Canela offers a range of lunch options with Portuguese/Brazilian sensibility. Londonist had the feijoada, the national dish of Brazil featuring black beans and rice with smoked meats, accompanied by......

Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on. In Gothamist's neck of the woods, they found out that many things are possible: A man caught a 40+ pound fish off the Rockaways and took it home on the subway. Graffiti......

Seattlest has a talk with the photographer from last week's "Segway Mom" and then experiences some dissension in the ranks over the question of wine vs. beer. It's not West Side Story, but about as close as they'll get. They're also still waiting on some inbox relief after a spammer is arrested. As Chicagoist counts down the days to its third anniversary party, they found all-organic pizza to be underwhelming amidst the hoopla, tried......

As previously reported, staff at one of our favourite London cinemas, the Ritzy in Brixton, held their second planned one-day strike today. This dispute continues to leave a sour taste in the mouth. London's 'living minimum' wage is £7.20 per hour, but the cinema chain that runs the Ritzy, City Screen, wants to pay some staff as little £5.41 - 6p above the national legal minimum. City Screen justifies this poverty pay on the......

We have to admit when we first saw this advertised we didn't have much of an idea what to expect. Henry VIII certainly knew how to cut it with the ladies, but we reckoned that a re-enactment of His Majesty's finest chat-up lines was unlikely, particularly in the middle of a river. It turns out that the Tudor Pull is run by the Thames Traditional Rowing Association and features crews of six oarsmen rowing......

Not very much on sale this week, however below are some of the hottest new gigs that are on sale now or will be at 9am on Friday 25th May. Stereophonics have announced a UK Arena tour for November. They'll be playing Wembley Arena on Thursday 15th November, and tickets are sure to sell out quickly, so make sure your there at 9am tomorrow to get yours! The Coral are back with a date at......

Not up to anything tonight? Want to see some new live music? Want to be able to claim that you were there before they were big? Then check out Annuals tonight at the legendary 100 club. Think Arcade Fire. Then make them a bit hairier. A bit more in sync with each other. And quietly confident of themselves. You've got Annuals then. They supported The National last night at the Astoria, which was easily this......

Busy week as ever in the capital for music, so straight in we go: Monday night sees Fountains of Wayne grace the Astoria with their power-pop melodies. Tickets are still available from the usual places, however are going quickly. However if power pop isn't your sort of thing, you can seethe avant-garde guitar experimentalists Wilco play Shepherds Bush Empire on Monday night, which is well and truly sold out. If you like your Joy Division......

Eurovision 2007 is on. Here's the first of Londonist's previews of this year's entries, and there's already some amazing songs. Bulgaria send an ethnic rave song with vocals that are mere sound effects built into the heavily drummed mix. It's quite amazing.Israel's controversial entry sounds like 5 songs in one. Sounding like a bargain bin Gogol Bordello, Push The Button by Teapacks mixes rap, rock, drum and bass, jaunty pop, klezmer with social messages......

Same as the old Wembley? Several bloggers were fortunate enough to be among the 60,000 Brent residents to be invited to the first public event at the new stadium and their first impressions sound a strangely familiar note. Rascal Houdi on The National Midday Sun message board concludes: Stadium, superb.....signage, catering & transport, must do better. In fairness, the new owners have only had the keys for a week and are working like crazy......

Tessa 'Watch me keep a straight face' Jowell finally gave in and announced that yes, the 2012 Olympics will cost in excess of £9 billion. Thats a lot of zeros. Can't we just buy everyone a copy of Escape to Victory instead? Everyone's a winner in that except the Nazis. Central government will pay 4.93 billion pounds - in addition to 1 billion pounds already committed - to pay for the games and regeneration......

Yargh, yargh, yargh! Avast. Yargh! Sorry. What is it about pirates that's so compelling? The National Gallery's summer blockbuster, Dutch Portraits in the Age of Rembrandt and Franz Hals, will include the image of a skeleton pored over by surgeons. The skeleton is that of an unknown pirate, who was caught, executed and donated to Dutch science in 1615. So that's what they mean by 15 men on a dead man's chest. Yargh! The......

Lambeth town hall has come if for a good kicking: AN INFAMOUS council has become the worst in London. Lambeth has been judged the poorest performing council in the capital. It is now ranked among the five most pitiful councils in the whole of England. The borough's Labour administration has been left reeling after the national body that measures local authorities' performance decided the council's services to residents had got worse. The Audit Commission......

As London Fashion Week struts onto the headlines catwalk, the debate over whether fashion models are too thin took another thrilling turn when Sasha Wilkins, fashion editor for The Observer Magazine, observed that, no, they weren't too thin. However, on Saturday, Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell, said that, yes, they were too thin. Somebody somewhere tried to divert the discussion toward the national problem of life-threatening disorders like bulemia and anorexia, and how those afflictions......

Because schools aren't violent enough: Boxing is being reintroduced in several schools to help pupils develop their mental and physical skills. Of course! Nothing like the risk of a good old fashioned brain injury to increase fist to eye co-ordination. The director of sport at Beckenham's Kelsey Park Sports College, Matthew Strange, believes there could be a place for boxing within the national curriculum "due to the massive impact it can have on those......