Residents are less than happy about a mural in Streatham: they’re not really sure if it’s art. The new mayor’s new arts and culture director has some new ideas. Actually, Londonist reckons she’s sound. The Aussies are packing their bags in droves: apparently the jobs market is better down under. Boris is to retain his column in the Telegraph. And call it The New Londoner? Black Cab drivers look set to get a helping......

It's been a bad few weeks for the Spice Girls: they released the worst selling Children In Need single ever (to put this into perspective, let's remember that Martine McCutcheon once had a Children In Need single. Martine McCutcheon), appeared in terrible Tesco adverts, played to half full shows in America and Baby Spice sprained her little baby ankle on stage. However, little Emma Bunton ingested her weight in painkillers, soldiered on and appeared......

Bitterness aside (yes, we too were not on the pulse fast enough to bag tickets before their price sky-rocketed), we are rather enjoying the bitch fight that is ‘should Ewan McGregor have been cast as Iago in the Donmar Warehouse’s production of Othello?’ Bloomberg, while slightly disappointed by McGregor’s under-emphasis of evil intent, are definitely the most complimentary of his performance: Fortunately, Ewan McGregor gives a very creditable performance -- codpiece and all ... The......

Harrow motorist in jail after 172 mph motorway run. DNA to the rescue in decades-old murder case. London has nine spots that breech EU pollution limits. Once the Big Smoke always the Big Smoke. The Telegraph has a guide to London. They recommend you visit the New Piccadilly Café. We recommend you do not, unless you're a fan of 'Closed' signs. Image courtesy of tezzer57 via the Londonist flickr group.......

If you're a first-time buyer looking to get onto the property ladder, you may be interested to know that Witanhurst, the 94 year old Georgian-style Highgate mansion, and second largest private residence in London (the largest being the Queen's gaff), has been sold to Marcus Cooper for an estimated £32 million. His firm The Cooper Group plan to "restore and develop Witanhurst beyond its former glory", and transform it into the capital's first £150......

London's got its share of surgical history, but our newest scientific exhibition space has strapped the operating theatre concept to a gurney and wheeled it into the 21st century. Last night at the Wellcome Collection a full house watched Dr Frank Wells perform open-heart surgery on a 68-year-old man. It was all done via a remote link to Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, so although the audience wasn't in the same room as the patient......

This is our favourite assault on police story ever. The headline: Woman accused of spraying cop with breast milk The details: It is alleged she was detained for trying to steal shoes from Lizard, in Hill Street, Richmond. After being arrested for theft she sprayed an officer with milk from her right breast. There's a 'right tit' joke in there somewhere... We expect the Standard to start an anti-breast campaign later today. The Sun......

According to The Telegraph London has turned into a great ant-heap in swarm. Not sure what that means, but it's a nice read. Muslim activist Abu Izzadeen has been remanded on conditional bail after being charged with a terrorism offence. The Tories are all set to probe the cost of the Olympics. And have a couple of spare quid after selling their old HQ. And Ian Richardson died.......

And we live by the river. Latest climate change news: We're fucked: Scientists have issued dire warnings about the threat from climate change, predicting average world temperatures will rise by around three degrees by the end of the century, with devastating consequences. In the UK, rising sea levels could potentially cause huge damage to low-lying areas, including London and coastal and river areas. It's not all doom and gloom though. The Independent this morning......

Bryony Gordon's opinion piece in The Telegraph gets off to an odd start by talking about whether or not to sit next to a tramp on the tube: What do you do in such a situation? Stay standing and risk fainting, or sit down and risk vomiting? I was weighing up this conundrum when I noticed that the tramp was reading the New Statesman. How peculiar, I thought. And then I realised that it......

Tim 'The Tube Man' O'Toole has said that he doesn't believe Abu Hamza's son posed a threat while working as a labourer on the Underground. Ex-IRA spy Kevin Fulton has been arrested in London in connection with two murders in Northern Ireland. The Telegraph delves into the 2012 budget and comes up with a few surprises. Centrepoint have opened a new facility for the homeless featuring internet-access in every room. The Doors (not all......

The Telegraph is reporting today that Sunday theatre-going may be a possibility within the next 12 months. You may remember earlier this year when the National theatre announced plans to start staging performances on Sundays and that the National's artistic director Nicholas Hytner was reported to be "close to securing a deal that will turn the South Bank complex into a seven-day-a-week operation." Well, since then we've heard nothing, but today Nick Starr, the......

Just catching up on the 'anti-terror' arrests that took place over the weekend. As you probably know by now, on Friday 14 men aged between 17 to 48 were arrested under the Terrorism Act 2000 (12 of them at The Bridge to China Town restaurant in Borough); and residential properties across the capital are currently being examined in connection with the arrests. The men are "mainly young British Muslims of Pakistani origin," and have......

The Theatre Museum will not be closed - yet. The ventilator has not been switched off quite yet, though there is a hand hovering near the plug. Usually ignored by tourists for the flashier and better laid out museums of South Kensington, this quiet subsidiary of the Victoria and Albert museum in Covent Garden has been in the limelight of late. When two applications to the Heritage Lottery Fund were rejected, its future was......

A walk from Stratford to the South Bank doesn’t sound particularly alluring. What, after all, is the Jubilee Line for? But, as you’ve probably guessed from the hilarious title of this post, we’re talking about Stratford-Upon-Avon, not Stratford-Upon-Olympics. Yup, some chap’s come up with the idea of creating a special walking route from the Bard’s home town all the way to the Globe. Measure for Measure, that’s about 146 miles, passing through many charming......

When Jacques Chirac made his chauvinistic Olympic-losing snide comment that, "The only worse food than British food is Finnish," it confirmed to us a couple of things: 1. He's a twat. 2. He's never tried Danish food (not from the canteen we used to eat in anyway). It didn't surprise anyone, though, that a Frenchman was denigrating British food. The French have long suffered a superiority complex rooted in attitudes about food formed with......

The Piccadilly Backpackers Hostel opened up its 'POD dorms' last week, and The Observer and The Telegraph sent along a couple of lucky souls to try it out. Despite the name, the pods have nothing to do with Apple or the London Eye; it's more an allusion to how you might feel in one of them: like a pea in a pod. You get six to a (presumably titchy) room, in what looks like......

We were going to leave Blair and his toy soldiers a little time to go away and lick their wounds before we laid into them again but then we read this story in The Telegraph: The Brazilian man shot dead by police in the mistaken belief that he was a suicide bomber was killed with a type of bullet banned in warfare under international convention First we thought they'd shot him five times, then......

This week's Peter Bradshaw Appreciation Society kicks off with Roman Polanski's take on Oliver Twist. For the illiterate, using screen readers to read this week's Friday Film News out to you, Oliver Twist is the story of an orphan boy sent to the workhouse, who runs away to London and falls into criminal ways before finding redemption (via some horrific encounters, including murder). There may be a happy ending but, flipping heck, there's some......

Here we go again then with London Fashion Week. Don't get us wrong, we have nothing against fashion (although it may have a few questions to ask us one day, but that's a different matter). It's just LFW brings up the same tired old debates every year. For example: fur. Yes, we've already had our first London Fashion Week Disrupted by Protestors headline, and things only kicked off yesterday. PETA members were escorted out......

Mike Leigh's new play now has some reviews to go along with its recently revealed title. After a shaky start last week when the first two previews were cancelled, it's now all systems go for Leigh's new venture, which is called Two Thousand Years. What's it about? Well, first, what it's not about is the war in Iraq or Jewish settlers in 1948 Israel. The actual plot is nicely summarised in The Telegraph: "This......

A few weeks ago we encouraged you to book tickets to see Frida Kahlo’s exhibition at the Tate Modern . Londonist hasn’t had an opportunity to wander down the South Bank yet, which this weekend we blame solely on the horrendously hot and suffocating weather, but being the good Samaritans we are at Londonist, we are compiling the thoughts of art critics from around the UK. Rachel Campbell-Johnston at The Times remarked that there......

How did we miss this one? David Hasselhoff turned up at a pub in Brixton the other weekend, because the club night they had on there was named after him. Apparently Germany's favourite pop star decided to pop along to the Telegraph pub's Hasselhoff Scandal night because he "loved the flyer featuring a young semi-naked Hasselhoff". The Telegraph's promotion manager is quoted as saying "A few of us came up with a name for......

Boy oh boy, we just love spy stories here at Londonist, and this one is particularly good because it involves a Frenchman, sideburns, nosey old women and the word "Londonistan". The Telegraph article revolves around the life story of one Pierre Martinet, a former French spy whose book (the catchily titled La DGSE, Action Service, An Agent Comes Out of the Shadow) comes out tomorrow. The book apaprently gives a "hands-on account of the......

Commuters on the Brighton to Victoria line are being encouraged to raise their weary heads from The Da Vinci Code and look for wildlife instead. According to the Telegraph, the train operators are to give out free wildlife guides on 10 of the country's busiest routes, including the Brighton one. Among the fauna on offer are: ... herons, cormorants and gulls on the Thames at Battersea, foxes and grey squirrels in the suburbs and......

The Winston Churchill Memorial Screen (it's actually a gate) was unveiled today (the 30th anniversary of Churchill's birth) at St Paul's. The monument cost £26,000, weighs 3 tonnes, took 7,000 hours and 10 assistants to make, and, we have to admit it, the pictures of this thing make it look pretty impressive. Has someone finally worked out how to get the balance between a work of art and a memorial right? Maybe they should......