There's a Spitfire in Trafalgar Square today. Not a Banksy Spitfire, amusingly positioned so it looks like it is crashed into the steps leading from the National Gallery. It's not propped up between the lions by a protest group and it's not there as a misguided celebration of Prince Harry's safe return to England. It's there to launch a campaign to put a statue of Sir Keith Park on the fourth plinth and do......

You’d be forgiven if upon watching Doris Lessing settle into her armchair and begin reading to the audience at the Southbank Centre Tuesday night, you were reminded of your grandmother tucking you in with a bedtime story. If, that is, your grandmother was the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature. And the story she was telling you effectively imagined away your existence. But incongruity seemed the theme for the evening. And so......

No, Helen Mirren's academy award hasn't been thrown overboard, but London's favourite battleship, HMS Belfast, has lost Oscar - one of its two cats. We're keeping our hopes alive that the ginger moggy hasn't drowned as he apparently tried in vain to find the other ship's cat, 'Kilo'. History is on Oscar's side. During World War II, the German warship Bismark sank to the ocean floor and took almost 2,000 men with it. But......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 26th November 1983: An armed robbery at the Brinks Mat warehouse near Heathrow Airport becomes the largest heist in British history, as £25 million worth of gold bullion is pinched. Tuesday – 27th November 2000: 10-year-old schoolboy Damilola Taylor is stabbed in the leg and dies in Peckham, south London. The following six years would see several trials and re-trials over the killing, finally culminating in the......

Don't get us wrong. As you can probably tell from last week there's a good deal of enthusiasm for the NFL on here. This Londonista in particular has to confess to a near addiction. However, while last night's Miami Dolphins hosting of the eventually victorious New York Giants at Wembley was the ideal meet-up for the sport's many fans in this country, and the NFL can finally put a big tick in the box......

Michael Murphy is an American architect and illustrator living in London. Growing up in San Francisco and attending university in the desert states of Arizona and New Mexico before working in Dublin and London, Michael has a singular vision that’s uniquely his own. With the recent release of his London series of Giclee prints, we thought now would be a great time to have a chat with Michael about his art. Rather than Londonist......

The statisticians are at it again. Trying to connect A-B but, just for fun, popping into every shop along the way. Sketching trends with a pencil as there is insufficient data to ink them in. Reading significance into very little. Missing the point. A new survey by the University of East London has produced a map portraying religious segregation in the capital, which concludes that religion is a bigger dividing factor in the city than......

Or, stuff about London you think is true, but is actually rubbish. 1. The Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus. Ah, the Eros statue. A symbol of love in the midst of tourists and shoppers. How romantic. Er, actually, sorry to dissapoint you, but it's all rubbish. Think we're making it up? Allow us to explain. The statue is a memorial to The 7th Earl of Shaftsbury (yep, that's where the avenue got its name) and......

Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to Win-nie, Happy birthday to you! Londonist would like to congratulate Winnie Langley for reaching the precious age of 100 years old today. To put this in context, this means she's seen two World Wars and no less than 19 different Prime Ministers. Wow, that's a lot of stuff to see in a lifetime. So how is Winnie, from Croydon going to celebrate her......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 20th August 1989: The Marchioness pleasure boat collides with the dredger Bowbelle under Cannon Street Railway Bridge, causing the Marchioness to sink rapidly. 51 of the pleasure boat’s 132 passengers drown. Tuesday – 21st August 1920: A boy who would be named Christopher Robin Milne is born in Chelsea, West London. His father, the author A. A. Milne, would use him as inspiration for the Christopher Robin......

10. Scareships Just previous to the First World War, as Germany prepared to release the Zeppelin air ships, a spate of phantom airship sightings took grip on the world. London was just one city in the UK to become besieged by the mysterious aircraft that had no definitive origin. Were they the first UFOs? How did such craft seem to vanish or escape pursuit? Here's a chronicle pertaining to the capital: 9th May 1909......

6. Animal Apparitions: Chickens Yes, chickens. Prepare yourself for a fowl tale. The strangest of all London’s animal spirits has to be the spectral chicken of Highgate’s Pond Square. This quirky enigma originates from 1626 when philosopher Sir Francis Bacon was travelling with Dr Witherborne, friend and physician to James I. During their journey the gents discussed Bacon’s idea of preserving food by freezing, at which Witherborne scoffed. So, to prove a point Bacon......

Nestled somewhere between the Novae Archaelogical Site, Bulgaria, the Darbush Tomb, Eritrea, the Capitanes Generales Palace, Guatemala and 96 other gravely endangered world monument sites sits an unassuming East End Music Hall. Wilton’s Music Hall was included today on the World Monument Watchlist of 100 Most Endangered sites for 2008. The watchlist raises global awareness of monuments of significant artistic, architectural, historic or social value that require urgent attention; without which they will disappear.......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 28th May 1908: Ian Fleming, creator of the character of James Bond and author of more than a dozen novels featuring the British agent, is born in Mayfair. He also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Tuesday – 29th May 1886: The current Putney Bridge is opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales, replacing an earlier bridge that was built in 1729. Wednesday – 30th May 1972:......

The tube loves throwing money at art almost as much as it loves making money from big corporate advertising. Platform for Art is TFL’s public art programme and its latest commission sees Turner Prize winner Liam Gillick’s work on the new cover for the tube map - the design shows the words of the date of the last day in London without the Underground network: Friday 9 January 1863, done in the 12 colours......

There's no question in my mind that My Space is a wonderful thing but I find it alternately inspiring and overwhelming when you get a glimpse of the sheer number of bands and promoters are out there trying to do their thing. It doesn't help that at the majority of gigs I've played on the so-called "toilet circuit" I haven't been that keen on the other bands, I'm not someone who will randomly pop......

This week - Africans prove that not all the French are cheese eating surrender monkeys (Days Of Glory) and Mr Bean goes on holiday to the South of France (Mr Bean's Holiday). This week's Friday Film News has a definite French theme. As a result we are eating brie, beating everyone at Rugby and later we're going on strike. First up, Days of Glory Bradshaw gives it 3/5, The opening scene pretty well boggles......

This Day In London’s History 1916: Prolific actor Eric Christmas is born in London. OK, so it’s slim pickings this week in terms of interesting London-related events that have taken place on this date. But we did discover that the wonderfully-named Eric Cuthbert Christmas was born on 19th March 1916 in London, and in the absence of anything more interesting occurring on this date in London we thought we would find out a little......

This Day In London’s History 1988: The Bank of England withdraws the £1 note from circulation. In 1797 the Bank of England started printing banknotes in denominations of one pound sterling on a regular basis. To quote their website: In 1759, gold shortages caused by the Seven Years War forced the Bank to issue a £10 note for the first time. The first £5 notes followed in 1793 at the start of the war......

There's a throwaway line in Clint Eastwood's Flags of our Fathers that underlines the weakness in that film but promised that there was much more to come in his companion piece, Letters from Iwo Jima: This was the fifth day, sir. The battle went on for thirty five more. The story of the flag raised above Iwo Jima turns out to be a banal one and the film itself jumps around so much that......

Our favourite story from yesterday: AN unexploded World War II shell which was used as a doorstop for 60 years has been removed by bomb disposal experts from a New Malden house. The old dear who inherited the piece of ordnance from the previous owner of her house said "I thought if it had lasted ten years, it was probably dead". We had a similar theory about Take That's 'retirement, but look what happened......

This Day In London’s History 1991: A packed rush hour train carrying over one thousand commuters collides with the buffers at Cannon Street station. At 8:44am on 8th January 1991, the 07:58 train from Sevenoaks failed to stop when pulling into Cannon Street station and hit the buffers at the central London terminus at about 5 miles per hour. Despite the relatively low speed, the impact caused the infrastructure of some of the carriages......

This Day In London’s History 1890: Public opening of the world’s first ‘deep-level’ electric tube line, running between Stockwell and King William Street. Although the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railways had opened several underground tube lines since 1863, these were relatively shallow ‘cut-and-cover’-type lines. Following advances in tunnelling techniques later in the century, it became possible to construct much deeper lines, and the City & South London Railway was opened to the public on......

The most beloved Christmas tree in the UK, perhaps the biggest, certainly the one with the most royalty hanging off the boughs, is returning to Trafalgar Square this evening at 5.45pm. As traditional and eagerly anticipated as the lucky loose change embedded in grandma's Christmas pudding, the enormous Picea abies aka Norwegian spruce, often over 20 metres high, is given to London by Norway each year as a gesture of gratitude for British support......

Sincerest apologies, dear readers. The author of this column (Column? Post?) has had a particularly trying week, what with almost getting fired from his high-pressure media sales job and also being asked to vacate the sofa near Highbury Corner he had been staying on since July. Now, we know, this is no excuse. Two posts in a fortnight is almost unforgivable. How much more trouble can he get in, do you wonder? Well, two......

If you build it they will come. And if you convert a disused Bethnal Green warehouse into an art and performance venue, and fund it yourself (so you can stick it to "the man") they'll bang down your door. The Londonist talks to Marlon Brown, "the man" behind The Empire, about bank loans, broken wrists and the Buy It generation. First things first, how did you come about acquiring the Empire? I knew some......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Tonight Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award way back in 2003, discusses his writing and latest book A Spot of Bother. £8.50 at the Royal Festival Hall, 7:45 pm in the Purcell Room, find out more. Kevin McCloud......

You know the airports are well and truly fucked when they have to be evacuated before they've even been built: Part of Heathrow's £4bn Terminal Five site had to be evacuated after the discovery of an unexploded anti-aircraft shell. Work on the project ground to a halt for a few hours, after builders dug up the shell, dating back to World War II. Thousands of workers were moved to safety and a 200m exclusion......

Having spent an enjoyable couple of hours exploring leafy Holland Park last week, our next mission in our continuing quest to find out more about the city we live in was to investigate some parts of the decidedly more urban locale of St Pancras (sans audio-guide this time). Our first stop was to be St Pancras Old Church, at the top end of Pancras Road. Easier said than done, as it happens – we......

"A medal awarded to the only dog to be officially registered as a prisoner of war in World War II has gone on public display for the first time." Pedigree pointer, Judy, was captured along with members of her Royal Navy ship's crew in 1942. She was the ship's mascot. Taken to a Japanese PoW camp in Sumatra, Judy soon made her mark: Frank Williams, a British airman at the camp, befriended the pedigree......