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......

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......

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.......

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 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......

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......

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......

"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......

An unexploded World War II bomb caused London City airport to be closed earlier today. The airport and the area's DLR link were both closed down for several hours at this morning after the device was found on a building site at Seagull Lane, Canning Town. The bomb has since been moved to wasteland where it will be exploded. The airport is back up and running, although there are continuing delays.......

As of next month the Tube will run 30 minutes later on Friday and Saturday nights and start one hour later on Saturday mornings. The four men charged with attempting to carry out bomb attacks in London on 21 July last year are due up in court today. "Jackie Fisher who are you Dreadnought." Yes, the Da Vinci Code judgment code has been cracked. Find out how and what it means here. A new......

Today sees the release of a set of stamps which marks the end of Royal Mail's 'British Journey' series. The series began in 2003 and ends its journey throughout the British Isles with a set for England. Curiously, a previous set was issued for South West England - other sets were issued for Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales - suggesting that Royal Mail views this area as somewhat, ummm, different. St. Paul's, of course,......

We're always on the look out for stories that involve explosives and young children here at Londonist, so we were particulary excited to see the headline Bomb disposal team called to school in the Harrow Times today. Turns out that Auriol Junior School in Stoneleigh has to be evacuated last week due to a hand grenade which had been brought in by one of the pupils as part of a "World War II display".......

Normally when we link up a page with music we warn you to turn the speakers down or plug a discreet headphone in via your sleeve ala Grange Hill 1984, but for something as special as The JCB Song we really think it best to crank the sound up to 11 and get the rest of the office to crowd around your monitor for a sing-along. Especially for anyone who remembers good times as......

"Under the sea, there'll be no accusations, just friendly crustaceans." When Homer J. Simpson first uttered these immortal words he was dreaming of a place of make-believe. But one day we might just be able to join him in his little ethereal world, aboard a high speed train to New York no less. Apparently plans have been a foot for such a natatorial train since Churchill, Roosevelt, and their military advisers discussed the feasibility......

My parents are coming to visit and I can’t stand to go on the bloody wheel again! Any other suggestions? Here’s a revelation we had during a visit from our own elders last year: Parents are old, so they like to look at old stuff. Especially stuff that’s about as old as they are. In other words, you can’t go wrong with World War II. Make your way to the new-ish Children's War exhibition......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. The Edinburgh Festival ended last month and we literary Londoners were finally allowed to have some interesting stuff to do around here for awhile. But alas, once again this week, the most interesting literary event in the UK is taking place in a place other than London, just a bit to the south in......

Rumour has it that this documentary was already in production when the big studios got a whiff of it and immediately set up Jack Black to make School of Rock - it's kind of lucky that it happened that way around because if the real life antics of Paul Green had hit the screen first there would have been no need to fictionalise a thing. This is one of those must-see documentaries in the......

Since our copies of The Earth from the Air and Exquisite Mayhem are now well thumbed and falling to pieces it's time for Londonist to find a new book for its coffee table. And what could be a better subject than the Blitz? Nothing - as long as you don't concentrate on the estimated 42,000 dead and 50,000 injured and focus instead on the 130,000 so houses that were blown to kingdom come. Official......

If you don't 'take' the Observer on a Sunday then you might have missed this article by Miranda Sawyer in the paper's Sunday magazine. The piece was written to mark the twenty-year anniversary of the death of photojournalist David Hodge, who was fatally injured during the Brixton riots. During the article Sawyer tries to assess the area in which she's lived for fifteen years and throws up some interesting facts while she's at it:......

Ahh, the good old days of the gentlemen spy: bowler hats, poison-tipped umbrellas, cigarette cases and, best of all, no David Shayler. What's made us all misty-eyes for the golden years of espionage? The discovery of a KGB 'spy's guide to London' in the latest bundle of MI5 files released to the National Archives. "Apparently seized by the Germans from a Russian agent captured in Paris during World War II," only to fall, "into......