With the flood of recriminations about its cost and suitability yet to subside, work begins today on the aquatics centre at the Stratford Olympic site. Despite final blueprints yet to be agreed, concrete piles for the building's foundations are being installed, nearly two months ahead of schedule. The centre, with its distinctive sloping roof, has gone from being the darling of the design community to a metaphor for Olympian overspend, an initial projected cost......

Festival season embeds itself in our social life this week and makes a mockery of our diary – it’s all illegible scribblings, strike-throughs, and exclamation points. Whilst we attempt to sort ourselves out, let’s see what sense we can make of the week ahead in literary London for you... Monday: Bebop hep-cats (that’s right, hep-cats) converge on the Troubadour tonight to celebrate the 1950s poetry scene (8pm, £6/£5 concessions); biographers Anne Sebba and Andrew......

Another day, another thunderclap of hand-wringing and dire Nostradamus warnings about the 2012 Games. Organisers have been accused of "spending money like water" as costs for the event rise like floodwaters threatening the ageing Thames Barrier. This is the charge made by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, who have pricked their penny-pinching ears up at the well-publicised report by the Public Accounts Committee that the original budget was unrealistic. Costs for key buildings......

Frank Gehry will design this year’s Serpentine pavilion. The Kensington Gardens gallery gains a temporary annexe each year, designed by a guest architect with no previous London commissions. And they always bag a big name - Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Daniel Liebeskind, Oscar Niemeyer… So this year it will be Frank Gehry, who is perhaps best known for designing the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (pictured). It’s a shame he wasn’t the architect of 2007’s......

Tourist season in rain-soaked down-town London, and all the big museums are, shall we say, a tad busy. But Londonist always has something up its sleeve for a rainy day. And for those of you inclined towards higher aesthetic planes, we would strongly recommend the Design Museum in Shad Thames, more particularly their current exhibition featuring the works of ‘starchitect’ Zaha Hadid. It is hard to over-state the achievements of this prolific lady –......

While we love London as it is, there's no denying that this place is changing. These changes are in some cases very welcome, much needed and the result of earnest campaign. In some cases, these changes are unwanted, unwelcome, unnecessary and wasteful. There's a certain amount of debate on this very website about London past, present and future but we note with great pleasure a far grander and, dare we say, better organised lot......

The Olympics. Tired of all the naysaying and doom-mongery? Here's a site that's sure to include more positive spin than a world-class discus throw: the official 2012 Olympics blog. No half-baked observations about office life or photos of cute kittens here. Oh no. This is quite a differnt calibre of freshman blogger: I met HRH the Duchess of Cornwall who was visiting to site to find out more about the venue. She arrived at......

The award-winning Zaha Hadid was today announced as the designer of London's Olympic Aquatics Centre. Which may or may not be the plain old London Aquatics Centre, depending on whether we get the 2012 Olympics. Either way, it will be built. The building looks very nice, but they always do when they're computer-generated. Architects are hardly likely to submit pictures of something looking dank, grotty, litter-strewn and swathed in graffiti, are they? According to......