Taking to the stage at the Handover Party in Beijing, his successful flag-unfurling and debut on the international stage complete, Mayor Boris Johnson finally returned to a theme he has occasionally expounded since his election in May: expanding the capital's lexicon. Having re-introduced us to the joys of "piffle" and "cripes" in his three months at the City Hall tiller, the Mayor used the opportunity of addressing London's bid team to discourse on the......

Like a London bus, you wait for a great Londonist photo gallery and then three come at once. Well, in Beijing, there definitely was a bus. There was also a Beckham. There was a Boris. There was an apparently ununfurlable and tricky-to-wave flag. There was a football. There were two little girls. There was a funky film. There was some dancing. There was a Leona Lewis and some guy from Led Zeppelin. And suddenly, there......

Pictures below from a sneaky preview visit to the site for tomorrow's 'Visa London 2012 Party' on the Mall, which is happening right in front of Queenie's Front Room. Feverish activity seems to be going on to get the stage, the set and back-of-site operations built in time. If you got your mitts on one of the 40,000 tickets through the public ballot for this, then enjoy the celebrations to mark the handover from Beijing......

Philatelists, take note: to commemorate the impending handover of the Olympic flag from Beijing to London, a series of four special edition stamps has been issued. 'Cause there's nothing that says "Olympic handover" quite like, er, stamps. Anyway, the set of four, on sale in both China and Britain, feature the London Eye and the Tower rubbing up nicely against the Queen's profile, while the Bird's Nest stadium and the Corner Tower of the Forbidden......

Quick quiz - which Olympic sport, flouting the notion of gender equality, is the only one without a women's programme? Boxing is the answer. Despite the male pugilists getting to pound eachother into the ground, women's boxing (not to be confused with foxy boxing) remains on the outside looking in. That may change come 2012. The Amateur International Boxing Association is planning on making a proposal to introduce female fighters at the London games,......

Days after the collective involuntary bowel movement performed by London's Beijing-based 2012 organising team as they witnessed the spectacle of China's opening ceremony, Tessa Jowell has recovered enough to identify the area in which London will excel: getting bums on seats. Reckoning that there's no way our cupcake's icing will best the razzle dazzle that lit the Bird's Nest on Friday, the Olympic minister has claimed they'll attempt to fill every seat in 2012. With......

While the world and its singlet waits in anticipation for tomorrow's opening of the 2008 Olympics, folk in London's Chinatown are less than excited, claims one report. Money worries mean the 100,000 strong Chinese community packed into Soho's eastern climes are less focused on the men's marathon than making ends meet at home. Rents are heading north, trade has shifted south since the July 2005 bombings, and tourist numbers are down across the city,......

Later this month our benevolent Mayor will announce plans to introduce a "living wage" for all staff employed by the Greater London Authority and any organisations funded by the London Development Authority, says a report in the Guardian. He will also encourage hoteliers to do the same before the Olympics. Boris has been under pressure to introduce these measures from various groups, to improve the lot of those at the bottom of the food......

Get Dixon of Dock Green on the blower. See if DCI Burnside of Sun Hill is still kicking about ('Tosh isn't, sadly). A lack of security staff for the 2012 Games has led a senior police figure to recommend that veteran officers are brought out of retirement for the Olympics. Having outlined a £600 million pound security plan earlier in the year, officials are now concerned that there simply won't be enough able and......

Boris may be scheming to plant new trees, but it may not be enough to recover the foliage losses London experiences every year. According to Trees for Cities, 9,000 trees were felled in London last year, which would eat away the vast majority of Boris’ proposed 10,000 planting project. Trees for Cities works with local communities to create green areas in urban settings. The independent charity is currently campaigning to secure protection for city......

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......

Colour us surprised: those original 2012 Olympic costs were totally unrealistic Hounslow residents, consider yourselves warned: a teachers strike this Thursday means the yoof will be on the loose Arrests have been made in a 21-year old murder case Here comes the bat cab! That's, um, a battery-powered cab, not the kind of motor Bruce Wayne would be seen in. Pubs are closing at frightening rate. Do your bit, people - get plastered in......

2012 Games won't benefit locals, claims think tank Take that, Monaco - London now has the world's priciest homes Our Amy's up for three Ivor Novello gongs Lie detector software proves a nice little money-saver for south London council Russian heavyweights to square off at the High Court Which? reveals candidates for London Restaurant of the Year Image courtesy of Orhan* via the Londonist flickr group.......

We've spent enough time wading through the flytipped rubbish on our street or struggling to blast the grime off our bodies following a grubby commute home to realise that London's not exactly the cleanest of places. But is it really the dirtiest city in Europe? In a shameless promotion, travel experts Trip Advisor commissioned a survey asking tourists to rank their likes and dislikes across a number of continental destinations, and London cleaned up......

2012 "Friend-ship" scheme shelved before it sets sail. Is the sun setting on the Square Mile? Grape of wrath: Man slips on squashed fruit and sues M&S for "loss of confidence". We think he's got more chance of turning a profit by sending the video in to You've Been Framed. Stingy NHS won't cough up money for grandmother's sight-saving operation. Costs for parking a plane at Heathrow set to rise. Naturally, passengers will be......

Macabre London: First, man denies murdering model but admits to necrophilia; then a headless corpse turns up in northwest London. We find ourselves suspiciously eyeing other commuters on our Tube ride home this evening. Corrupt London: We know that London is ranked first on all kinds of lovely lists. But we’d prefer to forgo the dubious distinction of being first in rates of debit and credit card fraud. Tonally challenged London: Londonist thinks it’s......

Now, stories from the IT world ordinarily don’t do much for Londonist besides make our eyes glaze over. (We’re sorry, IT people, we’re sure you’re lovely, that your jobs are fascinating, and that we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without you. It’s just that we can’t understand what you’re saying.) So when we noticed this story about a new website created to help IT companies bid for contracts for the 2012......

Urban decay is on its way: ‘pashmina-wrapped lemmings’ are fleeing the ‘great termites nest’ that is London for the safety of the suburbs. We find ourselves alarmed not by stories of marauding youth but by metaphors run amok. 2012 British Olympians to enlist? No, but they may do a stint at an army base. After a little soul-searching, St Bart’s clears itself of wrongdoing in a security breach that left confidential medical records scattered......

Our friends in Westminster have voted that more money from the Eamon Holmes fronted tax on the poor, the National Lottery, can be used to plug the funding gap for the 2012 Olympics. Culture Secretary James Purnell said the £9.3bn budget for the Games (almost four times the estimate that helped win the bid in 2005) is "robust". We doubt it. How has it suddenly become robust? The real lottery here is determining how much......

We're game for these 2012 Olympics and, yesterday, tried to get all excited about the Get Set Roadshow that will be shimmying its way through all 33 Boroughs soon. But then we saw Londonist Flickr Pool contributor, MykReeve's first-hand shot of the thing and were somewhat underwhelmed. Many thanks to MykReeve for being our man on the scene.......

It's tempting to bask in the success of the re-branded O2 and write off the building's seven year existence as useless white elephant de nos jours as a bad dream. Unfortunately, that was no nightmare, and it seems that financially the Millennium Dome never stood a chance. The assembled politicians and VIPs had barely clunked their awkward way through Auld Lang Syne on December 31st, 1999, before the whole project was skint. Newly released......

Londonist is all for environmentalism. We even clothe the Londonist baby in non-disposable washable cotton nappies and take all our groceries home from the organic food shop in a bag made of woven hemp. We wash our hair with a cuttlefish and row everywhere. However, when we heard that a low-carbon Olympic flame will light up the 2012 Games, we weren't impressed. We want a big old dirty flame. This is the Olympics! Let's......

Last week's fire at the Stratford Olympic site was apparently caused by a gas torch (which is not a gas version of an electric torch as we initially thought, but some type of cutting tool which sends out sparks), which lit a pile of insulation material on fire. Hold on there a second. Seriously? A torch? Because, of course, one of the most easily recognisable symbols of the Olympics is the Olympic Flame, which......

The 2012 Olympic Games may seem a long way off, but the pressure is starting to mount on the proposed developments for East London. In addition to building a shiny new stadium, the Olympics is meant to be an opportunity to provide more jobs, improved transport, and 9,000 new homes (of which half will be low-cost). While the Overground is now servicing Stratford and due to hook up to the East London Line in......

The Olympic Park has received a lot of attention lately, unveiling its flagship stadium, promising to start work on it early and suffering fiery blazes which fortuitously destroyed a warehouse due for demolition. This Saturday though, an audaciously different kind of attention will be focused on the Stratford site: imagining the Olympics weren't happening. WE SELL BOXES WE BUY GOLD is an artistic collaboration exploring what the Olympic site means to people and endeavouring......

Well, it's certainly less controversial than the logo. The design for the new Olympic Stadium is something of a zoetrope in the aspirational design launch video which follows bits of the stadium as they fly and crawl through London to Stratford, witnessed by a jogging girl with a coldsore. The bits all spin together excitingly to settle into a massive, goldfish bowl. Or sunken, oval cupcake. After the Games, 25,000 temporary Olympic seats will......

With immaculate PR timing, just a week after London was urged to focus on delivering the 2012 Games on time, the team at Olympic HQ announce that work is starting on the Stratford Olympic Stadium 3 months ahead of schedule. In fact, they're so ahead of their game the news hasn't yet made it into the official 2012 website, although, that tells us other thrilling news: the laying of underground power cables is also......

This weekend, Rowan Walker wrote in the Observer of her torturous but strangely addictive experience of training at the Islington Boxing Gym to raise awareness of the fierce campaign to get female boxing recognised as an Olympic Sport for the 2012 Games in London. According to the International Olympic Committee, "Boxing ranks among the Olympic Games' most illustrious sports" yet only for men, to date. As Walker's article indicates, the number and calibre of......

Hmm. Londonist hasn’t always had happy bouncy things to say about the 2012 Olympics. And it is rather likely that we will come up with some more searing satirical observations before too long. That is what Londonist does. But just for today, it is with vague approbation that we report on one of the side effects of the whole proceedings – the Personal Best scheme. It is true that the idea behind it is a......

Phosphatic rock. A radium-luminised gauge dial face. Radium paint. It sounds like an amateur nuclear hobbyist's shopping list, but these are just some of the scary-sounding radioactive materials found recently at the Olympic Park site in east London. Contractors uncovered the objects whilst clearing a 100-year old waste tip near Stratford last month. A subsequent survey, ordered by the Olympic Delivery Authority, revealed "low level" contamination and hotspots of the highly poisonous heavy metal......