Away from the glitzy London Fashion Week, the British Library held its own alternative fashion show this week as part of the London Design Festival. The focus was eco-friendly high-street fashion showcasing the best of sustainable style by pioneering eco-fashionistas People Tree and REVAMP.......

Isaac Newton famously said "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". Next time you gaze up at his sculpture on the British Library's forecourt, consider that you are doing exactly the same. For most of the library's treasures are beneath your feet in four levels (equivalent to eight storeys) of subterranean basement. Few of the library's half a million annual readers get to see these......

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......

The British Library isn't always so good at promoting their free exhibition space, but they do tend to lay on something special for those who happen to wander in. Make a point of doing so for this summer's exhibit, The Ramayana: Love and Valour in India's Great Epic, which takes the narrative potential of the museum show and runs with it. Walking through the exhibit is an experience in storytelling -- is, in fact,......

Yet another reason our love runs deep for literary London: this happy little subculture is as diverse as the city itself. On offer this week is an eclectic mixture ranging from an Asian literature festival, to a panel discussion of the utility of creative writing courses, to a talk with a well-known American memoirist. As always, the difficulty is in choosing which events we just can’t bear to miss. Monday: Blame last week’s summer-like......

Not content with their squat parties and countryside raves, it seems Britain’s army of hormonal teens have now moved in on our national library. According to a number of novelists and academics, feral undergraduates are apparently abusing those most hallowed seats of learning, the reading rooms of the British Library, by texting, flirting and … high-fiving. "There’s loads of people dressing like they’re in an episode of 'Skins' and high-fiving each other," says Matt......

There's masses going on for us culture vultures to choose from this week. First Thursdays As it's the start of March, it's First Thursdays this week. More than 80 galleries and museums will be open til 9pm across East London. We recommend John Squire's (yes, him from the Stone Roses) Re-engineered Garments; alternatively, pretend you're an alien at the Barbican. The Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art opens this Thursday. East is East East London's......

Massive Attack to curate Meltdown London flood resilience to be tested East London super-church for KICC turned down Bloomsbury insider archive goes on display at the British Library Camden Market reopens in time for the weekend - London urged to rally round traders Image courtesy of Orhan via the Londonist flickr group.......

Congratulations – you can read! (Presumably. Unless you just look at Londonist for the pictures.) Literacy is sexy. Hyper-literacy, even sexier. Or so we at Londonist tell ourselves as we don our Coke-bottle glasses and curl up each night with a bottle of wine and a dictionary. But enough about our steamy Valentine’s Day plans. What have you got planned? Now, you may have inferred that we’re a jaded lot over here at Londonist.......

Every day this month the Londonist team will be pointing you in the direction of a Christmas present that (with a bit of luck) you won't already have on your list. Climb up onto our collective lap and we'll see what we can move from our sack to your stockings... It seems that everywhere we’ve gone recently, we’ve had the opportunity to buy environment-friendly souvenir and decorative tote bags. Gone are the days when......

Every day this month the Londonist team will be pointing you in the direction of a Christmas present that (with a bit of luck) you won't already have on your list. Climb up onto our collective lap and we'll see what we can move from our sack to your stockings... We recommended memberships to various arty places as Christmas presents earlier this week, but in terms of things you can wrap and place under......

Yesterday comes the news that a shiny new medical centre is to be built on wasteland somewhere behind the British Library….and today sees the start of the more-or-less obligatory protests therein. The idea is to build the £500 million ‘UK Centre for Medical Research and Innovation’ as a partnership project – the key players are the Medical Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, Cancer Research UK and University College Hospital. All very exciting. London could do......

Ahoy hoy, book grocery shoppers! The metaphorical book grocer aisles are stocked high with choice meats and sweet confections this December, so whatever your tastes, fill up your shopping cart and gorge yourself on this week’s selection of literary events – they’ll give you much less of a stomach-ache than mince pies. Monday: Revisit Sylvia Plath by attending the aptly named Sylvia Plath Revisited, at the ICA (7pm in the Nash Room £10 nonmembers/£9......

Unless there were leaves on the line, not enough station staff, delays at Paris holding everything up or industrial action on either side of the Channel, the first Eurostar train should be pulling into its new station at St Pancras this morning. We've had a sneak preview of what it's like and have been terribly excited about it so far, and at last, today, we get to see it in its full glory. We......

The British Library is a great place to hang out. Even if you have no cause to go into the reading rooms to request any book ever published, there are an array of good talks and exhibitions to see, a fine gift shop that sell natty oystercard holders and we once saw Jeremy Paxman in the cafe. (We, of course, cannot guarantee that you'll see a member of the Newsnight team, we don't know......

Here's Newton, outside the British Library, contemplating how every action has an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, 'splash back'. Please, please, please, send in some of your own distorted images of the capital to londonist at gmail dot com.......

Not that kind of constable, though if all missing policemen stories ended this nicely, the world would be a nicer place. A sketch by the artist John Constable, the man behind the famous Salisbury Cathedral painting, has been found after assumed missing for the last 111 years. Constable's grandson sold the sketch of Hyam Church, Suffolk back in 1896 and scholars have been unable to locate the sketch since the Christie's sale. But -......

Huge hangover? Spent all of your money? Yep, us too. So we can't go and watch Barbara Streisand (though we don't think we'll ever be that rich) and we can't go and see Elling. But, here's a few things you can do this week to make things a little easier on your pocket. Monday: Been a while since you've seen a good film? Then the Canary Wharf Summer Series at Canada Square park should......

Well, the big man’s in town – over thirty times – so we thought it apt to track down his other work in the capital. On the map at the bottom, green points indicate temporary installations that form the Event Horizon project, and purple markers are permanent pieces that predate this show. 1. Quantum Cloud, Greenwich Peninsula Did you know that London contains a Gormley sculpture taller than the Angel of the North? Quantum Cloud......

>>Before we begin, a small non-profit Theatre group is looking for a free rehearsal space one night a week. Email bookgrocer@gmail.com if you can help or know of any good sized rooms (church halls, pub back rooms, community art centres), the more central the betterFresh this Week: Thursday - it’s not quite a weeknight (Casual Fridays opens up new hangover opportunities; wear a wide brimmed hat to work and no-one will notice) however its......

In Next Week: Next Wednesday the winner of the Rossica Prize, awarded every other year for excellence in literary translation from Russian into English, is announced after readings from the short-listed translations. This year’s submissions include texts ranging from the 19th to the 21st century, from Tolstoy's War and Peace to Ismailov's The Railway - our Russian is a bit rusty but хорошее везение к каждому... 23 May at 7pm, £6, The London Review......

When Londonist originally heard that the Dead Sea Scrolls were being exhibited in London, an erroneous verbal concatenation took place which caused the communication to appear as, 'Dead Seascrolls'. We were curious – what are these Seascrolls? Are they washed-up aquatic behemoths, heaving their last sigh on some obscure Russian beach, causing the locals to run away, gasping in horror at nature's lost son? No. They’re not that. The Dead Sea Scrolls are a......

Email. Who could live without it these days? Well, according to the World Internet Usage Stats more people than you might think! Only 40% of Europe is online and only a measly 4% of Africa. The latter stat is shocking when you count up all the scam emails that we receive every day promising us untold wealth through lottery wins, letting money "rest" in our accounts and righting the monetary wrongs of evil dictatorships.......

This Day In London’s History 1826: The founders of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL) hold their first meeting. In 1824 Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles, founder of the city of Singapore, returned to England in poor health. After a period of convalescence in Cheltenham he moved to London and turned his attention to establishing a ‘learned society’ for the purpose of studying animals. On 26th February 1826 he held the society’s first meeting, with......

Congratulations to Stef Penney on winning the Whitbread Costa book of the year prize. Her novel, 'The Tenderness of Wolves' set in northern Canada in the 1860s was written and researched at the British Library. Walworth is not the best place to buy cosmetics unless you're a sucker for side effects. West Ham have been told they can't play in the new Olympic stadium. Iron Maiden will not be pleased. And bad news too......

Windows Vista was launched in the UK today and Bill Gates was on hand to put the operating system through its paces at the British Library Full press release here, but this was the part that caught our eye: Bill Gates and Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library, also announced the digital reunification of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. The two notebooks, known as the Codices, are owned by the British Library (Codex......

The words 'sublimely beautiful' and 'Euston Road' seldom decorate the same sentence, but here goes... Walk past the Wellcome Trust's HQ on Euston Road for this sublimely beautiful window display, and learn some science at the same time. The eyecatching fluorescent baubels, by designers Graphic Thought Facility, represent the structures of several proteins implicated in human disease. The rogues' gallery includes: leptin, a small protein that can cause obesity if it gets mangled; PPWD1,......

This Day In London’s History 1759: The British Museum in Bloomsbury opens its doors to the public for the first time. Some may feel that the British Museum these days is little more than a massive boast, bragging about how many cool things the British Empire has stolen from the rest of the world. But regardless of whether this criticism is fair or not, it’s hard to deny that the museum is still one......

This year is the 250th birthday of poet / illustrator / philosopher William Blake. Blake was born 28 November,1757 at 28a Broad Street, Golden Square, London. The British Library, to celebrate the anniversary, have put on display one of Blake's notebooks in which he wrote one of his most famous poems, "The Tyger". You know the one: "Tyger, tyger burning bright In the forests of the night I spelled it wrong. Tough crap for......

A Guardian journalist explores life inside the BNP. A rare recording of a Christmas carol has been found in The British Library. Two men have been jailed for robbing and spray-painting another man. Does London have too many musicals? And finally, Monica Lewinsky has stayed away from London's social scene and graduated from LSE. Photo taken from Nick Gray's photostream.......