The police have their work cut out investigating knife crime and youth violence these days so we imagine they're not best pleased at having to track down the gang of 3 teens who eschewed blades in their pursuit of cheap and mindless 'entertainment' and instead indulged in some light felinicide, throwing poor puss Kilo, a former resident of Battersea and recently adopted by HMS Belfast as ship's cat, overboard into the drink. Police have......

Private funder of Olympic athletes village, Lend Lease, having trouble getting a wee loan Tube cleaners to strike over living wage campaign Campbell gets community service for T5 lost luggage strop Mr Catt loses cattery Wimbledon starts on Monday and tennis fans rejoice as London's just bagged the Masters Cup for 2009 too Image of Woolwich Fire Clouds courtesy of Short Sharp Shot via the Londonist flickr group.......

With the impending financial crunch staring us down and cautioning a wiser approach to spending, it's good to know that the moneyed Londoner still has ample opportunity to disgorge his or her cash on the finer things. Case in point: a Sloane Square department store is selling cat-excreted coffee for £50 a cup. Customers at Peter Jones can now sample Caffe Raro, a blend of Jamaican Blue Mountain and Kopi Luwak beans that is......

Battersea Dogs and Cats Home are doing it again; tugging at our heartstrings with a soppy face, melting brown eyes, greying fur and eager to please expression... yes, it's Neil Morrissey - him of Men Behaving Badly infamy - fronting the dogs home's latest adopt a dog campaign. Morrissey led a mass dog walk at the weekend with his own cute rescue pup, Tiggy, to raise awareness of the tragic number of pooches that......

34. Phantom Assailants: Part Four Continued from episode 31… The London cat-rippings of 1998 continued into 1999. Even more bizarre was the RSPCA voice that stated, after several months of methodical research into the strange deaths, that vehicles were to blame! An inspector analysing the decapitations claimed that foxes, badgers and dogs had also been the cause, although I’m unaware of any animal native to England that kills in such a fashion. The vehicle......

31. Phantom Assailants: Part Three The last two episodes of the Strangeness have concentrated on bizarre and elusive individuals who have slashed their way into folklore. This third instalment in the mini-series continues the thread except that the victims have been domestic cats! 1998 was a very grisly year throughout the city with regards to frequent mysterious moggie murders, by way of decapitation and tail removal. Forty cats had turned up in eight months......

There are lots of feral cats on the Olympics site that are at risk of being killed There was a gas leak in Hammersmith today You can use your mobile phone as an Oyster card It is possible to have too many pens and pencils There aren't enough midwives in London Image courtesy of DB007 via the Londonist flickr group.......

Here’s what we learned this weekend, whilst you were drawing up your Christmas card lists (or crossing people off them): It’s been a bad weekend for London’s performers, with even the ROH being dissed, and one band getting the worst review this Londonista has ever seen. But it has been a great couple of days for pussy cats, with three of them being rescued from a derelict flat, and another being turned into a......

Londonist asks that most pressing of daily concerns: where to go on your lunch break. Seven Stars 53-54 Carey St WC2A 2JB Nearest Tube: Chancery Lane, Temple 0207 242 8521 11am-11pm (Monday-Friday) 12pm-11pm (Saturday) 12pm-10:30pm (Sunday) Map Expect to Pay: £10 or slightly more for mains Rating: 9.5 out of 10 This week’s What’s for Lunch? finds us back in the pub. And, considering we’re nestled in and having a scrummy meal across from......

Londonist spent all of its money this week getting drunk at its 3rd birthday party. Hopefully, you were one of the many people who decided to join us. As a thank you, London On The Cheap is back (hurrah!) showing you what fun and fabulous free stuff you can entertain yourselves with next week: Sunday: We had an extra hour today so you get an extra day of news from us. Out to Lunch......

Or, stuff you think about London that's true but is actually rubbish. 2. Dick Whittington and his cat. Everyone enjoys a good story. Especially one with a happy ending, interesting characters and familiar friends. Well this Londonista was a bit shocked and annoyed to discover that Dick Whittington's cat was completely made up. Well, that is to say there's no evidence to show it ever existed. For those of you who can't remember, let......

18. The Cheetah Of Shooter's Hill Over the years many ‘flaps’ of ‘big cat’ sightings have hit the headlines, from the so-called ‘beasts’ of Exmoor and Bodmin, to the more recent Bluewater leopard Bexley ‘big cat’. However in south-east London during the early 1960s, the Shooter’s Hill ‘cheetah’ scare was on everyone’s lips – back during a time when such cats were considered extremely mythical and were often misunderstood and wrongly identified, but were......

Fundraising events, for whatever cause, should always try to be novel and attention grabbing if they're going to reap the quids in. Londonist keeps up with the best of them. Lately, we've had the vet in a dog bowl, the bunny rabbit taxi and bid for a date girl. All excellent ideas to varying degrees. However, we've yet to come across a scheme that beats "Beards for Battersea". Yes, staff and volunteers from Battersea......

It's been a busy week for London's fire fighters. They've been rescuing plastic owls, and now they're demolishing homes in order to rescue trapped cats. Oh, and they're probably putting out fires as well. A family in Chingford called fire fighters and the RSPCA in to rescue their cat, thirteen year old Patsy, who somehow managed to get trapped in a three inch gap in the walls. Patsy's owner, Jenny Coates, called in help......

Seattlest has a talk with the photographer from last week's "Segway Mom" and then experiences some dissension in the ranks over the question of wine vs. beer. It's not West Side Story, but about as close as they'll get. They're also still waiting on some inbox relief after a spammer is arrested. As Chicagoist counts down the days to its third anniversary party, they found all-organic pizza to be underwhelming amidst the hoopla, tried......

3. Animal apparitions Last week, we tackled spectral dog stories from around London. But animal apparitions are not exclusively of the canine persuasion. Animal spirits are often considered harbingers of doom, omens of misfortune, eerie forewarnings to a coming tragedy. Here, in the first of a two-parter, we round-up some of the London’s phantom fauna: Birds – at West Drayton, 1883, a large, black bird, resembling a raven, haunted the local churchyard. Locals considered......

“With any luck, they also eat squirrels and tiny, annoying dogs.” So said AlyxL, commenting on our earlier post about big cats. Well AlyxL, if that is your real name, it really doesn’t matter. We have occasionally popular performance artist Mark McGowan to act in that capacity. The serial stunt-puller ate a corgi live on Resonance FM last night. (By ‘live’, we really hope the Metro is talking in the broadcasting sense.) McGowan, whose......

First there was the Surrey puma, and then there was the Shooters Hill Cheetah. The millennium brought us the Beast of Bexley, and now almost every borough seems to have its own salivating, Baskerville-esque so-called “beast”. This week has seen the second sighting in as many weeks of the Beast of Ongar, described as being “about the size of a Labrador”, “like a Panther”, and definitely “not a little tabby cat”. However, as Londonist......

We read this yesterday and went from outrage to horror, to reassured to uneasy, to gobsmacked to grossed out within minutes. Umm. Well. Let's take it from the top... Ricardo Byfield, 27, and Lisa Harvey, 34, were in Acton Magistrates court recently both pleading guilty to owning and breeding banned dogs. 26 dogs were found in the pair's one bedroom maisonette in Northolt, 21 of those were pitbull terriers - that's not very good.......

File this one under 'what the f*ck'. Hello. Please introduce yourselves, and your cause. We're the London Urban Ironing Collective. Our parents were diagnosed with Cancer in December 2006, so we decided to raise money for Cancer Research UK using the medium of ironing. We're asking Londoners to suggest well known locations where they'd like to see us carrying out Textile Crease Management (TCM). They donate money to Cancer Research UK on our website. make......

Musicals: Love them or hate them, if you're anywhere near The West End you really can't avoid them. Usually, this particular Londonista is a bit sceptical about them. That was, until The Drowsy Chaperone came to town. At least it doesn't have talking bleedin' cats in it. Yes, it's cheesy, it's a bit clichéd and it's very camp. And this is why it's so good. But this musical isn't overly over the top. It......

The nicer the weather gets, the busier we get across the Ist-A-Verse. But we like being busy. Here's a peek at what we've been up to since last week! Chicagoist had an interview with Audrey Niffenegger, whose popular book, The Time Traveler's Wife, was based in their fine city. They also had a heated discussion about Rush Limbaugh's controversial Barack Obama parody, talked about whether Uncle Julio's Hacienda is a good place to get......

Rumours are afoot that Chelsea are going to move to a super stadium A foul-mouthed West Ham fan has been banned from attending matches Elvish gimpboy Orlando Bloom is to appear in the West End. The LA Times writes about London's cats Image courtesy of BCseventyseven via the Londonist flickr group.......

At the turn of the millennium, the ‘beast’ of Bexley was born, a headline created by the London press. It was an inaccuracy, a contradiction and a conundrum. A large, seemingly exotic cat fuelled the imagination of the public, evaded the pursuing police, and stirred the sceptics. Something from legend prowling the open spaces, the back gardens of this bustling city? Surely not! However, the sceptics, the press and the police were completely wrong......

In a piece of late Friday afternoon no-newsness yesterday the BBC reported the terrifying findings of a Defra security inspection of London Zoo: "Tigers and lions kept at the zoo could leap over the 6ft-high perimeter fence if they escaped from their enclosures." Argh! Forget the BoB. This is where this shit gets real. Lions and tigers (and bears)… loose in Regents Park…. Oh my! Of course, the ‘could’ and the ‘if’ and the......

The Beast of Bexley has been spotted again… … this time carrying off a bloodied, wailing infant in its foul, be-slavered jaws. Not really. But that would be really cool, wouldn't it? Or rather, no, that would be terrible and tragic and cause for sorrow. Is "be-slavered" a real word? No one can say for sure who or what the Beast of Bexley is, but two facts are undisputed: 1.) it has been seen......

We loved a lot of things about Children of Men (Michael Caine mostly), but also appreciated the little touches that were just futuristic enough to let us know that this wasn't the here and now. Yet it was certainly a London firmly grounded in today's culture and politics as seen through things like the LCD screened bus advertising and TV spots. Just glimpsed long enough these little snippets of media helped to create the......

Punky has come home. Six years ago, Punky the Cat walked out the flap of his New Malden home, saying "Just going up the top for a pack of fags," and then vanished without a trace. Humans Maffelda and Bill Hay, under whose roof Punky had dwelt, had given up all hope for his return. But Punky has returned - older, rough around the edges, and virtually deaf - but he has returned. Maffelda,......

So the police have a suspect in custody for the recent spate of letter bombs: A primary school caretaker has been arrested in connection with the recent spate of letter bomb attacks. Miles Cooper, who is in his 20s, was arrested at a house in Cherry Hinton, near Cambridge. Police will finish searching the school where he works on Tuesday and expect to spend several days searching the house. But the postal system being......

On Saturday we did something a little bit special. We held the first ever Londonist guided walk, and we're happy to report that it was something of a success. We and around thirty of the Londonist readers assembled in Hay's Galleria and fell into line under the guidance of Chris Roberts. We couldn't have been in better hands as Chris took us on a meandering two hour romp through London's history. Best of all......