Boris Johnson this morning unveiled a mock-up of the new "S" stock trains being constructed for the Metropolitan, Circle, District and Hammersmith & City lines. Boasting more spacious interiors and easier movement between carriages, the main bragging point is that the trains will feature air conditioning, a first for the Underground. Sweltering Victoria line commuters, don't get your hopes up - these shallow, cut-and-cover lines make a/c much easier, though TfL claims to be working......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 8th September 1915: During the first bombing raid on London of the First World War, a Zeppelin drops incendiary bombs near Fenchurch Street. Tuesday – 9th September 1960: Hugh John Mungo Grant is born in Hammersmith. He would become a well-recognised film actor and producer. Wednesday – 10th September 1973: IRA bombs explode at King’s Cross and Euston mainline stations, injuring 13 people. Witnesses describe a teenager......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 14th July 1824: On a state visit to London, King Kamehameha II of Hawaii dies of measles. Tuesday – 15th July 1966: A ‘colour bar’ at Euston Station, preventing black people from holding positions where they might come into contact with members of the public, is overturned. Wednesday – 16th July 1924: Crowds of photographers, reporters and ‘autograph seekers’ greet the pilots of the first (successful) round-the-world......

School of Language is out this summer touring the UK and is making a stop in London tonight. The current focus of Field Music's David Brewis will be making an appearance at the once-monthly club night Tapestry at the St Aloysius Social Club near Euston. School of Language will be breaking up an evening of rock, disco, and soul records with his layered experimental pop. Expect some well catchy tunes full of laptop loops,......

Booze might now be banned on public transport, but that doesn't stop us getting trolleyed in the stations. The Betjeman Arms recently opened at St Pancras, bringing a much-needed touch of class to London's catalogue of terminus taprooms. To celebrate, we decided to go on a campaign for rail ale. Despite objections from our livers and serious renal remonstrance, we spent last Saturday working our way though a laevorotatory pub crawl of the major......

Nathan Horton: Controlled Explosion Number 2 Last time we talked about St Pancras Crypt, we were considering buying a London Borough. This week, the tone was rather more sombre with a group show, Responses to Conflict and Loss installed in these meditative, subterranean vaults. The Crypt is nigh on perfect for this sort of show. Its damp, fusty smelling waft and many vaulted rooms, nooks and crannies, with displaced gravestones lying around and family tombs......

Green Apples by Mark Bruce courtesy of The Place Spring Loaded is The Place's annual festival of fresh contemporary dance. We enthused about the opening show, Probe's Magpie, and we weren't disappointed (it was ace - so different and diverse and frankly, smoking hot and funny). Now the season is coming to a close and we're inclined to highlight a couple of gems that are ideal for popping along to on these gorgeously, light and......

In the late 90s, I knew a bloke who cut up an A-Z, and wallpapered the hall of his flat with the pages. It was great for checking where you were headed before popping out to meet someone. Artist Stephen Walter's gone a step further, drawing his own, unique, geographically accurate version of London. The Island: London Series is a graphite drawing of our fair city comprised of cartoon-ish buildings, signposts, historical details and quirky......

If the Guardian hadn't given Will Hodgkinson £5000 to start a record label then Londonist wouldn't be spending Friday night in a folk club in Euston. But we're here for the album launch of Rosemarie, the debut long-player from new young folkers, Thistletown. Strangely the place does not fully resemble a hive of outcasts from The Wicker Man: bristling beards and woolly jumpers, curling tresses and flowing dresses. There are day we say it,......

Always seeking to bring you new, challenging and unpredictable cultural things to do, here's the first contemporary dance suggestion of the year. Take your chances with brand new dance at Resolution! - The Place's annual season of have-a-go dance heroes trying to make their mark. That's 117 companies in 7 weeks. The joy and frustration of Resolution! is that each night's triple bill is pretty much pot luck. You might get something middling to......

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......

Euston is chosen as the site for a shiny new medical research centre. Heads involved in the Menezes case have started to roll. The results of the mayor’s latest jolly - freebies for Indian businessmen. Hospitals in South London not as clean as they should be. This time it’s dirty instruments. Where there’s a will, there’s not always a way. The government likes the Tate. The mayor’s equality dude is under investigation. Londonist is......

You may remember that we're not exactly lukewarm about this place. We were even up for finding love here. I guess you could say we're fans. Nothing has changed with a change in exhibition: Sleeping and Dreaming is marvellous and you must go. For a start, it's free. Nought pee. You can just swan through the doors, turn left and there you are. But that's where it gets dark and you immediately start watching......

A week after opening for the Queen, St Pancras International is finally ready for the likes of us. The station has been restored beyond its former glory. Britain's answer to Central Station is ready for business. Everyone knows by now that the sumptious Euston Road frontage to the station was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. But what else in London did the Great Scott design? Time to dust off our old 'Stalks' series,......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 29th October 1986: The M25 ‘London orbital’ motorway is officially opened by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, at a ceremony at the last section to be completed (junctions 22 and 23 in Hertfordshire). Tuesday – 30th October 1883: A group known as the Fenian Dynamiters detonates a bomb on the Metropolitan Railway, injuring 62 people. Wednesday – 31st October 1971: An IRA bomb explodes on the 33rd floor......

Antony Gormley continues his conquest of our town with this, his first piece of artwork in the City of London. 'Resolution' can be found on the corner of Shoe Lane and St Bride Street - an area surrounded by construction work. Gormley describes the piece: "Seen from afar it looks like a man, from close up it looks like a city. It is wonderful to be able to site a work that interacts with......

We think Josie Long is magic. Like, properly magic. With spells and prestidigitation and conjuration and that. This is the only way we can explain how she is able to perform to sell-out crowds at a venue as large at The Bloomsbury Theatre, but still totally capture the spirit, warmth, friendliness and intimacy of a small, lo-fi indie comedy gig. When we saw her earlier this year at Stewart Lee's fund-raiser to release a......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 10th September 1973: IRA bombs explode at King’s Cross and Euston mainline stations, injuring 13 people. Witnesses describe a teenager planting the first bomb by throwing it into the crowded ticket hall at King’s Cross. Tuesday – 11th September 1980: Armed robbers steal almost £1.5m worth of diamonds from a jewellery shop in Knightsbridge, west London. The haul includes a famous stone known as the Marlborough Diamond,......

While the newspapers and press agencies get their knickers in a twist over coverage conditions for the Rugby World Cup which kicks off in the Stade de France tonight, we're turning our attention to a more pressing issue. Which are the best London pubs to watch the tournament in? Several of the big chains are promising full coverage: It's a Scream, O'Neills, Pitcher & Piano and Walkabout. However, what's the more discerning and individual......

"Touch Wood" can't help but make us think of that charming metaphor "touching cloth". Childish, we know, but considering it's meant to be a direct and reference to a superstitious gesture intended to ensure whatever you've just been talking about doesn't go tits up, perhaps the subtext is also appropriate for those with anxious dispositions. Touch Wood is a season of brand new dance, most of which hasn't been created at the time of......

Gravity-defying demolition in the City (site of the Cheesegrater). SkyscraperCity had this covered back in March. Euston rush hour stabbing. A place in London where a 3-bedroom house costs less than £200K? Surely not. 100,000 evangelical Christians to attend concerts. West London tram looking unlikely. Image courtesy of Gary_Foulger via Flickr.......

It's not the first place you would think of when looking for love but for those with a questing heart, the place to go is Euston Road. art2heart is the dating organisation that aims to bring people together through art and culture. The idea is both lofty and lovely: each month, 150 people, sometimes more, gather for monthly art2heart events held at prestigious museums or galleries where art can be admired and discussed with......

This new space for science, arts and medicine isn’t yet on everyone’s cultural radar. It will be soon. The Wellcome Collection was opened yesterday by James Watson, the giant of science who co-discovered the structure of DNA. Watson said that we Brits ‘should be proud’ to boast such a centre, lambasting the rest of Europe and particularly the USA for lacking decent public science venues. And it really is a treasure. Three galleries chart......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 18th June 1972: A British European Airways plane bound for Brussels crashes moments after taking off from Heathrow airport, killing all 118 passengers. An inquiry later concludes that the pilot had made a ‘speed error’ and stalled the plane, causing it to crash into a field in Staines. Tuesday – 19th June 1997: McDonald’s wins a libel case against two members of the ‘London Greenpeace’ campaigning group.......

Like an invisible web of impossibly magic pockets of the internet hovering in London’s heavens, weird and wonderful WiFi proliferates enabling us tech-savvy, laptop bearing citizens to maintain our social networking and blog addictions pretty much 24/7. Unsurprising news, then, that wireless networks in London have almost trebled in the last year. We’re outstripping New York and Paris with the rate of growth of our WiFi hotzone with public access hot spots up by......

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......

Are you ready for a season of fresh dance by young and hip UK based choreographers whose work is “confident, idiosyncratic and unconfined by technical dogma”? Erm…. Quite, but if we run this through the arts bullshit translator we estimate it means there will be bold new dance stuff that’s quirky, funky, artistically interesting, will make you think and be top notch although possibly a bit odd. Fundamentally, it will involve people moving about......

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 1890: Public opening of the world’s first ‘deep-level’ electric tube line, running between Stockwell and King William Street. Although the Metropolitan and Metropolitan District Railways had opened several underground tube lines since 1863, these were relatively shallow ‘cut-and-cover’-type lines. Following advances in tunnelling techniques later in the century, it became possible to construct much deeper lines, and the City & South London Railway was opened to the public on......

Bloomsbury might become the place to relax after a heavy shopping session in town, if new proposals go ahead. Plans are being put forward to Camden Council to pedestrianise the Bloomsbury area and evoke its old free-roaming Bohemian spirit. The constant sound of drilling, and building works isn't conducive to a gentle autumnal ramble and academic chatter. And for most non-student Londoners who are coming into the West End on a bus, the area......