It wasn't so long ago we were discussing the ease of scoring Es and whizz in Croydon. Perhaps stung into action by such reports, it appears that Croydon council are getting tough. They've invoked anti-terror legislation, in the form of the RIPA, six times in the past 12 months for offenses such as illegal trading and fly-tipping. RIPA, for those who don't follow the ever arcane activities of our increasingly Orwellian society, is the......

You can get packed into a club playing bad techno any weekend, but it’s not often that you get to party like it’s 1859. Saturday’s White Mischief, themed “From The Earth To The Moon”, was an evening envisioning the future as the Victorians imagined it (well before George Orwell came along and scared the crap out of us). The crowd was split between those in standard club dress and those who went all out......

An occasional column on the forces behind the capital’s economy. Potemkin, a Russian-themed vodka bar on Clerkenwell Road, has unveiled an intriguing set of five cocktails whose recipes will be tied to stock prices. It’s not an entirely new idea. We (barely) remember a night at the Dax bar in Hannover, and there’s the near-famous Dow Jones in Barcelona. The twist this time around is that Potemkin will adjust the alcohol content of its drinks......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 30th July 1966: England defeat West Germany in the FIFA World Cup Final at Wembley Stadium, claiming the Jules Rimet Trophy (and, of course, the status of Football World Champions for the next four years). Tuesday – 31st July 1962: Violence erupts at a rally of the Union Movement (formerly known as the British Union of Fascists) in Dalston, East London. Sir Oswald Mosely, leader of the......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you'd like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Wednesday The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghoutir has fourteen books under his belt and has been described by Edward Said as “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement we now have”. Tonight Barghouti will give a talk on the nature of exile, read his poetry (in English) and a short extract from I......

This day in London’s History 1966: Arrests at Vietnam Rally in Grosvenor Square. Some 4000 people gathered to protest against the Vietnam war and things turned violent as scuffles broke out at the demonstration outside the US Embassy. The general secretary of the Communist Party, John Gollan, asked demonstrators to call it a day, but instead they knocked a police officer from his motorbike and set fire to petrol that leaked from the bike. This......

Today's Media Guardian carries a nicely detailed article on the redevelopment of Broadcasting House. As with most architectural projects in the capital the BBC's plans have been beset with problems right from the start, with the latest stories in May claiming that the whole thing was 11 months behind schedule and £7m over budget. However, chief operating officer John Smith is now promising that the project will come in under budget by about £8m......

We might be a little late coming to this one, but if we are it's because we haven't really seen it advertised anywhere. And if we haven't seen it then that might mean you haven't seen it, and that means you might be missing out...shall we just get on and tell you what it is now? Travelex (you know: the world's largest non-bank provider of commercial foreign exchange services) have launched a deal in......