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......

Speaking of property, rumours are circulating that the Fitrovian telecoms stick could be transformed into a boutique hotel. Not the beanpole part, but the bulky base areas. BT have appointed a team of designers to look into the concept, reports the Times, picking up on a subscription-only piece in the Estates Gazette. In addition, the famous rotating restaurant could become a public space for the first time since a bomb attack in 1971. If......

The Hangar Lane Gyratory has been given the dubious honour of being named Britain’s scariest road junction. In fact London claims 3 of the 4 top adrenalin-fuelled traffic experiences in the country, with Marble Arch and the Elephant and Castle coming 3rd and 4th on the list. Londonist begs to differ, slightly. Hangar Lane is, admittedly, a teensy bit petrifying on the first or even second encounter, but once you understand what it is there......

All cars must pay the congestion charge if they enter the congestion zone. That's £8 a day unless you are driving a taxi, a police car or one of those little buggies that runs on jam. Of course, Londonist sidesteps having to pay the charge by bounding around the city on the back of a giant mechanical deer. However, a number of enterprising individuals are registering their cars as taxi cabs in order to......

Greenwich Indoor Market is fab. There's nothing more enjoyable than a stroll around all the little stalls on a Sunday. Thankfully, plans to knock it down and turn it into flats were scuppered after public out cry (no shock there then). But new plans have been uncovered to revamp it and keep the locals happy. Hopefully, this means that the market will get a nice new roof, and the possibility to open all week......

London has as many hotel projects underway as the whole of Spain and five times as many as the second busiest city in Europe in terms of hotel development, Moscow. Surprising, innit? This is the opening message of the latest temporary exhibition at New London Architecture, that wonderful and free gallery on Store Street. By focusing on just one building type, Away From Home - New Hotels in London reminds us of the huge......

Head East out of London, about as far East as you can go without falling in the water, and you will hit the sprawling conurbation known mostly as Southend-on-Sea. Most of us have been there at some stage. Whether it’s to feed the slot machines and dig holes in the beach, or to go a-cruisin’ and a-clubbin’, it has for nearly two centuries been a playground for East Londoners. And it is furthermore one......

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......

This weekend the police raided FIRE, London's biggest gay club - and closed it under the Misue of Drugs Act. The threat of kicking off a Stonewall Riot in the Vauxhall area seemed to have been averted by police tactics of, er, handing out small leaflets and treating all the presumably wide-eyed clubbers rather gently - and with perhaps a wry smile on their faces. This was also perhaps helped by cramming Vauxhall with......

It's the oldest trick in the book: go to a fancy restaurant. Order an enormous, sumptuous meal. Eat it with relish. Leave a small amount of food on your plate (perhaps the uninspiring salad garnish or other bit of the meal that didn't interest you). Add to it a dead cockroach you brought with you. Call management and complain loudly; threaten to take the restaurant to court for poor hygiene standards. Back down graciously......

The TV licence fee is going up by £20. Boo. Will 2007 be the year of the London BnB? A two year old boy died in Kentish Town in yesterday's storms. The full London Lord of the Rings cast has been announced. And a Vietnamese boyband sensation are heading to London. Woo. Photo taken from Fabbio's photostream.......

Do you know your Sexual Orientation Regulations? Sounds like they should involve a spinning bottle and a Twister mat, but it turns out they simply ensure that gay people get the same rights as everyone else. Opposition to them was quashed despite yesterday's protest: New rules outlawing businesses from discriminating against homosexuals have been upheld in the House of Lords. A challenge led by Lord Morrow of the Democratic Unionist Party failed by a......

Wandsworth Council have given consent to six planning applications and one variation concerning detailed designs for one of our favourite lump of bricks - the Battersea Power Station: These consents, representing a total area of 4.5 million sq ft mean that, for the first time, the project can now move forward towards the construction stage and leasing programme. Victor Hwang, President of Parkview International explains why it's taken so long to get this far:......

Do you know roughly how many black cabs there are in the city? About 21,000. How do we know this? Well we just read this article on carmaker Manganese Bronze's decision to begin production of the black cab in eastern China. The venture "will increase the appeal of our iconic vehicle around the world", chairman Tim Melville-Ross said in a joint statement announcing the news. The deal has no implications for the future of......

An 80-year-old Blackheath woman who fell and broke her neck when the bus she was travelling on stopped suddenly, has died in hospital. Apparently "figures in London show a rise in robbery and other offences around the time of Halloween" so this year the Hallo-hoodies are going to get cracked down on. The late Princess Margaret allegedly enjoyed extra-marital one-night stands in London hotels. Kevin Spacey has waived his fee as the artistic director......

"Euston station," he said. "The only place where one is allowed to rest in comparative peace and comfort, free of charge." In his Collected Memoirs, the English writer and dandy, Julian Maclaren-Ross (1912-64), writes of nights spent sleeping in a variety of exotic venues in central London and environs (Turkish Baths, police station cells, railway station waiting rooms), whenever he was frequently hard-up or down-and-out. That was in the 1940s; a world now gone. In......

There's the rest of today, all of tomorrow and all of Saturday. That's a little over two days to brace yourself and exercise your mental defences. When the clock strikes midnight and it officially becomes Sunday 26th March... that's it. It's going to be Mother's Day. Aren't mums lovely? That special lady who brought you into the world and looked after you, stayed up all night worrying and watching over you when you were......

There's a lot of WiFi buzz going on at the moment. First the Square Mile gets plugged in and 350,000 workers are able get online without hassle (that's the first first time we've ever been jelaous of city types). Then the Beeb run an article getting all excited about wirless and predicting that soon the net will become "ubiquitous like power and water." Last week even the Thames went wireless; and today we hear......

That's a confusing headline isn't it? What we mean is that Mick Jagger, who has apparently "been living out of hotels for the past few years" is thought to be finally settling down with his girlfriend L'Wren Scott (pictured). According to the online gossip the couple have been scouring west London for "plush Victorian houses": The properties the pair have viewed range from £2 million to £6.5 million in price. Most of the swanky......

Things are a-brewing on the South Bank. The proposed Beetham Tower, AKA 1 Blackfriars Road, AKA The Boomerang, looks like it’s found a major occupant. But a substantial redesign will also be necessary. The 68 gleaming stories will rival the nearby Shard in elegance and stature, while its bizarre pregnant bulge renders the design both original and iconic. Or at least that was the plan. Now, several elements, including that bulge, have been criticised......

No progress on the New Year's strikes, with the RMT refusing to attend talks with LU (although the Times seems hopeful.) Ken has said "A strike will do nothing other than spoil a great night out for hundreds of thousands of Londoners." Some 'good' tube news: the Jubilee line reopens today, two days ahead of schedule. A study has shown that there are currently only four hotels within a mile of the major 2012 venues.......

The Charity Commission has announced that it's to launch its third investigation into George Galloway's now infamous Mariam Appeal. The Mariam campaign was founded by Galloway back in 1998 in order to "to campaign against sanctions on Iraq which are having disastrous effects on the ordinary people of Iraq," but the fund became the centre of controversy in 2003 when Galloway's somewhat extravagent travel arrangements (luxury hotels, champagne, caviar... those massive cigars he likes......

I'm finding it rather hard to imagine a perfect Sunday right now. This is because today has been a rather imperfect Sunday, with the majority of it being spent on a stuffy National Express coach travelling from Leeds back down to London. I arrived home, only to find that the bunker in which the computer resides is experiencing below-zero temperatures, because someone who shall go unnamed forgot to leave the heating on. Honestly, you......

- Police think that the killers of WPc Sharon Beshenivsky may be part of a gang responsible for robberies across London. - The Nigerian state governor charged with money laundering has skipped bail in London and escaped to his home state and "a triumphant welcome". - New German Chancellor Angela Merkel will be visiting London on Thursday as part of a European tour. - London hospitals are transferring patients to four star hotels because its......

In today's New York Times the fantastically-monikered R.W. Apple Junior (Associate Editor of the paper) has written an article designed to answer that age old question: "Where does a visiting New Yorker or Parisian - or for that matter a country squire in town for a night or two - turn for a first-class English meal?" (A country squire?) The article is of course inspired by the now infamous comments of Mr Jacques Chirac,......

It remains unshakable, confident, sprawling, determined. There is a spirit and a soul here not found in other places, a remarkable spirit that makes London so special and civilized, even when things go terribly wrong like yesterday. Bertis Downs, occasionally known as the fourth member of the band R.E.M., posted his thoughts about the London bombings on the Huffington Post website the day after they happened. Here, R.E.M.‘s manager, legal counsel, and advisor, talks......

At some point later today we'll be pooling together some of the stories that reached us about yesterday's events and of course the majority of those concern Londoners doing what they do best - getting on with it. Sadly it wouldn't be human if someone hadn't managed to work an angle on how to turn what happened to the city yesterday to their advantage so hidden away amongst all the tales of people just......

London's very own TV channel sucks, it's official. According to the papers the capital-centric satellite TV channel London TV is the third least-watched channel in the country with just 1,285 people watching it on a daily basis. That means more people (lots more) read this website every day than watch that channel. And they have £2 million a year to spend on themeselves, £210,000 of which is taxpayers money. In its defence a London......

With the violent death of 24-year-old bank manager, Saad Mohiuddin, still fresh in everyone's minds, the Independent have been out on patrol with the man who caught the whole thing on video camera. Ian Wilder is 58-years-old accountant who has been out on the streets of the West End, recording anti-social scenes for six years now. His love of the West End comes from the fact that his grandparents set up a tailors in......

If you've got access to BBC4, don't forget that the serialisation of Patrick Hamilton's Twenty Thousand Streets Under The Sky trilogy starts tomorrow at 9:50pm. Hamilton's book is one of those definitive London novels (Nick Hornby once said of it: "it's as if they've finally finished the stretch of motorway running from Dickens to Martin Amis"), if only for its depiction of the capital's seedier hostilieries. Did you know, for example, that you could......