Have you noticed a little less vomit smeared on the sidewalk outside your local Antipodean imbibery? Seems that our board short-wearing buddies are deciding to head back home. According to The Times, "record numbers" of Australians are departing, with around 2,700 leaving every month, many of them formerly employed by London's listless financial jobs market. However, it seems that we're not going to let them go without a fight. To those Sydney-siders and Melbourne metropoles......

Ken's been coming under the cosh for his fact-finding trip to Delhi last month. The mayor and his long-time nemesis, Tory councillor Brian Coleman, have been flapping barbs at eachother in the London Assembly, with the Barnet bruiser landing a number of heavy blows on Livingstone, accusing him of taking a "larger entourage than the Queen". He went on to question whether Ken's fellow visitors Myleene Klass and a group of dancers from the......

Alternative Christmas tipple: hospital patients booze on alcoholic hand rub Seasonal crackdown on unlicensed minicabs Unseasonal cuts on funding for tackling homelessness Desperately seeking new jobs: Blondie musical cast unemployed for Christmas Tate tree decked out with festive fighter planes Image courtesy of Simone ver.β via the Londonist flickr group.......

The 2012 Olympic Games may seem a long way off, but the pressure is starting to mount on the proposed developments for East London. In addition to building a shiny new stadium, the Olympics is meant to be an opportunity to provide more jobs, improved transport, and 9,000 new homes (of which half will be low-cost). While the Overground is now servicing Stratford and due to hook up to the East London Line in......

This weekend column is brought to you by the founders of Niceties Tokens, Liz and Pete of Team Nice. 24. Llamas As Team Nice and the Niceties Campaign is a year old, last week we spoke of niceties tokens, which is the mechanism that started Team Nice. So this week I thought I would speak a little bit more about Team Nice. Team Nice is an ever-growing group of people (currently just under 1,000)......

Had TfL existed in his time, the great Samuel Johnson may well have amended his famous aphorism to read "a man who is bored of London needs to hop on the number 19 bus". In its perambulation from Battersea to Finsbury Park, the 19 cuts a swath across the capital's economic and cultural barriers, revealing the world within one city that modern London manifests. Vogue has certainly been impressed by the number 19. The......

Two aircraft do low-five at Heathrow. Crossrail: 30,000 extra jobs, probable fair rises and calls for extensions. It's the one they're all talking about. Yet another swimming pool story. Hillingdon will build London's first Olympic-sized pool for more than 40 years. Is the Super Bowl coming to London? Magners Carter. Runnymede is the most hazardous drinking spot in the UK. It's also closed to walkers, thanks to foot-and-mouth, which this Londonista found to his......

Aside from being crime-ridden, non-reversing, combustible, poorly-designed eyesores, we can sadly add another category to the list of faults with the bendy bus: potential deathtrap. 21-year old Lee Beckwith was exiting the N25 route in Ilford early on Tuesday morning, when he apparently fell under the wheels of the bus. The driver, who was subsequently arrested, failed to notice the presence of a fully-grown man lodged beneath his vehicle, and drove off with Mr.......

Yee-hah! Woo-hoo! Yippy-kayay! And other such celebratory noises. After umpteen years (actually 20 or so) and countless debates and immeasurable lengths of newspaper footage, Crossrail has today been given the funding green light. Londonist can only join the chorus of approval on this. To quote the Man in Seat 61: Like the RER in Paris, this will bring suburban trains right through the centre of the city and out the other side, relieving the Underground......

He may be fond of lazy generalisations when it comes to Northern towns or foreign countries, but Boris Johnson can't be accused of being idle himself. Beneath that languid public persona lies a hard-working, sleeves-rolled-up, can-do kinda guy, as demonstrated by his vow yesterday that - despite his candidacy for mayor of London - he would not give up his seat in Parliament in the event of a snap election. Speaking about the good......

Londonist has learnt with relief that London’s Community Wardens are to be taught to smile. Well, they are at least to be taught stuff other than marshalling resentful kids, scribbling reports on graffiti and harassing shopkeepers who infringe on the pavements 1cm too far. The London Development Agency is to train 200 or so of our boys (and gels) in blue (and red and black and yellow) to be nice to tourists, with a......

The fourth in our series of interviews with potential candidates for next year's Mayoral election. Previously: Victoria Borwick (Tory), Andrew Boff (Tory) and Warwick Lightfoot (Tory). Sian Berry is the Green's candidate for next year's elections. Unlike the Tory rivals we've previously interviewed, she is a strong supporter of the congestion charge. She's the only person we've ever known to use the words 'The North London Line is good'. And she's also got a......

There was very little else for Londonist to be concerned with when the threat of a Tube strike became a very unpleasant reality. The inconvenience was extreme: there aren't many alternatives to the Tube in London despite the best efforts of the Londonist team to get everyone from A to B. Brighter news came in the form of the first ever female Yeoman Warder, or Beefeater as the position is more commonly known, and......

Londonist was awfully tickled to learn of the launch of London’s very own ‘Starmap’. From this day forward, for the price of £5.95, eager tourists and starry-eyed Londoners will be able to follow in the footsteps of their fave ‘A’ list celebrities. Not only can they stalk them at home, but they can hang out, paparazzi style at the right bars and restaurants to star spot, and even re-enact bestest bits from London movies on......

BAA are cutting 2000 airport jobs. Because the major problem with Heathrow and other pull-out-your-hair-ports is the unwieldy number of staff clamouring over each other to help you at check-in and baggage reclaim. New trains are too heavy for their tracks. Or is it that new trains are overcrowded with far more passengers than they were designed to carry, thus causing the damage? And it's only the trains to the south. Everyone knows that......

New figures released yesterday show, well, they show that London is pretty much doing what it always does: changing. Quite how is not entirely apparent. The newspapers managed to get some headline footage out of the statistics – the Daily Mail even ran a story about the UK population across the whole of the front page. And of course, there is some stuff to report. Most significantly, shedsful of Londoners are upping camp and shipping......

Stones told off for smoking on stage. What has happened to our rock and roll? Thousands of jobs may go in the City. Serpentine Pavillion unveiled. No bail for Dando killer. Wife branded with iron for not doing housework to hubby's satisfaction. Image courtesy of atharabidi via the Londonist flickr group.......

The third of our interviews with the Tory candidates for London Mayor. Previously, Victoria Borwick and Andrew Boff. Warwick Lightfoot has, no doubt, spent a lifetime tolerating jibes about his Tolkeinesque name. He's also acquired an outstanding CV that includes stints as Mayor of Kensington and Chelsea, Special Advisor to the Chancellor and 20 years experience as a councillor. Most impressively of all, he's the first Tory candidate to admit to vomiting on the......

The second of our interviews with the Tory candidates for London Mayor. Previously, Andrew Boff. Victoria Borwick is a born and bred London lass whose Mayoral campaign carries the tagline 'A red head not Red Ken'. She has 25 years of management experience and is currently a councillor for Kensington and Chelsea. She has four children, doesn't like tinny techno and knows a thing or two about Cleopatra's Needle. But does she have the......

We at the Gothamist network would like to express our heartfelt wishes to the people of Minnesota in the days after their tragic bridge collapse. We're not trying to discount the severity of the accident by making note of it in opposition to our usual -Ist lightheartedness – we just wanted to take a moment and recognize those affected last week. After the Minneapolis bridge collapse, Bostonist did a little research and found that Massachusetts......

It used to be that the wealthy, with their high powered jobs that meant they couldn’t make it home in time to walk the dog, paid someone to do it for them. They got all the perks of having a dog without having to actually put on wellies, throw sticks and bag turds. The world’s gone topsy turvy though and, apparently, the wealthy animal lover about town now wants to pay someone else for......

It wasn't so long ago that London-based "social music revolution" website Last.fm was bought out by American media behemoth (no, not the band) CBS. We asked co-founder of Last, Martin Stiksel what it meant for the site - and what on earth is going on with Paris Hilton ... What does the CBS deal mean for Last? Apart from £140m, of course. It means we get the muscle behind us to do all the......

From The Garage to new(ish) venue Bardens Boudoir, the Daughters of Kaos have been causing mayhem with their polysexual Club Motherfucker for the last 4 years. Mixing performances from cool up and coming artists with different guest DJs every week, you can expect sleazy electro, indie beats and well just whatever anyone feels like playing. The next (and last till September)Club Mofo is this Saturday 14th July, so if you like the sound of......

London's got its share of surgical history, but our newest scientific exhibition space has strapped the operating theatre concept to a gurney and wheeled it into the 21st century. Last night at the Wellcome Collection a full house watched Dr Frank Wells perform open-heart surgery on a 68-year-old man. It was all done via a remote link to Papworth Hospital in Cambridge, so although the audience wasn't in the same room as the patient......

Perched on the rooftops of London, there are hundreds of statues warding off pigeons and other unwanted birds. And no, we're not talking about Antony Gormley statues. We're talking about owls. Plastic owls that keep us safe from invading hordes of pigeons. But what happens when those plastic statues come loose from their fixings? After all, we can't let them just drop into the streets. They're not doing their jobs if they're randomly attacking......

As the morning of the 2007 Champions League final dawns and Liverpool fans throng the streets of Athens, desperate to acquire a seat for tonight's match from amongst tens of thousands of corporate matchgoers, it seems an appropriate moment for the launch of our new series of articles looking at where football is going, particularly regarding off-the-field issues which seem increasingly to dominate newspaper back pages. Liverpool's opponents tonight, Milan, are especially apposite for......

Call for new writers. Londonist is a collaborative blog, which means we're always seeking out new additions to our team. Unfortunately we can't pay our contributors because any money we do make from advertising etc generally gets ploughed right back into the site. However, there are a number of benefits to writing for Londonist, so here are a few of the obvious ones: It's good experience and good exposure. After all, thousands of people will......

We've been invaded, albeit willingly, by Vikings recently. Ah, that sounds a bit filthy. What we're trying to say is that London-based fans of Viking metal have been particularly well catered for recently, what with Ensiferum the other week and with Amon Amarth last Wednesday at the Islington Academy. Actually, the AA gig was more of a double bill as far as this Londonista was concerned; with Finntroll providing support, for once the non-headline......

If Mr. T had a jibba jabbering British equivalent, what might he do if he and his trusty sidekicks were busted and broken apart? Terry Adams, leader of the notorious Adams crime family (aka the ‘A Team’), might be able to tell us – from prison. On Friday, Adams was convicted of money laundering and sentenced to seven years in the clink. At the height of their power, in the late 1980s, they were......

There was a recycling launch at the Tate Modern today - no, they didn't shred all the Dali, but they did play host to London Remade and a possible solution to the capital’s waste and recycling infrastructure problem: The solution, entitled Leave no footprint, will deliver exciting and practical ways to expand recycling capacity, create jobs and supply the market with materials ready to be made into new products. Transforming the way London manages......