Help is on the way for those affected by the fire in Camden Market. Thus far, £750,000 has been allocated to help rebuild the charred Canal Market. This is great news for the 90 market stalls, six shops, and the Hawley Arms, which were all damaged in the canal-side inferno. The London Development Agency has set aside £250,000 in a recovery fund for business grants and promtion to get tourist traffic back to Camden......

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......

This Day In London’s History 1937: A Japanese aircraft lands at Croydon Airport, setting a world record for the fastest flight from Tokyo to London. In the 1930s there had been considerable interest in establishing records for long distance flights, and a prize had been offered for the first flight between Paris and Tokyo to take less than 100 hours. However nobody had yet won this prize, despite many attempts, including one that failed......

Today was the day that the thriving community of East End gardening enthusiasts who’ve been cultivating the Manor Garden Allotments since 1924 were expecting to have to lie down in front of the bulldozers, a la Arthur Dent, in a last ditch attempt to avoid the total obliteration of their flourishing and fruitful Hackney Wick veggie paradise. But, having failed to secure planning permission for an alternative location in Leyton (mainly due to the......

There's a good little article in today's Guardian on Ken's recent comments regarding the London Development Agency's decision to use a compulsory purchase order to secure the property needed for the development of the Olympic Village. During his weekly press briefing yesterday Ken got a little worked up over the deadline that landowners had been given: We gave notice to the landowners that the deadline was last week and we would not budge from......

Here it is then: the first Olympic bid post of the week, and it's not a very positive one either. It seems that if London does win the 2012 bid on Wednesday then the organisers will face not one, but two legal challenges from businesses and residents of east London. The first challenge comes from a collection of businesses in the Lea Valley area who feel that compensation packages they've been offered are unfair.......

What Paula Radcliffe paused to do in the streets of London, bid organisers are doing to the locals. It's possibly the most contrived headline of the week, but it does head a pretty decent article on the damaging effects a London-based 2012 Olympics could have on east London. The article, from today's Times, looks at the 300 or so businesses which could be "cruely evicted" if the bid succeeds: Forman’s is the oldest-established salmon......

The call is out for new musicians and designers to take part in this year's City Showcase from the 5th to the 9th September, which will be supported as ever by XFM. But hurry you only have 28 days to get your designs or demos in. Launched in 2003, City Showcase is supported by the Mayor as part of the London Development Agency's 'Creative London' initiative. The festival features new and emerging musical talent,......

Those mischievous Scots, Welsh and Irish have been at it again. When the London Development Agency opened their web poll to name the new "state-of-the-art" footbridge at Wembley, who'd have thought anyone would have hijacked it for their own ends? But you know, that's exactly what's happened. According to the Evening Standard (so it must be true), "Thanks to an email campaign, nearly 90 per cent of the 80,000 suggestions that have been put......