We all know that the Loony Line needs an upgrade, so what’s stopping them? Where not to eat in Leytonstone. A guard was shot and injured by an Enfield pensioner who wanted to try something new yesterday. A man was killed when a tree fell on his van at Clapham Common yesterday. One man was shot in both arms and another in the buttocks in an attack in Camberwell. The smuggler of £1 million......

Maintenance workers for Tube Lines are planning a series of strikes for higher wages. The maintenance workers are concerned by the 4.95% pay rise they were offered over the next two years, given that those employed by Metronet are getting a better deal. Two 72-hour strikes are planned to start on the 20th (next Wednesday) and 3 September, both at noon. Expect complications on the Northern, Jubilee, and Piccadilly lines. Meanwhile, the Tube cleaners network-wide......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 12th May 1967: Pink Floyd stage their ‘Games for May’ concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank. The concert is notable for being the first ever live performance to use a quadraphonic sound system. Unfortunately, the use of bubbles and daffodils during the performance stain the carpets and seats, resulting in the band being banned from the venue. Tuesday – 13th May 1966: Alison......

Between Morden and High Barnet travel the sexiest passengers on the network according to the results of Qype's Love on the Tube survey. About 300 people completed the cheeky survey and the prevailing wisdom is the Northern Line's where it's at for ‘spiky-haired indie kids’ and ‘hot City types’. Unsurprisingly, no mention of the swollen handed alcoholics or the billion tourists who get on between Waterloo and Leicester Square. Dowdiest is the Hammersmith and......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 25th February 1900: The first tube station to be known as ‘Bank’ is opened, effectively replacing the old ‘City’ station and providing a link between the Waterloo & City Railway and the newly extended City & South London Railway (now part of the Northern Line). At the same time, nearby King William Street station is closed. Tuesday – 26th February 1797: The Bank of England issues its......

Tube travellers from Balham to Barnet are unhappy at claims the Northern Lane will be separated. According to leaflets being pressed into commuter flesh at Hendon station, TfL, like some latter-day Moses, has "recently announced plans" to part the oft-delayed line, creating two distinct services - one running south from High Barnet via Bank, the other from Edgeware via Charing Cross, with nary a switchover between the two. Trouble is, the story's cobblers. While......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 11th February 1826: The University of London is founded. It would later be known as University College London (or UCL). Tuesday – 12th February 1554: Lady Jane Grey and her husband Lord Guildford Dudley are executed at the Tower of London. Wednesday – 13th February 1247: A major earthquake causes considerable damage to London. Curiously, it is reported that the quake was preceded for three months by......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 17th December 1983: An IRA car bomb explodes near Harrods in Knightsbridge, killing six people (including three police officers) and injuring a further 85 Christmas shoppers. Tuesday – 18th December 1890: The world’s first ‘deep-level’ electric tube line opens, connecting Stockwell and King William Street. As we mentioned last year, the City & South London Railway would later become a part of the Northern Line as we......

26. Going Underground Urban legends of the more sinister variety have always intrigued me, so continuous whispers and friend-of-a-friend tales concerning a mutant race of beings inhabiting the dark tunnel systems, sewers and subterranean passages beneath the capital are always welcome, even if unfounded (despite rumours circulating as far back as the nineteenth century). However, one thing us folklorists do know is that the underbelly of the city is teeming with all manner of......

Arrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggggh.... Yes. We still be talkin' like pirates. (We've tried but it's hard to stop.) So we reckon we aught to get back out onto the high seas. Or, at least the Thames. So it be a good job the Bring Stuff Pirate Party is on Saturday. It's on a real boat and everythin'. This means we can drink rum all night, say 'Ooo-arrrrgh' at everyone and talk to parrots. Because you have to......

Following yesterday's talks, RMT members have decided to suspend their strike. And just after we'd persuaded you all to go to work on space hoppers. Dang, that would have been a sight. Don't dismiss alternative modes of trasport too quickly, though. The strike may be over, but its effects are not. TfL told the BBC: "Some things we hope will start fairly soon but the suspension came so late last night that it will......

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.......

Will the real Buster Crabbe please stand up? And put one of those flippers on each foot up? We were intrigued to discover that the South London Swimming Club will this Sunday morning be hosting a race for the "Buster Crabbe Memorial Cup". That name instantly transported us back to our school holiday mornings, transfixed in front of the televised black and white 1930s adventures of space hero Flash Gordon, embodied by one Clarence......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 11th June 1988: The Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute (a.k.a. Mandela Day Concert) takes place at Wembley Stadium. On a scale approaching the Live Aid concert that took place some three years earlier, more than 600 million people worldwide tune in to watch the epic day-long concert featuring dozens of high profile bands protesting against the apartheid regime in South Africa and the ongoing incarceration of Nelson......

Smoke, Issue 10 is on sale now. This 'love letter to London' is available from some good newsagents and bookshops, and a few more tawdry outlets for £2.50. Highlights include the Hampstead fish who are evolving to look like William Morris carpets, where to find an alternative universe in Hackney and a double whammy of London's campest statues. There are undoubtedly other good articles in there, but we've only read the first half so......

We all love and hate the Tube, don’t we? On one hand it is an indispensable, magic, under earth fun-bus that transports us to all the wonderment and wide-eyed beauty that is London and its environs. On the other hand it is a fetid, overcrowded mess of the sinful and weary plebs that will sneeze on you, play their music too loud on their iPods or wait until it’s really crowded and try and......

You may remember the Vortex Jazz Club in Dalston for its inspired football World Cup sessions last summer where the on-screen action from Germany was accompanied by two competing free jazz ensembles. This time the club has turned to blues in the shape of South-East London guitarists Steve Morrison and Billy Jenkins who are presenting a brand new programme of topical music to accompany... a chess tournament. This Sunday sees the climax of five......

When we heard that Orlando Bloom was building a green house in London our first thought was surely he has more than enough money to just buy tomatoes. But it turns out he means an environmentally friendly house: "It's got solar panels on the roof, energy efficient light bulbs - newer technology basically that is environmentally friendly,'' he said after arriving in a plug-in hybrid vehicle. We've seen the plans and can exclusively reveal......

It was 9.30pm on Saturday night. It was dark, cold and there was rain and wind. One lonely Londonist contributor stood outside Covent Garden tube station, waiting for a delayed friend. Thank you Piccadilly line for not stopping at Kings Cross this weekend. No, really, thank you. If it wasn't for the engineering work that caused the line not to stop there, we wouldn't have been subjected to half an hour of the best......

Rumour has it that the SAS use the Northern Line to break new recruits. Put 'em down the holes in High Barnet and Edgware then pick up the pieces in Morden at the end of the day. They rebuild them as unflinching fighting machines because they know the worst is behind them. Every now and then you spot one of the few who didn't make it, mumbling and lost on the escalators at Kennington.......

It might be the holiday season but some of us have just returned from dial-up horror and can barely contain ourselves from attempting to read the whole internet. So, although a little later than some other bloggers we could hardly let this one go without mentioning could we: A graffiti gang has caused thousands of pounds of damage to a north London Underground (LU) station. They sneaked into Camden Town station and covered walls,......

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......

After posting about Vu Quang Hoang Tu we'd have loved to not post about another tube related death for some time, but sadly there was another accident over the weekend: A 25-year-old woman is in a serious condition after she was struck by a Tube train which killed her friend. Gustav Claassens, 20, from South Africa, died on the tracks at Tooting Broadway station, south-west London, at 0024 GMT on 2 December. The last......

The BBC are paying some attention to one of our own bugbears - the fact that Borough High Street just doesn't work: It is the gateway to the City of London, shrouded in history and referred to in respected literature. So why then, when you walk along Borough High Street are you more likely to spend your time dodging bins, street signs, other pedestrians and cars? The Southwark branch of the charity Living Streets......

The inside of 93 Feet East was absurdly hot last Saturday night. We’re talking very, very hot and humid here – imagine the Northern Line, at its busiest, on the hottest, stickiest day of the year. Hot hot hot hot hot. Damn hot. So it’s not surprising then, that many of the club’s clientele had chosen to spend the evening outside in the courtyard, where there was a pleasant cooling breeze. Not so for......

BBC: An investigation is under way following a Tube train derailment on the Northern Line in north London. London Underground (LU) said the train ran into sidings near Archway just after 1100 BST on Friday in what they described as a "minor incident". An LU spokeswoman said the slow-moving train was not carrying passengers and the driver escaped without injury. As you'd expect services have been disrupted and there are a number of replacement......

There’s frequent evidence of a peculiar moral indignation associated with being forced to listen to one side of someone else’s phone conversation in a public place. Especially on trains, for some reason. OK, it’s not frowned upon as much as the insanely annoying broadcast of tinny garage music from poxy phone-sized speakers to the rest of a carriage’s population. But people do still get quite inexplicably huffy about having to listen to other people......

We have to end the week with another lazy ‘look-e-here, someone’s played around with the Tube map’ post. Last week, the reworked network incorporated famous musicians. This week, somebody with enormous amounts of surplus time on their hands has generated an anagram-laden version. It’s utterly useless, but, as always with these things, utterly compelling. Several highly appropriate stations leap out. West Hampstead is neatly captured as ‘What Stampedes’, which will ring true with anyone......

Today's Guardian contains a brilliant article by their music writer, Dorian Lynskey, who explains how he went about adapting the London Underground in order to plot the history of 20th century music. The idea is simple and ingenious: each line takes on a certain musical genre, so the Circle Line is pop (because it intersects with everything else of course), the DLR is classical (controversial), and the Northern Line is hip-hop. Key stations are......

Some of us might recall, with wistful nostalgia, the ‘halcyon days of email’. In those days of yore, email was as harmless as gossiping on the phone, as novel as watching TV on an iPod, and as reliable as the Northern Line. Importantly, it was also something you could spend a lot of time doing in the office, whilst still giving the vague impression of ‘working’. However, at the end of 2000 the age......