The Tories have something different in mind for the proposed third runway at Heathrow: scrapping it in favour of high speed trains. Transport spokeswoman Theresa Villiers confirmed this morning at the Conservative Party Conference "that a Conservative government would say no to a third runway at Heathrow." The theory is that trains are greener than planes and will thus help cut carbon emissions. We're quite fond of riding the rails at Londonist; it's definitely......

This Week In London’s History Monday – 29th September 1829: The Metropolitan Police is founded by the Home Secretary, Robert Peel. In his honour, members of the force would become colloquially known as ‘bobbies’. Tuesday – 30th September 1928: Alexander Fleming discovers the antibacterial properties of penicillin at St Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. Wednesday – 1st October 1868: St Pancras Station is officially opened as the London terminus for the Midland Railway, despite its......

Photograph of Peter Bonetti at St Pancras station Off on a weekend trip to Paris or, er, Sheffield? While you're wheeling the luggage through St Pancras make sure you stop and check out the collection of photographs from the Press Association's archive that are lining the lower concourse. By a neat coincidence, the station and the PA are both 140 years old, so they're celebrating with a collection of iconic images featuring moments from more......

Today is not a good day for travelling on many levels. Firstly, forget your romantic weekend in Paris, Eurostar won't be running any trains today following yesterday's freight train fire in the Channel Tunnel. St Pancras is likely to be chocka full of disgruntled passengers so we say steer clear and check Eurostar's website for more information. Secondly, First Bus are striking over pay again so check with TFL before you leave for work to......

Hot-foot it to St Pancras, buy a ticket, board the Eurostar, and you could be swanning down the Champs-Élysées or loafing through the Jardin du Luxembourg in a little over 2 hours. Not quick enough for you? What if the journey time was reduced to under two hours. Impossible? Not according to Air France who, despite their aviation-inspired name, are planning to run trains through the Channel Tunnel when Eurostar's monopoly ends in 2010.......

The Press Association is celebrating its 140th anniversary by putting some of its finest photos on disply. The gallery space they've chosen happens to be St. Pancras International. The shots feature different aspects of British life from Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee portrait from 1897 to Beijing Olympic medalists from last month. In between, there are snaps of Twiggy, a still from the set of The Avengers, Fashion Week statements, and a certain clock tower......

Anything with the words "featuring Jedi Jugglers" fills us full of dread. Well, fills us with a mental image of middle class boys called Crispin or Nathan wearing combat trousers and flicking their dreadlocks around whilst earnestly juggling like soldiers going off to war in 1914. But this "illumination extravaganza", is in the crypt of St Pancras Church on Euston Road, which fact alone guaranteed our attendance at their public opening. Great pains were......

Cleaners for Eurostar trains have voted for a 24 hour strike on Bank Holiday Monday over a pay dispute. Workers are vexed that their hourly wage remains a low £6.37, and the RMT union is backing them, holding out for a bump up to £7.20. 140,000 passengers are expected to traverse the Channel Tunnel on the trains over the weekend, but Eurostar claim things will run smoothly; still, if you find a half-imbibed bottle of......

What is it? Walking down a rail-side industrial backstreet, an ornate wrought iron entrance with busy events and wildlife sightings boards assures passers-by that this is no ordinary green patch. Within lie a shoebox wetland, a wildflower meadow and mixed woodlands, attracting avian, mammalian, amphibious and arthropod refugees from far and wide. Where is it? A little two acre patch of Farthing Wood in brownfields Camden, Camley Street is a haven known to many......

With the Star Over London airship proving such a success, plans are afoot to give it a permanent mooring above St Pancras chambers. When not in service, the curvaceous dirigible will use the Barlow train shed for a hanger. Do you have a vision for London that's more warped than Captain Kirk's loom? Send your distorted realities to Londonist - at - gmail dot com. And browse our archive.......

Booze might now be banned on public transport, but that doesn't stop us getting trolleyed in the stations. The Betjeman Arms recently opened at St Pancras, bringing a much-needed touch of class to London's catalogue of terminus taprooms. To celebrate, we decided to go on a campaign for rail ale. Despite objections from our livers and serious renal remonstrance, we spent last Saturday working our way though a laevorotatory pub crawl of the major......

Nathan Horton: Controlled Explosion Number 2 Last time we talked about St Pancras Crypt, we were considering buying a London Borough. This week, the tone was rather more sombre with a group show, Responses to Conflict and Loss installed in these meditative, subterranean vaults. The Crypt is nigh on perfect for this sort of show. Its damp, fusty smelling waft and many vaulted rooms, nooks and crannies, with displaced gravestones lying around and family tombs......

Colour us surprised: those original 2012 Olympic costs were totally unrealistic Hounslow residents, consider yourselves warned: a teachers strike this Thursday means the yoof will be on the loose Arrests have been made in a 21-year old murder case Here comes the bat cab! That's, um, a battery-powered cab, not the kind of motor Bruce Wayne would be seen in. Pubs are closing at frightening rate. Do your bit, people - get plastered in......

What with all the whinging we've done about the comical opening of T5, and the state of British infrastructure in general, it seems we've forgotten about the smooth, stress-free move that Eurostar made from Waterloo to St. Pancras last November. Fortunately, travellers to the continent have been quick to take advantage: the operator has recorded a 21% passenger rise in the first three months of 2008. The world's largest inter-capital rail service could welcome......

The clearest thing to emerge from the mayoral race this week is that no one can agree about buses. The arguments began last Wednesday when Boris Johnson told Vanessa Feltz that the '21st Century' Routemasters he wants to replace bendy buses with would all have conductors and that these would cost 'eight million quid'. Ken Livingstone went on the show next day to say Boris’s figures were fine except he’d left a nought off......

As a parochial and unglamorous antidote to the Hollywood Oscars that took place last weekend, London Underground was crowned Public Transport Operator of the Year at what LUL are desperately trying to sex up as the "transport Oscars" but are actually more prosaically known as the London Transport Awards. The MD of LUL explained they had scooped the gong for: delivering a record volume of service, carrying more passengers than ever before, while at......

In the late 90s, I knew a bloke who cut up an A-Z, and wallpapered the hall of his flat with the pages. It was great for checking where you were headed before popping out to meet someone. Artist Stephen Walter's gone a step further, drawing his own, unique, geographically accurate version of London. The Island: London Series is a graphite drawing of our fair city comprised of cartoon-ish buildings, signposts, historical details and quirky......

That's right. As from today, King's Cross Thameslink is no more. The outmoded station on Pentonville Road closed for business yesterday. Services now stop beneath St Pancras International on new platforms (pictured). It seems to be the law these days that anything recently opened must be trumpeted as 'shiny new'. Not so with these platforms. IanVisits describes a 'clinical grey feel', but with much widened access. Diamond Geezer, meanwhile, gives a fitting eulogy to......

A group of men robbed a St Pancras telecommunications firm on Thursday evening by dressing up as policemen, in a plot bearing a touch of Alanis Morissette about it. The thieves were let into the building by one of the firm’s employees, after claiming to be investigating reports of people on the roof. Once inside, they ditched their pretensions to law and order and tied up five members of staff. They then made off......

The trains have been re-routed, the signage amended, the tube announcements re-recorded (completed, luckily, before the woman behind them was given the heave-ho). The re-opening of St Pancras means that Waterloo's reign as Britain's main international train station, a duty it fulfilled without complaint for thirteen years, is well and truly over. But what to do with those elegant Eurostar platforms, so admired in their mid-Nineties infancy? The plan in the short term is......

Toot toot! And honk, honk! For the London Transport Museum has finally reopened after two years and £22 million of renovation. Hot on the (w)heels of St Pancras. Typical: you wait years for a major nexus of transport heritage to open, and then two come along at once. The Covent Garden attraction tells the story of the trotting, crawling and whizzing of our city over the past 200 years. There’s also a section looking......

Time Out recently presented St Pancras Station as their inaugural 'Wonder of London'. Profile Books goes a couple of stages further by including the terminus in its 'wonders of the world' series - buildings and monuments, such as the Colosseum, Stonehenge and the Forbidden City, whose 'names will be familiar to almost everyone'. We're not sure if the station is quite in that category yet. It's doubtful it has anything like the global and......

Another dip into a parallel London, in which this week's opening of St Pancras took a sinister and surreal twist. Got a f*cked up image of the capital? Send it to londonist at gmail dot com Background image manipulated from Malias' Flickr photostream.......

Having visited the new-look station at lunch time, we can confirm: that's one bastard of a roof. Such is the scale and magnificence of St Pancras International, the cleaners will be sweeping up a fine collection of dropped mandibles this evening. We've compiled a few images of the opening, for those of you who couldn't get there. This place really has to be seen to be believed. But first a video. Qype visits St......

Unless there were leaves on the line, not enough station staff, delays at Paris holding everything up or industrial action on either side of the Channel, the first Eurostar train should be pulling into its new station at St Pancras this morning. We've had a sneak preview of what it's like and have been terribly excited about it so far, and at last, today, we get to see it in its full glory. We......

A week after opening for the Queen, St Pancras International is finally ready for the likes of us. The station has been restored beyond its former glory. Britain's answer to Central Station is ready for business. Everyone knows by now that the sumptious Euston Road frontage to the station was designed by Sir George Gilbert Scott. But what else in London did the Great Scott design? Time to dust off our old 'Stalks' series,......

Due to earlier technical vexations of a non-Stratford-related variety, Monday Miscellanea is a bit later than usual today... This Week In London’s History Monday – 12th November 1974: A 9lb salmon is caught in the Thames – the first time that such a fish has been caught in the dirty old river since 1834 – and sent to the British Museum for identification. Improvements in the water quality are hailed. Tuesday – 13th November......

It’s cold outside this week, so it seems like the best plan is to cozy up on the couch and watch some telly. Why would you want to risk frostbite? On TV, Londonist likes: Monday, 12 November I’m A Celebrity … Get Me Out Of Here (ITV1, 21:00-22:30) It’s off to the jungle yet again with Ant & Dec as they guide a new group of “celebs” through as many disgusting tasks as you’d......

With the opening of St Pancras and its high-speed line to the continent, the approval of Crossrail, and glimpses of the futuristic bullet trains that will soon call London home, there are plenty of encouraging signs that Britain's rail network is in good health. They don't come much more inspiring than the former railway man who has set up his own rail service. Grand Central Rail was established in 2000 by former British Rail......

Queen Liz officially re-opens St Pancras station Having nabbed a flash foreign manager, Spurs continue to ape Arsenal with new stadium plans Meanwhile, Gunners fans are accused of abusing shrinking violet Sir Alex Ferguson Smithfields Market to be butchered in redevelopment? Londonist hopes it can be saved Image courtesy of buckaroo kid via the Londonist flickr group.......