Every month, the folks at Fancyapint? get together to vote for their top ten favourite pubs. These are recently visited pubs that for one reason or another (the ambience, the booze, the company) stuck in their collective memory. Kindly, these booze-savvy Fancyapinters have decided to share their latest picks with Londonist and all our readers. Cheers! Here’s the current list from Fancyapint? in no particular order of merit. They assure us that all ten......

Well, it’s over for another year. Time to settle down, relax, and get ready for another batch of shopping in the January sales. On TV, Londonist likes: Carmen (BBC2, 13:45-16:25) This just might be the world’s most famous opera, and even if you’re not an opera fan, you’ll definitely recognise some of the songs. From the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, this production features an international cast, impressive sets and live animals. My......

Some of our favourite Scandinavian bands are coming to the UK in the next couple of weeks and we thought you better know about them. First, the most mainstream, Robyn will play her first live dates since everyone woke up and realised she was actually amazing, at The Scala on Thursday. The gig is unsurprisingly sold out but there are tickets currently knocking about for face value on Scarlet Mist. The weekend is filled......

Mince pies are proliferating on supermarket shelves people. It really is time to book your festive entertainment. I mean, we told you back in August about Cinderella at The Old Vic. Stephen Fry's "cheekily updated" script, Pauline Collins' Fairy Godmother and Sandi Toksvig's narrator promise to make this a cracking, cross dressing, cake filled chuckle fest in a veritable grande dame of a venue. Our advice is to try and get as close to......

Do you enjoy filling in questionnaires and sipping drinks in pint measures? Are you aware of how British you are? Would you like to go to the pub to do a quiz that won't ask tricky questions about football in the 1960s but instead tax you on how much tax you should pay if you're self-employed and working from home, after deductions but before taking into consideration any savings you may have equal to,......

A punning headline that doesn’t quite work is our stock in trade. Such is the case here, where we want to highlight a band of enthusiasts who seek out tales of London’s mysterious and arcane. The South East London Folklore Society meets every second Thursday of the month at The Old King’s Head - down one of those pokey little alleys off Borough High Street. Next Thursday (13 September) Rob Stephenson will talk about......

We're skint again! We've spent all of our money on festivals only to find that we've spent hours standing in the rain listening to the bands we didn't really want to see but our best mate wanted to because they fancy the singer. This means that yet again, we can't go and do any of the things we want (and yes we're sulking). We can't go to any of the gigs we'd planned to,......

Summer has at last hit us. So, with just 122 days to go until christmas, it must therefore be time to start thinking of how to broach that whole visit back to parents/family. What on earth should you do with that horrid snotty nephew? Or, to put it another way: To Panto Or Not To Panto? Now, sorry if this causes offence, but pantomime IS generally rubbish. (*Insert compulsory "oh no it isn't" reference......

This morning, Grandmothers were saving lives. Now, just a few hours later, they're being found guilty of murder. The news is seeing more and more about the terrifying 'honour killings' that seem to be happening amongst families. Bachan Athwal from Hayes, even boasted to relatives that she had got a relative to strangle her daughter-in-law, Surjit Athwal, and throw her body into a river in Punjab. This was nine years ago. Despite the horror......

It’s a quiz, in a pub, with prizes! We can’t claim to be the first to come up with that idea. But, by golly, are we going to use the opportunity to fact you till you fart. There’ll be music, film, history, pictures, good old random trivia, maps and, oh all kinds of things. Every question will be about this fine old city of ours. So if you think you can out-nerd the Londonist team......

Violent crime is on the rise in London and you can’t pick up a paper or turn on the news without the latest report of stabbings, beatings, muggings and even murder. It’s disturbing that the Justice system, crippled by overcrowded jails and soft sentencing guidelines, often punishes inequitably to the crime. However, we have it good in comparison to Ye Olde London Town who suffered waves of crime with such alarming titles as "Assault......

Always on the scout for the best the city has to offer, Londonist has caught wind of a cheeky little theatre deal to tempt you into one of its most vibrant and newly buffed up venues. Vernon God Little is currently showing at the Young Vic, just down The Cut from its bigger, creakier sibling, The Old Vic (no relation). Vernon God Little, the novel, won the Man Booker Prize in 2003 with its......

Ahhh, it's finally summer (try and ignore the rain for a moment). Summer in London means many things: picnics in Green Park, staying out late on a school night and students all over the capital stressing out about their exams and final year exhibitions. Enter Free Range 2007. A show of some of the most prestigious universities' design work, all in the heart of Brick Lane: The Old Truman Brewery. Londonist caught up with......

Only March and it's already been a bumper year for science / art hybrid stuff that only makes us want more - more, damn it! More! Regular readers may have noticed a preference for the undead and the utterly unique on this site. Having received some information about a new exhibition at Londonist's favourite rusty-blades-and-decaptitating-hooks museum The Old Operating Theatre, we just had to share it with you, because we're assuming you love waxwork......

The Old Bailey is at last living up to its name, having turned 100 today. The famous courthouse was completed in 1907 on the site of Newgate prison, and has since sent down some of London's greatest crooks and butchers. During that century figures as diverse as Dr Crippen and the Kray Twins, Jeremy Thorpe and the Yorkshire Ripper, and Ruth Ellis and Lord Haw-Haw, have risen to the court usher's instructions of "silence......

On Tuesday, Londonist's favourite comedian, the brilliant if.comeddie best newcomer 2006 and Londonist interviewee Josie Long is taking a break from her current UK tour of last year's show, 'Kindness and Exuberance' and doing her first ever preview for her next Edinburgh show on Tuesday at a night called Everyone Just Wants To Be Happy at The Old Coffee House in Soho. We imagine that it'll be pretty ramshackle at this stage, but we......

It's been a great year for abandoned buildings - having stood empty in various parts of London, defunct power stations, derelict archive buildings and now an abandoned abattoir have been filled with art and opened to the public, turning the unloved and unused into something unforgettable. The latest in this line of site-specific work is Soul-etude, a performance installation specially commissioned for the second year of Feeast, the Festival of Central and Eastern European......

There's a yard behindThe Old Blue Last, off Great Eastern Street, that frankly makes our eyes bleed. For anyone on the prowl for weird and wonderful street art (and it's not just us, right?), this is untouchable. Stenciler El Chivo provides the colourful backdrop, flytippers provide the furniture, and the Tate Britain should be providing a Turner Prize. Superb.......

Hollywood hunk Vince Vaughn will grace the stage at The Old Vic this Sunday, 8th October, as part of The 24 Hour Plays Benefit. "In collaboration with six writers and six directors, the actors will create and stage new works in just one day". Starting out in 1995 as "an opportunity to bring together a community of creative people in a time-limited experiment", The 24 Hour Plays "recently teamed with Planet Impact, a philanthropic......

We were upset to learn that the tobacconists Bonds of Oxford Street are no longer Of Oxford Street. The premises that they occupied for the entire childhood of one Londonista has been invaded by a shop that sells handbags. Bonds have been relegated to some backwater trading estate in SW16. Sentimental adolescent memories are attached to that purveyor of fine tobaccos, cigars, and pipes of all distinctions, shapes and sizes; we bought our first......

A tribute to the capital’s alleys, ginnels and snickleways. 4. Ely Court, EC1 Where? Semi-visible snicket linking the enigmatic Ely Place to Hatton Garden. What? Anyone who claims familiarity with London’s passageways will know that we had to cover this one sooner rather than later. As well as being Elizabeth I’s alleyway of choice, it was once patrolled by a costumed beadle and wasn’t considered part of London at all. So much oddness in......

The missing teenager and her 18-month-old cousin who went missing from Fulham last Thursday have been found safe and well in Harrow. The FA are apparently confident that next season's FA Cup will be held at Wembley and they have no plans to book the Millennium Stadium in Cardiff (might be all down the park then). Following the tat extravaganza that was last year's debut London International Tattoo Convention, the second one has just......

It's Friday and the weekend stretches out ahead of us with glorious gaps to fill with fun (and frequently free) things to see and do. Put on your comfortable shoes, prepare a packed lunch, bring sun glasses and an umbrella (just in case) and brace yourself for another Londonist Culture Crawl... Saturday: Springwatch Live at Coin Street, 12.00pm to 6.00pm, free entry. Lots to see and do with the Springwatch team: Thames 21 are......

This day in London’s History 1731: Daniel Defoe, one of London’s great characters, died. Most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe, Defoe was also one of the first to write sophisticated fictional accounts of London life. Moll Flanders and Journal of the Plague Year are essential reading for anyone interested in the 17th century city. He is interred in Bunhill Fields alongside another celebrity Londoner, William Blake. 1993: One person died and many were......

Friday: Raucous angular noise makers The Victorian English Gentlemen's Club who are neither Victorian, nor English (they're Welsh), nor Gentlemen (two of the guys are girls), but apart from that the name fits, play the 333 Club (333 Old Street) with Performance. Sunday: If The Pipettes don't start returning our phone calls, we're going to have to start stalking Lucky Soul instead. Which means you may find a number of us low knuckled Londonistas......

The Old Bailey yesterday took 23 minutes to return a unanimous verdict of guilty to murder against Yousef Bouhaddaou who stabbed teacher Robert Symons in his home during a burglary. He faces a life sentence. Two men have been arrested over the murder of a couple in Upper Norwood last week. The IPCC is to publish a series of "lessons to be learned" from the death of Jean Charles de Menezes as part of a......

In case you missed anything last week, here's what we got up to: We decided that everyone should just slow down a bit and just take it easy. Although, probably not to the point where you fall asleep on the tube and need to use stickers to get you where you're going. And it doesn't get any more laid back than a nap club. After all that relaxing we thought some dinosaur spotting was......

We love Alan Bennett; we think he's a bit of a national treasure. We love his unapologetic Englishness, his love of language, and his ability to create great understated drama. We cheered when he won his fifth Olivier award for The History Boys in 2004, and were 'quite excited' when we heard that a film version of the same play was due for release 'shortly'. But last night's production of The Old Country at......

The latest defection from LA to join the gangs of Hollywood ex-patratriates gobbling up the primest of London prime real estate is Neve Campbell. The film actress is currently in London rehearsing the Robert Altman directed, Arthur Miller scripted play Resurrection Blues at the Old Vic theatre in Waterloo. The Old Vic is no stranger to asylum seekers from Hollywood: no less than Kevin Spacey runs the place as Artistic Director and keeps up......

Who really enjoys Christmas shopping in London? Seriously - who? Though it is always the thought that counts, it is sadly true that you are obliged to put the thought into physical form in order for it to count, which means putting on your coat and hitting the shops to pick up that unique and original Christmas gift - which usually turns out to be the same unique and original gift that 50 million......