File this one under the ‘Huh, you don’t say’ department: A recent report by legal recruitment specialists Hughes-Castell has found that City lawyers are raking in big paycheques. Average starting salaries for new solicitors have for the first time climbed above £60,000. And of course, although that means that some newly minted lawyers are making less than £60,000, it also means that others are making more - with some firms paying as much as......

As bands jump across the Atlantic to play this weekend's V Festival and next weekend's Reading and Leeds festivals London is treated to a wealth of bands that rarely play these shores. Here's a selection of the best. Monday night sees the amazing Rilo Kiley play the Carling Academy Islington – tickets sold out pretty quickly, but there are a few floating around on eBay etc for what is sure to be one of their......

Part 1: Introduction Mods. Rockers. Teds. Punks. Ravers. Swingers. Skinheads. Suedeheads. Hippies. Yuppies. Rudeboys. Indie kids. Emo kids. Beats. Glam kids. Tribes. Subcultures. Neo-tribes. Groups. Bands. Movements. All of the above, and more, have - despite their points of origin - been magnetically attracted to the capital. To attempt to cover all of the ages of London’s youth might seem an exhausting task worthy of Peter Ackroyd who wrote of his biography of London......

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.......

What price a corner of Hampstead Heath? Harry Hallowes has got one for nowt. Well, not nothing. It cost him twenty years of squatting and a 2 year legal tussle with frustrated swanky flat developers and the Land Registry. However, it seems that Harry’s finally earned the right to call his exclusive, secluded plot of heath land home. Now that’s perseverance paying off. Harry started sleeping rough on the heath when he got thrown......

Email. Who could live without it these days? Well, according to the World Internet Usage Stats more people than you might think! Only 40% of Europe is online and only a measly 4% of Africa. The latter stat is shocking when you count up all the scam emails that we receive every day promising us untold wealth through lottery wins, letting money "rest" in our accounts and righting the monetary wrongs of evil dictatorships.......

We thought we’d take a break from linking up Onionbagblog, and instead sample a scallion of a different persuasion. Olly’s Onions serves up small helpings of news in a satirical sauce. A bit like The Onion, then. (What is this connection between bulbous edibles and current affairs piss-takes?) This week, Olly drops by a trendy boozer: The White Swan just off Ladbroke Grove has been serving a loyal clientele for decades, but since it......

Just out the Van: Penned in the Margins is an evening of "music-cum-literary delights" this Thursday, featuring spoken word artist Ventriloquist, Bristol-based SJ Esau, Dan Le Sac vs. Scroobius Pip and Tim Wells. Spitz, 109 Commercial Street, E1 6BG, 020 7392 9032. In Next Week: Tarquin Hall (Salaam Brick Lane), Melanie McGrath (Silvertown), and Will Self (The Book of Dave) discuss the wealth of stories to be found in London’s East End, especially, in......

Mayor Ken has blockaded himself inside a safe house in the country. Why? To escape the hired goons that Shell and BP and Texaco are sending around to break his kneecaps. Ken has signed a deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez to receive oil relief for the poor of London. Patterned after home heating oil agreements Chavez made with Boston and New York, Venezuela's nationalized oil industry will offer a 20 per cent reduction......

Leonardo DiCaprio was yesterday nominated for an Oscar for his role as Danny Archer in Blood Diamond, while his co-star, Djimon Hounsou, is up for a Best Supporting Oscar. The film directed by Edward Zwick (The Last Samurai, The Siege) is first and foremost an action movie although it does do a good job of highlighting the misery caused by the illegal trade of conflict diamonds in Africa. But is it any good? Well......

All the new space we've got as a result of our makeover* may have gone to our heads so it's nice to slip in a smaller capture for Photo of the Day. That is until you pull up wallyg's London - Tower Hamlets: Tower of London in full 4907 x 1431 glory. There's also a wealth of Tower information thoughtfully posted under the panorama over on Flickr. *Pros and cons of the recent Londonist......

A few days back, we reviewed The Meaning of Night, a new novel partly set in the shadier parts of Victorian London. We caught up with author Michael Cox, to ask him about his London influences and plans for the sequels. The Meaning of Night is brilliant. Where do you get the inspiration to write something like that? In April 2004, I began to lose my sight as a result of cancer. In preparation......

Not 'capture' in a 'behind bars' kind of way of course. We mean capture as in 'document'. We've slowly been building up a decent archive of Banksy photos over in our Londonist pool for a while now (thanks mainly, it must be said, to the tireless efforts of Sunshine Indoors). But we'd like to expand on this wealth of data, try and amass the 'complete set' as it were, and than maybe map the......

One of the reason that young people in Britain aren't interested in politics is this: Politicians make policies with old people in mind. It's true. The pensions whitepaper that came out today penalises young people, making them work until 68, whilst current elderly folks enjoy retirement at 65. Student top-up fees - there is a funding crisis in Briatin's universities, so who pays? The students, of course! Old people are serial voters, and serial......

Or at least it used to be, according to Charles Booth’s famous poverty maps from the end of the Victorian era. His maps show the haves and have-nots in glorious Technicolor; yellow for ‘Upper-middle and Upper classes. Wealthy’; black for ‘Lowest class. Vicious, semi-criminal’. The Charles Booth Online Archive have recently made the maps available online. Helpfully, the site displays a modern map alongside the Booth original, so it’s easy to see which bit......

These listings appear every Wednesday. If you want to let us know about any upcoming science or technology events, you can contact us on LondonistSciTech@Gmail.com Event of the Week Are you comfortably numb?, Royal Society of Medicine, Friday The nature of consciousness is one of the great unanswereds. For scientists, it’s right up there with tapping cold fusion, curing cancer and understanding exactly why TV units insist on filming their labs with moody purple......

The Londonist Literary List appears every Tuesday. If you’d like to bring an event to our attention, please email londonistlit@gmail.com. Along with a wealth of events this week, new books by Margaret Atwood and Jay McInerney (pictured) are also of particular interest... Events Around London: Tonight, David Runciman discusses his new book, The Politics of Good Intentions, which claims that Blair and Bush have abused history in order to further their goals for the......

Someone in the TV world really hates January. Why? Because to compensate for the month's grey, fuzzy, badly photocopied feel, they've decided to brighten it up with yet MORE imported US screen candy. Yes, Prison Break (Mon 10pm Five) is finally here - exciting, macho, and dumber than a barrelful of rocks, according to Charlie Brooker. It's got thrills, spills, tattoos of prison blueprints (er, whatever) and lots of muscular men looking moody. Will......

Now that the Pop Kid, the Noisy one and the Club Londonista have all had their say, it falls to Ricky to throw in his two cents. For want of a better pseudonym, let's call him RiotRicky. More appropriate job titles on a postcard please, along with your pick of last year's music. Top Ten Singles: Bloc Party - Pioneers Green Day - Holiday The Eels - Hey Man (Now You're Really Living) Weezer......

Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré London has been home to more double-acts than Great Yarmouth pier. Just off the top of the head, there’s Johnson & Boswell, the Adam Brothers, Holmes and Watson, the Krays, and recent North-London comedy duo Henry and Pires. Add to the mix the little-known Victorian pairing of Blanchard Jerrold and Gustave Doré, whose minor classic ‘London A Pilgrimage’ has just been re-released by Anthem Press. Londonist has wanted to......

The riots in France couldn’t happen here in London, right? Our society is far more integrated and recognising of other cultures - isn’t it? Well, so the news commentators keep saying. But when it comes down to it, many of us are dangerously ignorant of other faiths and ethnicities. Only today, a poll by the BBC indicated that more than a third of UK citizens have no understanding of Islam, while 37% of Muslims......

Hot Stuff is a small anonymous restaurant, so small and anonymous in fact that, on first glance, it hardly seems fair to describe it as a ‘restaurant’. Anyone walking down Wilcox Road (itself a rather nondescript thoroughfare that connects the South Lambeth Road to the Wandsworth Road in Stockwell) would probably dismiss the place as a café, that is if they even noticed it tucked away next to the off-licence and the chip shop.......

This Sunday, India's glammest festival: Diwali will be celebrated in Trafalgar Square. Diwali is celebrated on a grand scale in almost all the regions of India. Designed to celebrate the victory of good over evil, and "the glory of light over darkness", the word Diwali itself means ‘a row of lamps’ and traditionally homes are lit with the glow of small earthen lamps to welcome Lakshmi, the Goddess of wealth and prosperity. In Trafalgar......

If you love the legend they call Bob, then there's a wealth of goodies coming your way. You have 5 nights at Brixton in November. You have Uncut's 100th Anniversary issue with it's Highway 61 Revisited Revisted cd, his seminal album re-recorded by Uncut favourites such as The Drive By Truckers, Paul Westerberg and Richmond Fontaine (American Music Club's mournful psychadelic cover of Queen Jane Approximately and Dave Alvin's slow spoken soulful blues take......

Now that the clocks have changed and good weather is upon us, it feels like it's time to work off that winter fat by engaging in some outdoor pursuits. Surely our fair city has a wealth of opportunities for those willing to shun the pub and the joypad? Whenever Londonist goes for a stroll around town, we invaribly stumble across a group of fresh-faced enthusiasts engaged in some kind of rigourous individual or team......

The Way We See It is a side project which has sprung out of the burgeoning London Photobloggers site. The idea is to elect a specific London location each week and then invite a group of photographers to go out and capture that location in their own style. As the website explains: "The project aims to see how differently people view and perceive the same place through the lens". The Way We See It......

A wealth of sports news today, the major story being that London's bid to host the opening stages of the Tour de France looks likely to be accepted. According to "French officials" whose job it is to assess the applications, London's bid is currently wearing the yellow jersey, with other cities such as Utrecht, Rotterdam, Lugano (which we thought was a car) and Herning struggling behind in the wrong gear (that's enough of the......