"If I were in London now or in the next few weeks, instead of Frieze I'd probably be getting to these shows." Rod's lists are always good.

"Something terrible has happened in our city (and may yet continue to happen). It's damnable, deplorable, heartbreaking. But it is also extraordinary, unusual, bizarre. Slamming the door on it without studying and understanding it is a dangerous and short-term tactic. Allowing yourself to feel nothing but anger, and doing nothing but lashing out ... isn't that a little mindless? It would be nice, and useful, if we could ask London "why" without already having an answer in mind." Excellent, sober, cautious writing from Will Wiles.

"You wouldn’t think you could get homesick for a simple button. You’d be wrong."

"Deep craft is more than knowledge. It is a set of knowings. Knowing what is likely to work and what not to work. Knowing what methods to use, what principles are likely to succeed, what parameter values to use in a given technique. Knowing whom to talk to down the corridor to get things working, how to fix things that go wrong, what to ignore, what theories to look to. This sort of craft-knowing takes science for granted and mere knowledge for granted. And it derives collectively from a shared culture of beliefs, an unspoken culture of common experience." Craft / scenius / place / knowledge. The W Brian Arthur sounds great, and Matt's point - that building strength in a sector is building culture, and that requires investment in something that won't see immediate returns (rather than "five-year plans" and "strategies") is acute. Very good stuff.

I walked 4.5km down the A10, stopping every 200m or so to ask 10 unsuspecting passers by ... "Excuse me, what area is this?" This is what I was told.

"Hooray! Someone has put John Smith’s short film, The Girl Chewing Gum (1976), on YouTube... The film consists almost entirely of a single continuous shot of Stamford Road in Dalston Junction, a downbeat area of east London... The conceit of the film is that everything that moves or appears within shot - pedestrians, cars, pigeons, even clocks – is following the instructions of an omnipotent director who appears to be behind the camera: ‘Now I want the man with white hair and glasses to cross the road … come on, quickly, look this way … now walk off to the left.’ Pedestrians put cigarettes in their mouths, talk to each other, eat chips, take their glasses off, cast a glance behind them or look at the camera, all at the apparent behest of this offscreen director."

"The route of the [Metropolitan] line between Paddington and Bayswater (opened in 1868) necessitated the demolition of 23 and 24 Leinster Gardens, situated on a long, upmarket terrace of five story houses, and it was decided to build a 5ft-thick facade which matched the houses either side of the break."

"All true Londoners have a south London past. There they experienced their first flat, their first date, their first taste of city life, with nothing too exotic. They dallied in Clapham, flirted with Dulwich, tested their mortgage muscle on Stockwell. (I lived awhile in Upper Norwood.) South London is the kind of place, as was said of George Bush, that “reminds every woman of her first husband”." I enjoyed a lot of this article by Simon Jenkins, although he goes *way* too far when he mentions Cyprus and Yugoslavia...

"Perhaps the Shoreditch startups are more effective than their Dutch counterparts not just because they do more with less... but because they are in London. A city at a different scale than Amsterdam or for that matter the greater Amsterdam area, the Randstad as we call it around these parts. A city with a more diverse ecosystem of services and things, smaller services, more specialised services, ready to be employed by companies like BERG and RIG and Tinker, enhancing their abilities when needed."

"A rain-proof planetarium machine could be installed in public, anchored to the plinth indefinitely. Lurking over the square with its strange insectile geometries, the high-tech projector would rotate, dip, light up, and turn its bowed head to shine the lights of stars onto overcast skies above. Tourists in Covent Garden see Orion's Belt on the all-enveloping stratus clouds—even a family out in Surrey spies a veil of illuminated nebulae in the sky." This is lovely, though no idea if it'd, you know, work.

"John Leighton's hexagonal map only extended about 6 miles from the centre of London, but it's a relatively process to extend more concentric rings of hexes, turning the Great Wen into a setting for a boardgame, Settlers of Catan or Squad Leader re-imagined upon London." Wargaming/Catan pretty much leapt into my mind, too. I like this.

"Explore London on foot with our suggestions for some great capital walks, including riverside rambles, architectural adventures, even the odd pub crawl." A useful page to bookmark.

"Cracking the bus network is really the key to most cities, and we’re nearly at the point of directed bus serendipity. In London, at least."

'London police are now deleting tourists' photos because "photographing anything to do with transport is strictly forbidden."' Oh god.

"This project, shot on 4"x5" film, documents London's remaining professional darkrooms. It is based on my nostalgia for a dying craft (there are no young printers). It is in these rooms that printers have worked their magic, distilling the works of photographers such as David Bailey, Anton Corbijn and Nick Knight into a recognisable 'look'. I have lit these often-gloomy spaces to reveal the beauty of the machinery; enlargers are masterpieces of industrial design. And I have sought to shed light on the surrounding personal workspaces (snapshots of family members, souvenirs from globetrotting photographers, guidebooks to Photoshop, out-takes from glamour shoots, lists of unpaid invoices)." Gorgeous.

"Majini have gone through a small part of London, leaving behind a trail of remnant body parts from their victims. Find the bodies on the morning of Thursday March 12th and win a vacation to Africa." Um. Really not sure this is the best kind of live event, chaps.

In its entirety, on Google Video.

Gmap of all the Sam Smiths pub in London. Or, at least, a lot of them. The Cardinal isn't on there, for starters.

Jaw-droppingly good. More on this soon, but in a nutshell: you have about a week, and it's incredible. Do not ignore the queues inside it, either: they are all for excellent things.

"Every year on or around the same day ... at the same time of day and from the same position a photograph is taken at each of the twenty locations on this map which is based on a circle of half a mile radius drawn around the place where the project was devised. It is hoped that this process will be carried on into the future and beyond the deviser's death for as long as the possibility of continuing and the will to undertake the task persist." Tom Phillips project, as mentioned in Reading the Everyday.

A blog from Tom, Flora, and no doubt shortly et al, about life in Hackney.

"All of sudden, I realized that the grime pirates had become a niche thing, a micro-culture that probably wasn’t that much bigger than the anti-pop vanguards that populated the pages of The Wire." Simon Reynolds on grime for The Wire.

"Film showings from London's independent cinemas for the coming week." A bit like Tourfilter for movies. Roland's pet project, running on Sinatra/Thin/nginx (erk!). Looking forward to see it grow.

"This exhibition rediscovers the intriguing work of the Festival Pattern Group. This creative conglomerate of X-ray crystallographers, designers and manufacturers was inspired by the patterns discovered in crystal structures..." Anyone want to go?

"That’s why I enjoy @towerbridge so much - less the concept of machines talking, but more a simple reminder of the disrupted moments in everyday city life." All this is also true. Beautifully put, by Tom.

"I thought I would write a little about how the places and spaces that were familiar to us had begun to warp and twist in entirely new ways, and how I experienced new, unfamiliar places as a result of the birth."

For The Dulwich Horror TO LET signs across London will form the canvas onto which Dean Kenning will paint images representing the supernatural and monstrous entities from H.P.Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos.

Lots of good stuff in this year's Sci-Fi London festival - Things To Come in HD, and a Quatermass double bill, for starters...

"The map is an idealisation, a beautiful illusion of symmetry and grace. It gives form and order to the formless and disordered appearance of the capital." - Peter Ackroyd in the New Statesman, on the exhibition of London's Maps at the BL.

Lovely looking board-games shop in Greenwich. Must go down there soon!

Awesome awesome shop. Must read this later

I'm going.