The Big Smoke

When it comes to new technology, I am an embarrassingly late adopter. If I was a prehistoric man, I'd still be soldiering on with square wheels long after the family in the cave next door had switched to the circular variety. But when it comes to Twitter, even I can see the benefits of this terrific, and endearingly personal, networking tool. I can get the latest news from my favourite museums and galleries, follow the best London bloggers, keep track of Mayor's Question Time, or converse with the

Along with a set of golf clubs and a dartboard with Field Marshal Montgomery's face on, a monster trawl of Associated Press newsreels from the 1960s and '70s has been discovered in a bunker used by Eisenhower as his WWII headquarters. You can find it just down the road from us on Tottenham Court Road - it's called the Eisenhower Centre. It's one of the eight deep-level tube shelters built during World War II – Big Smoke editor Peter Watts saw inside one of them at Chancery Lane last year.

The haul was unveiled last night at BAFTA in Piccadilly, and it's a real (reel?) treasure trove. The 3,500 hours of ace footage include...

I developed a crush on the bollards of London after watching Ben Hopkins's mindbending experimental London classic 'The Nine Lives Of Tomas Katz' - see the brilliant trailer here - at the ICA, back in the days when I was young and funky (do people still say funky?) enough to watch mindbending experimental London classics at the ICA.

So imagine my delight when I stumbled upon the Bollards of London blog. This site is still in is infancy but has the potential to become THE destination London blog – you could call it canonical – for all things bollardian (see what I did there?). It is the work of John The Cabby, who has a number of other blogs...

I’ve written before about the need for the Metropolitan Police to have their own museum – this would be a great way for the beleaguered Met to meet the public face-to-face and try to win their support and trust after recent problems. Well, it’s finally happened, albeit in truncated form, with the opening of the bijou Met Collection in the lobby of a Met-owned building on Lillie Road in West Brompton.

Be warned: it is very small – half-a-dozen cases asked to tell the story of 180 years of policing in London. But the content is good: the 100 or so exhibits range from nineteenth-century cutlasses to the uniform Jack Warner wore...