Ravish London

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mps-vips-chil...

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/victims-alleg...

http://www.exaronews.com/articles/5322/dolphin-squ...

http://www.exaronews.com/articles/5323/mps-celebri...

www.exaronews.com/articles/5398/ex-mi6-chief-named-as-sexual-abuser-of-boys-at-dolphin-square

http://www.spectator.co.uk/features/9260031/a-very...

https://twitter.com/search?q=%20river%20lea&src=ty...

I'm looking for a heating engineer to install a new boiler in our house.

I understand that the person installing the boiler should be on the gas register.

There are plenty of engineers on the gas register close to where I live, but I am unsure as to how I can work out who the best are?

I've had a look at checkatrade.com which gives an average ranking for people who install boilers. However, oddly, the majority of names on checkatrade don't come up on the gas register.

Conversely most of the people on the gas safety register do not appear to be on checkatrade or any reviews website for that matter.

Does this mean there are alot of people, alot of highly rated people according to checkatrade, that are not gas safety registered?

Take J Smith and Sons (London) Ltd for example, they appear on Checkatrade and on http://www.worcester-bosch.co.uk/ as 'accredited installers' and yet their details don't seem to appear at all on the gas safety register.

http://www.gassaferegister.co.uk/registersearch/fi...

London and New York have been linked for years by finance and business, but seem also to share a common cultural history, which may help explain that following the development of graffiti art in New York, Londoners and Brits quickly picked up on these practices, introducing them to the streets of London in the 1980s. Adam Neate for example talking to Aesthetic Magazine described his own journey and the influence of American graffiti art:, “In the mid-80s my cousin was interested in the graffiti scene. VHS was coming over and there were a few graffiti videos coming from America and also acts like the Beastie Boys and hip-hop music. I would go to my cousin’s house where we would mess around with spray cans; I was only nine or ten at the time. As I got older I discovered books including Subway Art and Spray Can Art, which I would get from the library, they were really colourful, and I wanted to replicate what I saw."

Malarky, a street artist who paints in London regularly, provided the following account in Street Art London: I was always a doodler and then when i got into skateboarding when i was 13 or 14 I was subjected to a lot more art that related to me and this is when I started doing drawings for stickers and putting them about, gradually got into doing graffiti and for a while I was doing letter pieces but my letters normally always ended up turning into characters and then I started focusing on characters and just drawing stuff that made me smile… I worked a few different design jobs and started meeting like minded people that were already working as successful artists, loved the studio culture and just chilling with friends and drawing so I just started doing that. As far as street art goes, I like to paint outside, I can’t really explain it, I like to add some colour to the streets and reclaim a bit of bland street surface, if you what I mean. Here we see then that someone who just liked to doodle, seemed to evolve into doing graffiti, although interestingly Malarky seems to gloss over the day he decided to turn from private doodler to public vandal.

In the United Kingdom it was arguably Banksy who set the trend in making the jump from graffiti to street art. Together with the national media, who captured and communicated his work up and down the country, Banksy, Moses like, raised the consciousness of graffiti artists and conventional artists, showing them the possibilities, utilities and benefits of depositing street art in the promised land known as London. In fact it wouldn’t be surprising if, Banksy, who has proven to be an expert in the creation and maintenance of a successful commercial brand, deliberately targeted London as part of a strategy to make a name for his brand. For many street artists, who have ambitions to be known and for success, it's not just producing street art that matters, but producing street art that matters, which means producing street art in London. As Aidan While points out, “the social production of art is a collective practice that depends on complex interactions between artists and… patrons, dealers, critics, gallery owners and collectors"

Since then the street art has taken on a life and energy independently of Banksy. Gallery owners and graphic studios in Shoreditch seem to have been prompted by the work of Banksy to commission art on their walls. This seems to have encouraged a constant flow of gratuitous work, posted illegally, for company. The result is a cacophony of colour and oddity; a square mile of street art. Shoreditch has come to be seen as the spiritual home of street art, as the place where street artists, from all over the world come, some invited and commissioned, some not, to put up their work. Banksy, who came from Bristol to put his street art up in London, was the pathfinder, the first of many to beat a path to the Big Smoke to show their wares. Still most of this is theoretical, it would be interesting to know, from those in the know, when street art first arrived on the streets of London and who bought it here, and at what point Shoreditch began to turn into the open air art gallery that it is today – answers on a postcard. It would also be interesting to find out more about the development and emergence of institutions like Village Underground, the place on Curtain Road and even places like 333 who regularly commission artwork on their walls, and who or what influenced them to do this.

I am coming to the end of my tenancy.

My landlord says that we need to do a check out inventory.

I am not sure what we will be comparing the check out inventory with. At the beginning of our tenancy the landlord did not arrange for an inventory. Instead he sent us a check out report from a tenant who had moved out two months previous to us moving in. We checked the check out report, but it made reference to the inventory that was taken when the previous tenant had moved in. So we asked for this initial inventory. We received it six weeks into our tenancy. We then sent the check out report and initial inventory back to the landlord with additional comments. No document was formally agreed or signed.

I have called several inventory firms. One said that a landlord who does not have an initial inventory cannot require a check out. Another said they can do the check out but cannot apportion blame. A third said that they can do a check out based on all the documentation I have talked about.

What do people think?

Do I need to do a check out inventory?

My landlord has written an email to me to say that he intends to give me a month's notice from the date of the email.

However the contract states that he needs to send a written letter sent first class post or hand delivered.

He has done neither of these things yet.

If he sends me a letter in a weeks time, stating that he wants me to move out two months from when he sent the email is this OK?

Or should I be using the date the letter was stamped?

Or the date used in the letter itself?

Or the date the letter arrived?

Does the email suffice for the landlord? Does it form a legal notification?

s video ends with a woman wearing a bunny rabbit suit disappearing into a crowd in a disco?

Circa 1991

Would you recommend any good pubs for pub lunches?

I just thought with all the great produce that's on hand at Borough Market some of the pubs should do some really good food?

I am thinking of moving to Becontree in Dagenham, could anyone tell me what it is like to live there?

I am looking for a formula in Excel, which searches for any text in one cell, and which returns one value if text found, and no value if text not found.

I've noticed on some web pages you can put your mouse over a link and it calls up a small box, which provides a mini-view of the page to which the link refers.

Is there some simple HTML code which one can use for this?

Thinking about visiting British Museum Thursday morning - and would like a good place to eat and have a drink at lunch time - preferably a pub but I am open to ideas. RL