The Big Smoke

London is about to go Tudor crazy, so here are five very different looks at the cult and character of Henry VIII from You Tube.

1 Seeing the funny side of execution, Sid James says goodbye to one of his wives at the Tower in 'Carry on Henry'.

2 A lusty Robert Shaw in the Thames mud from 'A Man For All Seasons'.

3 Lustier still, it's some hardcore bodice ripping from Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the extraordinary 'The Tudors'.

4 Homer Simpson belts out 'I'm Enery The Eighth, I am'.

5 Harry Hill's hilarious take on...

It is 400 years since Galileo picked up a telescope and pointed it at the sky. To celebrate 2009 is International Year of Astronomy (IYA). Greenwich’s Royal Observatory is running a year-long programme of events, including next week’s Spring Moonwatch. We asked Dr Marek Kukula, the Observatory’s public astronomer, for his advice on sky-watching in London.

1 Get a telescope the size of a bus
'For public events such as Moonwatch, we use this 28-inch refracting telescope, which has a lens 28 inches across. It is the biggest of its kind in the UK and was at the cutting edge of technology when it was made in the late-nineteenth century.’

2 Small can be beautiful too
‘For public events, we’re also...

It seems like interest in paganism in London is on the rise. Perhaps it's the state of the world - financial armageddon, the catastrophe of climate change and the never-ending religious strife – or perhaps it's delayed feedback from the Ackroyd/Sinclair quasi-mystical way of looking at the city, but London's lost folklore, its recently invented ancient history, is experiencing a revival.

Two books have recently been published on the subject - 'London Lore' by Steve Roud and 'The Folklore of London' by Anthony Clayton - and it is also the subject of a sold-out all-day conference at the...