The existence of the Royal Menagerie, established at the Tower in the 13th Century and comprising many fabulous and exotic beasts is well known. However, the London approach to the keeping of zoological collections was nowhere near as enlightened then as it is now. The menagerie was maintained as a symbol of the King's wealth, power and influence and used to entertain courtiers and scare the pants off traitors and enemies. Unfortunately, this meant that the noble North African lions were kept in ignoble conditions, with scarce enough room to wiggle, let along swing their glorious regal manes, their equivalent of the peacock's tail, used to get the lionesses hot. Although, no evidence of lady lions has been unearthed so no wonder they're extinct now.

Rather sadly as well, despite being adopted as heraldic symbols for the King, those heartless medievalists simply dumped the lions' bodies in the Tower moat when they finally keeled over from cold, boredom and umbrage at being cooped up so unceremoniously.

Still, the Menagerie was a fixture at the Tower for hundreds of years until it eventually closed in 1835 when the animals were sent to the zoological gardens at Regent's Park, laying the foundations for the marvellously conservation and animal welfare minded institution we now call London Zoo.

Image courtesy of the National History Museum, copyright NHM.

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Everyone knows about London Bridge moving to the States. Most people are aware that Marble Arch was formerly outside Buckingham Palace, and that the Crystal Palace hopped from North to South.

But a Christopher Wren church in Missouri? Part of the House of Commons in Belsize Park? Next to a section of old Waterloo Bridge? Who knew?

Thankfully, Londonist keeps a watchful eye on the city's buildings. The itinerant structures have been mapped for your perusal. Blue lines represent whole buildings, red lines show parts of buildings. Click on markers for images (in most cases).

Please let us know in the comments if you have any additions or corrections.

As you may have noticed Formula 1 is getting into gear again across the other side of the world with races so far in Australia and Malaysia. One man propping his eyelids open in the early hours to follow the spectacle is London blogger Keith Collantine who runs F1Fanatic, a site dedicated to the sport. Londonist caught up with him as he emerged from lunchtime hibernation after the first race of the season in Melbourne and he told us about the latest rule changes, the mystery of the disappearing London Grand Prix and the joys of live blogging the F1 action.

How did you get into Formula 1?

I started watching Formula 1 when I was about eight. Nigel Mansell was driving for Ferrari, so you had this incredibly popular British driver driving for the world's most famous Formula 1 team. All my mates got into football and I just got into Formula 1 more and more. As everyone says it's a sport and it's a business, but it's also a white hot technological endeavour. Everything that the team does is 24/7, 365 days a year to get the driver onto the grid, but once the driver's there it's all down to him for two hours. It is a team sport, but it's also a sport for individuals and it puts these guys under tremendous pressure and you see what it does to them. When I first started watching Formula 1 in the days of Ayrton Senna and Alain Prost they did some incredibly extreme things. I mean, Senna took Prost off at 150mph in one race. It's not just the controversy, there's a lot of excitement in there. The pressure and the various conflicting things going on is all part of the appeal.

So how do you go from that to doing the site?

F1Fanatic started in 2005. It wasn't a blog at first. It was just a website, a place for me to write about the sport that I was interested in. At the time I was working in PR and looking to move over into motor sport journalism, because obviously that's what I know, and I thought it would just be a good place to get some writings together. It's evolved. It became a blog at the start of 2006 and it's now become a place for F1 fans to find out about races they can go to and to share experiences with people who've been to races across the globe - Malaysia and Canada and so on. We still follow the races as usual, and the new thing that we've just started for this season is live blogging the races. So last night I was on there with about eighty-odd other people on a live blog that we have with everyone commenting and it was great because we had some people watching ITV and some people watching the American feed and some people watching the German feed. Formula 1 is such an incredibly complicated sport. In a football match all the cameraman has to do is follow where the ball goes. That's really all that's interesting, but in a Formula 1 race you've got twenty-two cars and each one of those cars is a story and there's no way you can follow them all at once. I think blogging offers a brand new and really sophisticated, modern way to follow Formula 1 and get all the stories at once. There was stuff going on in the race last night which ITV, who do a pretty good job on the whole, missed out on and that's always going to be the case.

Picture of the 2004 London Formula 1 demonstration event via jtstewart's Flickr stream.

What are the key things that draw people to your site?

There's lots of Formula 1 blogs out there and a lot that I really like. Most of them concentrate on just following the sport as it is today, the latest news and gossip and so on. F1Fanatic is a little bit more broad perhaps. I occasionally do articles on history and perhaps spend a little bit more time looking at the motor sport world beyond Formula 1. I'm into things like GP2, which is the category where a lot of Formula 1's drivers come from. That's where Lewis Hamilton raced. Timo Glock and Nelson Piquet Jr and Kazuki Nakajima, who've all made their debuts this year, all came through GP2.

F1Fanatic also has quite a lot of content. I'd say we average at least two or three pieces a day and I've had feedback from people saying that they like to know that they can come on at any given point during a day and probably find a new article. Apart from that you've got the general reasons why blogs are really popular today as an alternative to mainstream media. There are always, I think, in any topic, and obviously Formula 1's a niche topic, areas that the mainstream media doesn't cover so well, or perhaps chooses not to cover. One interesting thing that happened when McLaren got their big penalty last year in September, the FIA, the governing body of motor sport published the documents of the different discussions that they'd had, outlining everything that had been said, but allowing McLaren and Ferrari to censor out any bits of confidential technical information that they didn't want the general public getting - wheelbases, weight distributions, things like that - and other sensitive information such as how much their members of staff were being paid. When the FIA published the PDF document they didn't censor it properly and you could actually read everything. So, I put that up on F1Fanatic and that was the most read individual post last year. It got on to text blogs, it got sent round lots of Formula 1 blogs and it was everywhere. I did not read it in a newspaper, I didn't read it in any of the specialist motor sport press, and that surprises me. Blogs always go for that kind of story and I think that's why people increasingly keep an eye on blogs as well as mainstream media because I think that way they feel like they're getting the full picture.

What's the situation with the idea of a London grand prix?

Formula 1 can go to places like Singapore and Malaysia and the government will fund the building of the track and they'll spend hundreds and millions of dollars on it. Silverstone in Northamptonshire, which is run by the British Racing Drivers Club, cannot compete with that and Bernie Ecclestone, who runs the commercial side of Formula 1, is constantly putting them under pressure for this. It seemed like a couple of years ago that his next big plan was to ask for the British Grand Prix to become a street race held in London and this is something he's really stepped up on in the last twelve months. So this year, for example, Formula 1's having two new street races on the calendar - one in Valencia and one in Singapore. Back in 2004 it did look like we were going to have a Grand Prix in London and so they had this demonstration run [pictured above] which went up Regent Street and a couple of other roads. They had loads of spectators, a quarter of a million or something like that if I remember correctly, but a race didn't come together and I'm not entirely sure why. That was 2004. There were no British drivers doing particularly well in F1 at that time. There was just Button and Coulthard. Button was having a reasonable year, Coulthard was basically nowhere, there was no Lewis Hamilton and yet still everyone turned out. One could assume, obviously, that London's been pitched in for the Olympics and it's got plenty of other things going on. I suspect that the government groups involved have gone cold on the idea.

What I do know is that last year Shell put together at great expense a very, very big advertising campaign with Ferrari where they had footage of lots of historic Formula 1 cars driving through the cities of the world and it included New York and Rio de Janeiro and Rome and one of the venues originally was going to be London, but it wasn't because the city council or something like that said that it would be a danger to public safety and so they didn't do it. If they're not willing to let one car in closed circumstances drive down a street it doesn't sound like they're keen to have twenty-two Formula 1 cars racing around the street of London, which is a shame because it would be fun.

How could you get involved in motor sport if you were in London?

Basically karting is all that there's going to be in London, scaled down things that race on small tracks, the kind of thing that young racing drivers cut their teeth on. I think the only track in the centre is at Kings Cross, which I believe is only bookable for corporate events. I have been there once or twice myself.

What are the big rule changes to watch out for in F1 this year?

The biggest change is that they've got rid of traction control which is the little electronic computer gizmo that kicks in when a driver puts his foot to the throttle that makes sure he doesn't accelerate too hard and spin off. Basically they've said that all the teams have to use a mandatory piece of electronic equipment which they can monitor to make sure that the teams are not using traction control and of course the argument here is that the big manufacturers - Ferrari, BMW, Mercedes, Honda, Toyota, Renault - all want these traction control systems on the car because it's good R&D for them. They can develop these systems and make their road car systems better, but from the point of view of Formula 1 as a sport it's terrible because it means that the driver isn't controlling one of the most fundamental things of the car and there's been a big argument rumbling on about this for years since the early 90s. Finally this year they've banned it again and found a way by which they can police this ban and the change that it made in the Australian race was massive. All of a sudden the cars look on screen very, very hard to drive. Don't get me wrong, they were very hard to drive last year, but the difference is now it's clear to the spectator, and to the people watching on TV, just how hard these guys are working. We see them making little mistakes more. There were one or two crashes this morning and it makes it look more spectacular, makes it easier to appreciate what the driver's doing. That's a big thing. The banning of traction control has other knock-on effects that I won't bore you with, but the basic message is the driver is now a bigger part of the equation than they used to be and that for Formula 1 as a sport is a great thing. Based on what I saw this morning I'm confident of a really good season this year.

Do you think Lewis Hamilton will win it this year?

Well, I was very impressed with him this morning - a really clinical win from him. It was a lot like his first win last year. It was a really mad race. The safety car was out a lot, there were quite a lot of crashes, a lot of debris and muck on the track and he just cruised around and won it. Up until seeing that race I was fairly cool on his chances because I thought Ferrari were going to be a bit further ahead than they were today, so I definitely think from a point of view of driving ability he's able to do it. He was able to do it last year. Things went wrong and the team was under a lot of pressure at the end of the year. I would say he can definitely do it, provided the McLaren is competitive all season long and based on what I've seen so far, I think it will be.

So we were delighted to see, in our favourite Facebook group, People who like to sit at the front of the DLR and pretend they're driving, a wall post from the DLR's PR manager David Sanders offering a free DLR goody bag to anyone who emailed him asking nicely. We duly sent off and our goody bag of wonders arrived a few days later (see picture). The DLR watches are particularly cheery, and the cardboard DLR train packaging for the jelly beans was cute, ingenious and brilliantly frivolous. (There was also a DLR pen included which we forgot to put in the photo, but rest assured, it's very classy.)

Now David has kindly agreed to send out more DLR goody bags to Londonist readers who are quick off the mark and email him at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it . Fellow wannabe DLR drivers, what are you waiting for? Get emailing!

Let this serve as a cautionary tale to illustrate why we never leave home without topping up our hip flask of whisky. Although some may insist we have a drink problem, you simply never know when you're going to be stranded on a major world tourist attraction with only water to imbibe.

Image courtesy of bortescristian's Flickr photostream.

The shy, retiring supermodel and occasional moral crusadee has parted company with £45,000 to get her hands on one of LTI's taxi cabs - a LTI-TX4, for those who like to keep abreast of these things. In recent days she's been papped rattling her hackney carriage around Hackney and other parts of town, ferrying celebrity chummettes from pub to boozer to watering hole and back to alehouse again, regaling them with dubiously wrought vexations on modern life and waxing loquaciously about those bloody foreigners pinching British jobs. The diligent folk at the Mail On Sunday have even prepared a photo gallery showing Kate behind the wheel, bless 'em.

Kate won't, however, escape the bane of modern London motoring, the congestion charge: despite the fare-paying fraternity being exempt, privately owned taxi cabs are not. Until she bones up on The Knowledge and starts picking up fares between Camden and Primrose Hill, she'll need to fork out the money like the rest of us mortals.

Image from mockney_piers' Flickrstream

Our own brave lads might be about to do battle with the mighty French in Paris (insert inappropriate Agincourt reference here), but even though there's nothing on at Wembley this time around that's no reason to miss out on some excellent live international footy this Wednesday evening. Indeed, our new national stadium will be hoping that the continuing prestige of London as a second footballing home for other countries rubs off when venues are selected on Friday for the next round of European club finals.

The Emirates is certainly fast becoming the European base for the phenomenon that is the Brazilian national squad and on Wednesday night they play host to Sweden in a friendly being billed as a rematch, half a century on, of the 1958 world cup final which Brazil wrested from the hosts in Stockholm by five goals to two. That day they were inspired by Pele, but sadly his modern successor, Ronaldinho of Barcelona, will not be gracing Arsenal's turf and neither will Kaka of Milan nor Swedish striker Zlatan Ibrahimovic of Juventus. Spectators will have to make do instead with promising youngsters such as Robinho of Real Madrid and Anderson of Manchester United. Fans of London-based clubs will be able to look out for Gilberto Silva (Arsenal), Alex (Chelsea) and Freddie Ljungberg (West Ham) while Arsenal old boy Sebastien Larsson will also be back, but, like Ljungberg, still turning out for the visitors. Some Club Level tickets are still available priced at £50 and £60.

Meanwhile, over at Craven Cottage, slightly more itinerant but no less frequent visitors to the capital Ghana will be entertaining Mexico. If anything this could provide the better entertainment as the Black Stars, like England, are always expected to give their all even in non-competitive matches and the central Americans are a handy side as they demonstrated at the last world cup when they took Argentina to extra time before being knocked out 2-1. Mexico feature no London based players (and, indeed, only one playing in England at all), but Ghana may field Chelsea midfielder Michael Essien and rarely sighted full back John Paintsil of West Ham. Tickets are available from Fulham from £20 to £35 with concessions at about half price.

Picture of a tower whose allegiance is in little doubt via General Wesc's Flickr stream.

A series celebrating the talent of our friends over in the Londonist Flickr pool who make our site look pretty with their fabulous photographs. Here, they introduce themselves and share their favourite London shots.

Full English Breakfast: "Bus photography from the 243" could be a genre of its own and gives you a privileged angle on the state of the nation.

I have been shooting film for a few years, mostly black and white, on a second hand Pentax reflex. As a long-standing anti-digital fanatic who firmly believed in the superiority of film and in the idea of "capturing light", "transforming energy" and all that nonsense, I thought I would never switch to digital. Another reason to shoot black & white was that I didn't need to bother with what may be the hardest element to fit in a picture, i.e. colour. When I started shooting digital, I was forced to learn "seeing in colour", and this remains the most difficult and exciting challenge ever since.

Marble Granite: When you start composing a picture just for the colours and a bloke suddenly decides to pass by training his biceps with a blue plastic bag, you feel blessed and grateful.

I am a geek with a camera. Waiting in the street for the good shot to come is like engaging in problem solving: when things work out as I like, this is probably because eye, hand muscles and the world out there just happen to work together nicely. In this sense, being so unpredictable, London is the ultimate destination for street photography, with the North-East as my favourite hunting ground.

Parsing: My tip for the ultimate Holy Saturday experience: Walthamstow High Street market is the place where everyday physics stops working.

I recently discovered a compulsive fascination for frontal compositions and serial shots, which may have started the day I spent several hours taking pictures of people on an escalator at Tate Modern.

Dario's photographs can be seen on his photo portfolio and Flickr stream. His Tate Blur series was recently featured by FILE Magazine and a series of pictures portraying Muslim women in London is due to appear in the next issue of Swindle Magazine

If you're a Flickrist don't forget to join our group and tag your quirky London photos "Londonist".