2 minutes, 38 seconds of Cosplayers from the Winter London Film & Comic Con

Lies the London Underground tells you

Amusing gents Tom Scott and Matt Parker take a look at some of the Tube’s little white lies.

Video: Soho's green roofs are really cool

Would it not be great if the city had more of these?

Video by dustygedge on Vimeo

How Australians view East Londoners

The brothers Van Vuuren visited London last year on holiday from Australia. Their video London Underground by “Cnife Krime” is their artistic representation of their experiences.

London's oldest anarchist bookshop firebombed over the weekend

Whitechapel’s Freedom Press, founded in 1886, was firebombed last Friday by persons unknown. Brian Whelan at Vice has the definitive story.

It’s not business as usual, but the shop has re-opened today. They would love donations of books.

Fire on the ground as helicopter crashes in Vauxhall

Video by niczerogoeshome

According to the BBC, a helicopter crashed in to a crane. There is no information on injuries at this time.

Related: 520 firefighters, 18 fire engines and 12 fire stations face axe

Watch 93 Feet East get raided by 175 cops, the Met helicopter, and dog units to arrest five people for possession

This video, supplied by the Met, proudly one supposes, shows the vast overkill that their ‘Operation Condor’ exerted on Brick Lane venue, 93 Feet East.

Intended as ‘a major capital-wide crackdown by the Metropolitan Police on crimes relating to licensing issues,’ all the officers, including the public order specialist branch, helicopter, and dogs arrested five people on suspicion of possessing Class A drugs, two people on suspicion of being concerned in the supply of drugs, one for being drunk and disorderly, and one for being the poor guy in control of the premises. The Met also arrested that one creature even worse than a single mum on the dole, an illegal immigrant.

The Chicken Cottage Awards on video

We’re a little late on this, but as the London Video Log of record we could not ignore this amazing work, the annual awards ceremony of Chicken Cottage,

The fried chicken shop may be London’s most significant contribution to food culture, so it is gratifying to find that its largest representative takes its leadership seriously.

Here’s Part 2:

Previously

The secret shame of London’s fried chicken shops

Cirque du Hoxton Overground

In this latest video from Londoner Remy Archer, the morning commute on the Overground becomes a circus train.

City History: Soho's Chinatown is a product of World War Two

Chinatown Oral History Project – Part1 from Collins Tam on Vimeo.

In this video (it takes 55 seconds to get going) a Chinese man, so old he claims not to know his own age, tells the story of his life and of Soho’s Chinatown.

From it we learn that the original Chinatown was in Limehouse, clustered round the sailors working at the docks. But then the bombs of World War Two forced another displacement of Chinese Londoners, further west to Soho.

Collins Tam’s film is also good at explaining some of the outward pressures pushing people to leave China and come to the UK in the mid-20th century.

For more Chinese London stories, see our in-depth interview with photographer Mike Tsang. He explains how the children of those first immigrants deal with their complex Chinese/British heritage.

And there’s a brilliant post from 2009 here about the mistreatment which the original inhabitants of Chinatown in Limehouse received from the popular press. The Yellow Peril, and all that.

More city history:

More demonisation of immigrants, and a gun-toting chase across Edwardian Walthamstow – Filmmaker Si Mitchell brilliantly explains the Tottenham Outrage of 1909
Protected building porn – English Heritage’s round up of London’s newest listed buildings
Samuel Pepys gets a steel rod up his cock – Dr Richard Barnett’s Sick City Project for the Wellcome Trust