Changelog

Type your postcode and you get the planning applications around you, led by the ones still inside their comment period and the day each one closes. It reads the Greater London Authority's Planning London Datahub, which collects what all 33 planning authorities publish — 2,991 applications across London were open for comment when it went live. Where a council has not fed the datahub for months, the page says so rather than showing you an empty list.

The Royal Parks closed the Serpentine Lido at the end of July after finding signs of blue-green algae, and the swim guide now says so, alongside a standing note on blooms in London's lakes. Brockwell's handover to Active Lambeth has happened, so its details point there now. London Fields was carrying a 2025 price that was wrong — it is £6.40, or £4.55 on Better's free pay-as-you-go membership — and Charlton had no price at all: £11.50, or £9.50 with a Greenwich One Card. The Hampstead prices now come from the City of London's own tickets page, which is where the useful discovery is: the Lido's breakfast and evening swims are £5, against £8.80 in the middle of the day.

The comparison had been serving 2025/26 figures four months into the new tax year. All 33 councils are updated from the GLA's published table, and the Mayor's precept with them — £510.51 at Band D, up £20.13, or £176.38 in the City of London. The gap between the cheapest and dearest council is now £1,589: Wandsworth £1,020.35, Kingston £2,609.20. Wandsworth and Merton use their own published charges rather than the national average, which folds in the Wimbledon and Putney Commons levy that only nearby streets pay — there is a note about it on the page.

London's page now opens with a colored-pencil banner of a Hampstead Heath bathing pond, the distant City towers low on the summer horizon.

Cheap and free swimming is one of London's real joys. The new guide gathers the Hampstead ponds, the great lidos (Parliament Hill, London Fields, Tooting Bec, Brockwell, Charlton) and the Serpentine in one place — when each is open, roughly what it costs, and how to get there — and is honest that the tidal Thames is not for swimming.

London makes its own heat — the city passed 40°C for the first time in July 2022, and it holds warmth worst of all overnight. The new tool reads the hourly heat and air forecast together, names the easier windows, and says plainly when no hour is a good one — pointing first at the official Heat-Health Alert and NHS advice.

Today's air quality in central London in plain language, updated hourly, with pollen in season — the pollution the ULEZ is meant to cut, and who should take more care on a bad day.

Type your postcode to find which borough you're in and this year's council tax for your band — then see how it compares across every London council, from Wandsworth (the cheapest) to Kingston (the dearest). Your postcode is used once to find your council and never stored.

London's first tools are up: a live Tube, DLR, Elizabeth line, Overground and Tram status board, a calculator for what it costs to drive into the city (ULEZ plus the Congestion Charge), and Environment Agency flood warnings for the Thames. London runs across 33 councils, so these all-London tools come first; borough-level tools (bins, council tax, schools) come next.