20 fascinating facts about east London

Recognise this? (See 17)

Spiral Notebook: Bridging the gap between now and the climate apocalypse

"Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors," said Jonas Salk, the polio vaccine pioneer.

Green: How east London keeps west London cool

What Shoreditch hipsters will tell you is confirmed by the environmentalists. It's east London that makes west London cool.

And that perennial role - as temperature regulator rather than fashion barometer - will become increasingly important as the capital comes to terms with the impact of climate change.

What's On: Ships, Clocks & Stars: The Quest For Longitude at National Maritime Museum

WHAT'S ON

In many ways, a major new exploration of the quest for longitude at the National Maritime Museum is the story of Greenwich itself.

Why London's bridges are more than just pieces of engineering

WHAT'S ON

The story of London is the story of river conquests.

From the first Roman pontoons, through the congested first London Bridge to the gothic splendour of Tower Bridge and onward to the prospect of a new Garden Bridge, these crossings are a reflection of a people and their times that carry more significance than mere engineering.

London should plan for more heatwaves

London can expect more extreme weather events over the next few years with the number of "uncomfortable" days of heatwave likely to double.

The rise of intensely sunny days should prompt architects and planners to start including "cool culture" design features to make life more bearable for overheated residents and workers, say experts.

Exhibition: Mammoths - Ice Age Giants, Natural History Museum

WHAT'S ON

Lyuba led a short life. But she has become endlessly significant.

At around 35 days, the infant mammoth tumbled into soft clay. Her trunk and oesophagus were clogged with mud and she suffocated.

Sundance review: Obvious Child

WHAT'S ON

Obvious Child
(tbc) 83mins
★★★✩✩

Obvious Child opens with scatty and scatological stand-up Donna Stern (Jenny Slate) ruminating on gussets and female flatulence.

Sundance review: Dinosaur 13

WHAT'S ON

Dinosaur 13
(tbc) 105mins
★★★★✩

Up until 1990, only 12 fossils of Tyrannosaurus Rex had been recovered, the best being 40% complete. The one miraculously preserved in the badlands of South Dakota Hills was 80% complete and a scientific marvel.

Sundance review: Fruitvale Station

WHAT'S ON

Fruitvale Station
(tbc) 85mins
On general release on June 6
★★★★★

We know it's going to end badly. Genuine mobile phone footage captures the chaos and discord on the platform of the eponymous station where a bunch of lads are corralled by jittery transport police on New Year's Eve in Oakland.

Sundance review: The Voices

WHAT'S ON

The Voices
103mins
★★★✩✩

If the measure of a movie is the decibel of debate that follows the closing credits, then The Voices will surely rank among the most memorable at Sundance London.

Dance review: Shadowland, Peacock Theatre

WHAT'S ON

DANCE
Shadowland
Peacock Theatre
★★★★✩

At the end of Shadowland, by way of an encore, the flexible folk of US-based Pilobolus said thanks - more accurately "cheers" - to the London crowd with a YouTube friendly silhouette romp depicting their journey across the pond.

Spiral Notebook: Nothing lasts forever

COMMENT

By Giles Broadbent

I met a man the other day who made history. Or at least extended its boundaries.

Dr Nick Ashton of the British Museum was one of the team who identified small indentations in slab of sedimentary rock as footprints and in doing so set a new marker on this country's ancient history.

Spiral Notebook: Why London's Left will be keeping an eye on New York Mayor Bill de Blasio

It's Eyes Left as Bill de Blasio takes up residence in New York City Hall with the promise of the kind of new socialism that Labour's Ed Miliband has been test-driving.

Combining tax-the-rich rhetoric with redistributive zeal, De Blasio, a former aide to the last Democrat Mayor (David Dinkins), arrived from nowhere in the 2013 primaries to take the most important municipal post in the US on the promise of aggressive remedies to close the "affordability gap".

Spiral Notebook: Red is the new green

There is a busy T-junction near my home. It is guarded by traffic lights. Cars obey. Pedestrians wait for the little green man. Cyclists ignore it all and do what the hell they want.

I cannot recall a single time a cyclist has stopped at these red lights if jumping them posed no risk to their safety (and theirs alone).

This observation could be made of any traffic light anywhere in London. Cyclists see them as mild inconveniences, much as they do the pedestrians they target when they take to the pavement for a shortcut.

Exhibition: Lowry And The Painting Of Modern Life, Tate Britain

Laurence S Lowry painted football matches. He painted evictions, and men at work and magnetised huddles around a suicide in the street.

Little wonder then that his work was popular and that popularity - as usual - was a double-edged sword, bringing him affection among "his" people and a derision and dismissal among the critics.

5 key moments of the Royal Mint at the Tower

A new permanent exhibiton at the Tower of London tells the tale of the tower's little-known role as the Royal Mint between 1279 and 1812. The exhibition focuses on five key episodes in the Mint's life, as explained by Curator Dr Megan Gooch, pictured.

Battle for heart and sole of Labour party

As the unions wrangle to get back their party from the Blairites - threatening to oust the Progress group from within its ranks - it is clear that the left-right tussle continues, two decades after New Labour came to prominence.

Last night, a revelation cast new light on the rightward bias of that revolutionary triumvirate of Blair, Campbell and Mandelson.

Former director of strategy and Blairite torch-bearer Alistair Campbell, launching the fourth instalment of his delicious diaries at the Mile End Group, revealed his bias is inherent and visceral.

He affirmed that his right leg was shorter than his left, requiring insoles to keep him walking in a straight line. If his audience at Queen Mary University Of London doubted his word - perish the thought - he removed his shoes and aired the devices.

Unassisted by artifice, it was clear that Campbell naturally veers to the right. The battle for the heart and sole of the Labour Party was won.

Redford and T-Bone talk movies and music

Music and movies have taken equal billing in the Sundance London festival, which runs over the weekend, and an evening with festival founder Robert Redford and hypercool music maestro T Bone Burnett was the perfect confluence of the two art forms.

At his press conference, Redford had been keen to push both strands of the festival suggesting that a hybrid of the two was fast becoming the next generation of the artform.

The first full-scale event at The O2 explored the theme further with Redford and T Bone reflecting on a career in which both had spent their careers attempting to enhance story-telling techniques with image and music.

Conversation - moderated by music-movie connoisseur Nick Hornby - was accompanied by film clips from O Brother Where Art Thou, Butch Cassidy, Ordinary People and others to illustrate the anecdotes.

And if that wasn't enough for the enthralled audience at a packed Indigo2, the songs were re-interpreted and played live by the sinuous Guillemots and Oscar-winning Glen Hansard.

The live music was raw and live, even to the point of Hansard abandoning his cheap instrument ($60 from a shop in Brooklyn) which kept falling out of tune to be replaced with a haunting unaccompanied folk ballad.

The Guillemots - who had their own small-scale version of technical difficulties - came out with a thrilling versions of, among others, A Man Of Constant Sorry and Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head.

That song - anachronistically placed in Butch Cassidy And The Sundance Kid - but capturing the revolutionary, free-love verve of its time - was one of a number of self-confessed misjudgments by Robert Redford.

"I thought 'it didn't even rain in the movie'," he said when shown the sequence. The song and the charged cycling scene which it accompanied was put in to give Paul Newman a romantic slant to his character.

Originally, Newman was slated to play the Sundance Kid but when they swopped roles he lost the girl, something that producers thought unpalatable when he was the bigger box office draw and Redford the newcomer.

Redford also cited his ignorance of the music of Scott Joplin before director George Roy Hill memorably used his jaunty piano score to create the rhythm and feel of The Sting.

But Redford's most famous dud call came with the comment "she's not going to sing, is she?" to Sydney Pollack about a certain Barbra Streisand in The Way We Were.

However, he had more success in his own movies, giving Randy Newman his break in the baseball film The Natural, an excerpt of which was now a familiar fall-back in baseball grounds and sports network studios.

And he introduced Pachelbel's Canon to the closing credit of Ordinary People. He said he had heard the music at a hotel on the Big Sur which he had walked when he was younger but it took him years to track down exactly what it was. He said it had the right mournful tone to end the film.

T Bone Burnett is the go-to guy in Hollywood for the recreation of authentic roots sounds.

His knowledge of the music of his home country made him a natural choice for "sound track movie" O Brother Where Art Thou> but his collaboration with the Coen Brothers began with cult classic The Big Lebowski.

He said: "[The Coens] just wanted me to put together, well if you were to say it in today's speak, put together the Dude's ipod playlist. The songs in the film were character-driven choices, that is, what would he listen to."

He worked for months with Reese Witherspoon and Joaquim Phoenix ["he quit everyday saying it was too big for him"] on Walk The Line, building up the band for months on end to recreate the organic history of the sound of Johnny Cash and his untutored backing players while the Dude himself, Jeff Bridges, reunited with T Bone for Crazy Heart, the title song of which was played by the Guillemots.

He also spoke of his work with Glen Hansard and The Civil Wars attempting to imagine what Apalachian music would sound 300 years into the future for the soundtrack of The Hunger Games. "It could sound like AC/DC," he suggested before explaining how free jam sessions with his musicians increasingly found traction.

The evening dovetailed at the end when T Bone and Redford showed a clip from their new, early-stage project American Epic, which has unearthed never-before-seen footage of performers such as iconic bluesman Lead Belly, to chronicle the birth of the music that shuffles around the iPods of today's contemporary music lovers.

A standing ovation at the end seemed genuinely to warm Redford, who had said earlier in the day that Sundance would be judged by its reception, and the cinephile crowd could scarcely believe that this was just the beginning of a feast of smart film and music right on their doorstep.

© First published in The Wharf, April 2012