Today's the day we print our first list of fine Les Routiers restaurants where you can use your Club Bon Viveur card, which was in the Magazine on Saturday, to ensure that one of your party will get a FREE meal.

Blueprint for Blackfriars

Newspaper letter column editors will henceforth have a much lighter postbag. Few individuals have had greater tenacity for a single cause than Enid Lakeman had for electoral reform over the past 50 years. Her commitment to preferential voting and her ability to apply a rock-solid foundation in theory to the practical opportunity of the moment, serviced by the simple combination of a good press cuttings service and an increasingly battered typewriter, enabled her to produce a swift and sharp resp onse toeach and every electoral nonsense or wayward statement. Not even the most far-flung of local newspapers was immune to a Lakeman thunderbolt. Most of them were so surprised to get a letter from a London office that they printed them.

DIRECTORS of privatised utilities have enjoyed individual profits of up to pounds 470,000 this year by exercising lucrative share options, writes Barrie Clement.

CORRECTION (PUBLISHED 9 SEPTEMBER 1994) APPENDED TO THIS ARTICLE

LONDON could have its first covered bridge since the 18th century if a proposal in the City wins approval. One of four sites being considered by the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) for a new headquarters is a scheme to house much of the ICA, which has far outgrown its premises in the Mall, on a new bridge across the Thames at Blackfriars.

THESE are the major services British Rail operating companies hope to run during the 48-hour strike beginning at noon tomorrow:

DID Eve fall or was she pushed by the boss's wife? Newspaper gossips are divided.

Gerald Eades Bentley, writer and scholar of English literature: born Brazil, Indiana, 15 September 1901; Murray Professor of English, University of Chicago 1929-45; Professor of English, Princeton University 1945- 70; Lecturer in English, Cambridge University 1953; author of The Jacobean and Caroline Stage (seven volumes) 1941-68, The Swan of Avon and the Bricklayer of Westminster 1948, The Revels History of Drama in English (volume iv) 1981; married 1927 Esther Greenwood (died 1961; one son), 1965 Ellen Voigt Stern (died 1990); died Highstown, New Jersey 25 July 1994.

THE following BR routes are expected to have services on all three RMT-union strike days this weekend, unless stated otherwise below:

A SORDID question of money is preventing the Oxo Tower on the south side of Blackfriars Bridge from reappearing in all its glory. This splendid monument to commercial ingenuity represents a successful effort to dodge the ban on advertising on the banks of the Thames by arranging the windows in the tower to spell the three magic letters, with red lights to spread the name at night.

BRITISH RAIL is expecting to run more than 20 per cent of the normal train timetable during the sixth 24-hour strike by signal workers, which starts at midnight tonight.

One of London's least-known annual events is the race for Doggett's Coat and Badge, to be held next Tuesday at 6.15pm. In 1716 the actor Thomas

In the mid 1850s, William Rossiter had a dream about founding an art gallery in the slums of Victorian London. Dream turned to reality in South London, where Rossiter solicited sufficient donations to build up a collection that included some of the most prominent Victorian artists: Walter Crane, Evelyn de Morgan, Frederic Lord Leighton, John Ruskin, Ford Madox Brown and G F Watts.