The search is on for warrior queen’s bones, once thought to lie beneath a McDonald’s

Main image: eclectic bronze shoe door stop by Tom Dixon, £145, Selfridges; selection of frames, from £5, John Lewis

Before Roger Gifford becomes the 685th incumbent next month, Matthew Bell tries his luck in the footsteps of Dick Whittington

Not all 'Yo Ho Ho' and buried booty

With under 400 days to go until the start of the London Olympics 2012, we have seen east London being transformed to accommodate a newly built stadium, the nominations for Torchbearers are coming in and test events are underway.

Street photography has changed since Henri Cartier Bresson's day. So what place does it now have in a world awash with cameraphones? A new festival sets out to redefine an artistic institution

Maps lie. Or at least, the people who make maps lie. They use maps to show what they want to show, to say what they want to say. They make the Tube network less accurate but more navigable. They squeeze Africa and expand Europe. Even the London A-Z fibs, exaggerating the thickness of streets and shrinking parks to a green speck. Maps lie, but usually for a reason and often rather beautifully.

Cartography, in general, requires a degree of artistic licence. Drawing the shape and features of the Earth’s surface on a map is arguably less about creating an exact replica of it than about creating a useful tool by which to navigate it.

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If you were drawing a map of where you lived, what would you leave out and what would you include? Would you put in every street? Every house? Every tree? This question was posed last year by Londonist (www.londonist.com), a website that asked readers to send them their personal maps of London. The results – which included a map of central Hackney featuring every house – were so impressive that 11 of the maps collected are being displayed at the Museum of London later this month.

A new exhibition of prints and paintings at the Museum of London presents a diverse spectacle of the Capital's impoverised circa 1800.

There is a photograph by Horace Nicholls at the Museum of London's excellent London Street Photography that neatly encapsulates the elusive magic of street photography. It was taken at the Epsom Derby in 1910 and features a well-dressed lady in her thirties, who sits slumped at a table resting her head in her hands with a cigarette in mouth, lost in thought. But what thought? Street photography can capture a fleeting moment in a stranger's life for eternity, but it will never tell you what they were thinking. That's for the viewer to ponder.

An extraordinary collection of street photography will open to the public at the Museum of London from tomorrow.

A magazine seller at Ludgate Circus in 1893 is seen here after being covertly snapped by Paul Martin, the first photographer to use a hidden camera in an attempt to record life in London "as it is". Visitors to the Museum of London are being given the chance to view life on the capital's streets over the last 150 years in a photo exhibition, set to open on Friday.