It is widely accepted that there is a housing crisis in the UK, whether you can’t afford to get on the property ladder, apply for a mortgage, live in poor local authority properties or paying sky-high rents for poor quality dwellings. It seems that everyone you speak to has a serious issue with the home they live in. Now a survey by Shelter has discovered that almost half of us (43 per cent) live in homes of poor quality. The...

London SketchFest returns for its fourth annual festival on 5th & 6th November 2016 at Hackney House in Shoreditch. The festival showcases the best up-and-coming comedy talent and is becoming the biggest alternative comedy festival for launching new and emerging comedians. We caught up with the organisers for a chat. Can you tell me more about SketchFest and how it came about? Sketch comedy has a long history in Britain, from Monty Python to The League of Gentleman but for...

Tom and Caroline’s little boy had just turned four when the couple first started thinking about extending their family. Dominic had brought untold joy to their lives and both had embraced parenthood with gusto. As they considered their new addition, their thoughts increasingly turned to the possibility of welcoming their second child through adoption. Caroline said: “Parenthood does heighten your awareness of just how precious children are and we felt that if we wanted another child in our lives, this...

It's a cool evening as our taxi driver meanders through narrow dusty roads elevated above the fertile lands of the delta de l’Ebre. Flamingos and Heron rise above the wetlands, their frail legs mimicking the stalks of the rice plants they tower over. Home to enough wildlife to fill a Dorling Kindersley encyclopaedia this is a part of Spain that you seldom hear of, and I for one can’t wait to discover what it has in store. Located within a...

It’s Sunday evening, and as Leicester Square drains of tourists and locals head home to prepare for the working week, one London hotspot is just getting warmed up. London has embraced the NFL with open arms since the first live game was played in 2007, boasting an international community of fans living in a city that has streets emblazoned with livery and three live games a season being hosted in its impressive stadia. And if there’s one place to really...

A giant pumpkin that weighs the same as four baby elephants has been donated to charity to feed almost 1,000 homeless and vulnerable people. Ray and Sarah Armstrong are donating their humble veg to the homeless after the veg tipped the scales at a whopping 372kg (820lbs). Indeed, it’s so big it had to be transported in a horsebox from their home in South Clifton, Nottingham, before being loaded into the city’s Lenton Centre with a forklift. After taking second prize at a...

A date has been set for the much-anticipated bout between Anthony Joshua and Wladimir Klitshcko. The two heavyweights have been given the green light after WBO and WBA heavyweight champion Tyson Fury vacated his belts after being ruled medically unfit to compete. According to The Telegraph, the Joshua Klitshcko fight has been set for 10th December, with confirmation expected this week. The bout is expected to fetch a whopping £30 million and garner record viewing numbers from across the World as...

By Math Morrison  Yesterday two sets of football fans united off the pitch for a protest march. Charlton Athletic and Coventry City fans stood shoulder to shoulder in protest against their respective owners, owners who through their clueless knowledge of football seem hell-bent on running their clubs into the ground. Fifteen years ago the same two teams met in in the Premier League, yet this weekend the clubs meet in League One, the third tier in English football. The going-ons off the...

No stranger to controversy, Oliver Stone continues his exploration of personal conflict enmeshed with the political, in his latest film Snowden. Bringing fresh perspective on Edward Snowden - the man, and his whistleblowing on covert civilian data monitoring by the NSA (National Security Agency), the film casts a paranoiac shadow over labyrinthine, secretive government operations resulting in a tense, dramatisation of events. Building on Laura Poitras Oscar winning documentary Citizenfour, the film starts at the now infamous rendezvous at the...