Well, it's not so bad...

http://www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=14939

The Financial district will be under a wifi cloud in the next few months. It's not going to be free, but will be managed by The Cloud who have roaming agreements in place with BT Openzone and T-Mobile.

Not sure what the big deal about it being free is though... Someone has to pay for it, so why not target those using the service as opposed to it being subsidised by taxes???

As an aside, I have noticed a big reduction in the number of unencrypted wifi spots in central London over the last year or so. Seems people are wising up to the fact that some basic WPA protection or whatever is a good idea...