Job hunting in London - where do I start?

I'm American living in Sydney... I temped a lot here while waiting for my spousal visa to come through. A number of the bigger, posher temp agencies have offices here in Sydney AND in London. Try Adecco, Hays, Drake Intl, Julia Ross (?) etc... Good luck!

I've been working through http://www.officeteamuk.com/ for a while now and they've been great. Mind you, I'm in Canada and I can't guarantee they're as good in the UK.

London has a lot of specialist temp agencies - I work for a media company and we hire ours from Judy Fisher, as does ITV and C4. It would be worth looking to see if any deal specifically with policy - even if you'll be on reception, having knowledge of the industry is good and it means you'll be around if something permanent arises. I had a bad experience with Adecco - they laughed when I said I'd like something equivalent to my current salary, and felt the need to explain to me what professional dress was when I'd been working in offices in professional roles for five years and had attended the meeting appropriately dressed. It might have been the Holborn branch that were particularly bad - one branch of an agency in Manchester were hilariously terrible but the London one wasn't - but being a temp is hard enough without also being patronised, so I'd use your meetings with agencies to gauge whether these are people you really want to deal with.

To look for jobs, in addition to agencies try the http://jobseekers.direct.gov.uk/homepage.aspx?sessionid=899af26d-e7e8-45bc-be14-549589b29d51&pid=3 website. You can search by area and \ or type of job. I recently got a new job in London using this. I agree with Mippy about Adecco - the experience I had with them is that they do tend to be a bit 'one size fits all'. They also explained to me about the importance of dressing professionally and showing up on time despite that fact that I had had several years of office experience. However, they do have good roles occasionally so it might be worth having a conversation with them. http://www.indeed.co.uk/ can also be quite good but you will generally have more success on there if you apply to jobs advertised by companies directly, rather than those advertised the agencies.