Things to do in London today

Popping up each summer on the steps where the Regent’s Canal passes Granary Square, Everyman’s Screen on the Canal is one of the city’s best loved outdoor cinemas, thanks to its atmospheric setting, eclectic programming and the fact that it doesn’t cost viewers a penny. Pop down on a sunny afternoon to catch live coverage from Wimbledon every day of the tournament, plus the usual mix of live sports, classic movies, family-friendly flicks and recent hits. So far we know that Devil Wears Prada, Dune: Part One, Some Like It Hot and Paddington in Peru are all on the lineup, and there are plenty more still to be revealed. Best enjoyed with a couple of tinned cocktails and some picky bits from the nearby Waitrose, or classic cinema snacks from Everyman’s on-site bar.  This year, the pop-up has been pimped out by local Kings Cross artist and UAL Central Saint Martin’s graduate Alice Wilson. She’s created a unique folklore-inspired design that will appear across popcorn and the screen itself.   

Is it art, or is it maths? It’s a question even MC Escher himself couldn’t answer about his own work. While the Dutch printmaker known for his infinite staircases, metamorphosing tessellations and paradoxical buildings was rejected by the art world, he was revered by mathematicians, and is now one of the most famous optical illusionists of all time.  The OG creator of images that make you go ‘Huh?’ is going under the microscope in London with a blockbuster exhibition celebrating his life and work this summer. Created by Italian company Arthemisia and the immersive peeps at Fever, MC Escher: The Exhibition has arrived at Somerset House as part of its world tour.  The family-friendly display is surprisingly big. With more than 150 artworks on show, it tells the story of Escher’s life and work in chronological order, before it gets to the biggies – the ones that have been wheeled out in maths classrooms for decades – towards the end. You’ll see the originals of ‘Waterfall’, where water appears to run upwards, ‘Ascending and Descending’, the looping staircase that goes up and down simultaneously, and ‘Belvedere’ depicting an impossible tower. And you’ll learn about the techniques and mathematics that make these illusions possible along the way.  The meticulous craft that went into his totally baffling work is evident. On a personal level, I can see why Escher was rebuffed by the art world. Many of his works seem like something from a bad acid trip: giant, bulbous ants;...

Summer by the River is back in London Bridge City(the area of the South Bank between London Bridge and Tower Bridge, duh), with an eclectic mix of entertainment, as well as food and drink from its new bar The Clubhouse, which is a breezy, European take on the classic sports clubs, complete with stylish covered seating and riverside views. You’ll be able to watch all the key Wimbledon matches outside in the sun on the big screen. Just turn up and grab a seat. 

Hampstead locals will be celebrating the joys of their quaint village in this annual fest. The main event is the Big Fair on Sunday July 5 (12noon-5pm). The fair takes the form of a carnival-style street party complete with art, food and craft stalls, live music, family activities and community group performances. You might even see a few famous Hampstead faces among the crowds. There are also some smaller events falling under the same festive umbrella. Visit Art Street in Keats Grove and you'll see works by local artists and schools, from June 21-July 5. On Sunday June 21, there's a big Art Fair in Keats House Garden, featuring an open exhibition, prize giving, kids' activities and refreshments. And on Sunday June 28, you'll find a family party in Keats House Garden, complete with a magician, face painting, birds of prey, costumed fairies, giant chess set and even a ballet performance.

Rev your engines! The British Grand Prix 2026 kicks off this Friday and to get London hyped, Atlassian Williams has set up a fan zone in Piccadilly Circus. Throughout the race weekend, the pop-up will let you get up close to full-scale FW48 show car, compete for prizes in a trivia game, experience an immersive race simulator lap around the Silverstone Circuit, get behind the wheel on a haul truck simulator and pick up a copy of the Silverstone special edition Williams x Marvel comic. In between all of that, fans can take a pit stop at a bar run by official team partners Estrella Galicia and refuel with a complimentary half pint of Estrella Galicia 4.7% lager or Estrella Galicia 0.0. 

This immersive exhibition from Australian filmmaker and architect Liam Young is impressively audacious, taking up multiple spaces in the Barbican, including a rather pungent underground carpark. What is In Other Worlds? Well, it’s not an art exhibition in the classic sense, but a sort of multimedia hybrid of visual art, storytelling, and speculative sci-fi, combined to make the point that while humanity has famously screwed up the planet, the means to un-screw it are within our grasp if we embrace radical solutions. If that sounds a bit worthy for you, then sure, it is kind of worthy. At the same time, it’s weird, psychedelic and vividly imaginative, offering more a sort of fever dream of a possible future than an actual pragmatic solution for climate change et al. At its centre is the mad vision of the Planet City, an unimaginably dense single urban environment in which all ten billion of Earth’s inhabitants live, while the rest of the planet is effectively allowed to rewild, with visits to nature confined to a sort of annual opportunity for every citizen on the planet to be dropped randomly somewhere on the planet. This is obviously an insane idea, but the vision Young and collaborators present is nonetheless really weird and cool. Physically, we’re presented with taller-than-a-person scale models of gargantuan tower blocks comprising of individual homes madly piled on top of one another, while a giant screen projects a Young-directed digital film shows us a vision of...

Soho hotel Ham Yard is creating a Centre Court in the city this summer, so you can watch all the action at the Wimbledon tennis championships alfresco without having to queue. The hotel restaurant’s leafy courtyard is setting up a huge LED screen showing all the matches. Watch them with a special edition Pimm’s cocktail in hand, and while eating strawberries and cream or a picnic afternoon tea. Wireless headphones are available for dedicated fans who don’t want to miss any match points.  Available throughout the Wimbledon fortnight, afternoon tea starts at £53 per person. Tables for drinks are available on a walk-in basis throughout the tournament. For the Ladies' and Gentlemen's Finals, guests can reserve a prime viewing table for £30 per person, including a Wimbledon Cup No.1 cocktail and homemade strawberries and cream ice cream.

While the Science Museum remains one of London’s quintessential free days out, there’s an ever-growing list of paying bolt-ons for those who are happy to spend a little (or a lot), from the glorious hands on experiments of the WonderLab to the retro videogames mecca of Power Up to a very decent science afternoon tea featuring petri dish jellies and test tubes filled with sweets. Joining them is Smithsonian Starstruck, a galactic VR experience from America’s prestigious Smithsonian Institution, in which the 360 digital imaginings of some of space’s most stunning and surreal vistas are rooted in hard astronomy, and not the fanciful slop that creeps into several nominally educational London VR experiences I could name.  It's basically a guide to all the mad shit in our galaxy, with a reassuring-voiced American man taking us on a virtual journey around various observatories and space telescopes, and the wild celestial phenomena they can nominally see. We watch the dawn of the universe. We visit an uninhabitable planet strewn with diamonds. We stand before the event horizon of a black hole. It is all, undeniably, pretty visually stunning: from a looming gigantic sun on another world to the bizarre spectacle of light being dragged into a physics-defying gravity well, this is spectacular (albeit, to be clear, often an interpretation of what these things might look like given available data). You’ll also learn a decent amount about the phenomena depicted without feeling...

In April this year a Yung Lean music video went viral. Depicting schoolboys in Leeds, the excellent video shows the rapper as a menacing bully, cigarette dangling from his mouth, as he flushes heads down toilets, gets high in classrooms and rides through corridors on wheely tables. It also features some mesmerising choreography by Damien Jalet. Now this video is on display as part of a film exhibition at 180 Studios.  Created by Gener8ion, a creative duo comprising film director Romain Gavras and producer Surkin (real name Benoit Heitz), Visions of 2034 is promoting an audiovisual album, Love & Tears, made by the pair. It’s also a way for Gavras to show off several of his highly acclaimed music videos, created for the likes of MIA, Jamie xx, Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis and 070 Shake.  So what is the exhibition about? Imagine that it is the year 2034. Gavras and Surkin have created a series of short films (or are they music videos?) that postulate all the terrible things that will be happening in the world: Athens is uninhabitable thanks to toxic algae blooms; volcanoes are erupting; schoolboys are getting high on lithium from 6G antennas and bullying each other from within an inch of their lives.   Gavras and Surkin appear to have predicted the future In some of these films Gavras and Surkin appear to have predicted the future. In videos shot in 2010, 2018 and 2019, respectively, ICE-style raids round up redheads for social cleansing; an AI-type machine creates a...

A hat in the shape of an upside-down shoe; a dress resembling an inside-out human body; embroidered jackets covered with gorgeous pink roses, sparkling zodiac symbols and vibrant vegetables. Elsa Schiaparelli made clothes that were as surprising as they were beautiful. The V&A has plundered the well of ingenuity that is Maison Schiaparelli in its latest landmark fashion exhibition – the first British exhibition dedicated to the Italian designer, who rose to fame in Paris between the World Wars – and there are some real treasures to be found.  With over 400 objects, including 100 ensembles and 50 artworks (by the likes of Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Man Ray), as well as accessories, jewellery, photographs, perfumes and an excellent collection of buttons, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art presents a deep dive into the fantastical and surreal world of the fashion house. Founded on Paris’ Place Vendôme in 1927, the exhibition spans the 1920s to the present day, showing glorious garments from Creative Director Daniel Roseberry, who has been at the helm since 2019.  Excitingly, many of Schiaparelli’s 20th-century creations appear astoundingly contemporary. Knits from 1927, some of the designer’s first works, are patterned with pretty bows that the TikTok girlies of today would die for. There’s also an incredible gold chainmail headdress which wouldn’t look amiss on Florence Pugh in Dune, or on a ‘medievalcore’ Pinterest board. A shirred form-fitting dress with a visible zip – a...

The title of Hideki Noda's latest play is ‘minus three twenty Fahrenheit’, roughly the boiling point of liquid nitrogen, the temperature at which a body sits suspended in cryogenic storage. It's also, roughly, the temperature at which this review nearly froze trying to explain the plot to a friend afterwards.  The Japanese theatrmaker’s company NODA MAP returns to Sadler's Wells for a third round, following A Night at the Kabuki (2022) and Love in Action (2024), with its latest being billed as ‘a Faustian descent through myth, memory and other bad ideas’. Unsurprisingly, then, given that Noda is notorious for jam-packing his plays, this one runs across three timelines, all featuring characters chasing angel bones.  In the modern strand, sniping pharma siblings President Oolong Deathmask (Satoshi Hashimoto) and Chairman Oolong Cha (Shoko Takada) – the production's best running joke – hunt the mythical bone using the vibrating one in the body of Help’s (Sadawo Abe) as their compass. With the help of their research team, they want it ground into supplements for an engineered Ultimate Human, or harvested to cure a genetic condition called AngelDN – either way there’s money in it. In the medieval strand, Mephisto (Suzu Hirose), the half-angel half-devil heroine, stakes a wager against God which sets up a fateful pact with Dr. Faust (Isao Hashizume). In antiquity, an empire answers to Queen Himiko, based on the legenadry shaman-ruler of early Japan. For all its denser themes,...

After 430 or so years it’s fairly apparent that we as a species are not going to get tired of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare. And even though Emily Lim’s new take comes less than three months after the Globe’s last production of the same play ended, it still feels like a breath of fresh air. It’s not the most nuanced or revelatory Dream I’ve ever seen. But Lim’s USP is creating massive scale participatory public theatre works (mostly for the National Theatre). This isn’t quite that, but it uses the Globe’s large, lairy crowd to maximum impact for a production that cheerily deviates repeatedly from Shakespeare’s exact text in a joyous, almost non-stop welter of audience interaction. The embellishments run from start to finish, with a lengthy and enjoyable pre-show that involves roping audience members into ‘auditions’ for the Mechanicals: when I took my seat I assumed the people dancing on stage were in the cast, but no – just punters, though many of them get callbacks throughout the show and one lucky attendee even gets to the play Moon at the end. Lim has, also, hired a ringer in the shape of Michael Grady-Hall, who played an anarchic, improv-tastic Feste in the RSC’s recent Twelfth Night, and more or less reprises the character here except the role is fairy henchman Puck.  His role is actually better modulated here than in Twelfth Night, where it felt like the action kept having to stop so that he could do lengthy magic routines. But it’s easy to...

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

This review is from Southwark Playhouse in October 2025. Hot Mess returns for a summer 2026 run at The Other Palace While the millennia-old union between planet Earth and humanity might not be the first coupling that springs to mind when you think of unhealthy relationships, there’s no denying it is pretty toxic. The Earth gives! Humanity takes! The Earth had boundaries, and humanity violated ‘em – first digging up the ground to mine for coal and drill for oil, then jetting into space with a wandering eye, pushing the atmosphere to its limits in a bid to see what else was out there.   It’s safe to say we’ve put our hosting planet through the wringer physically, but what if we’ve left it feeling emotionally drained too? Could the climate crisis with its ruinous wild fires and unforgiving floods be a scorned Earth’s way of telling humanity to do one? It’s a theory! Or at least, it’s the premise of this pop musical romcom from Ellie Coote (book) and Jack Godfrey’s (music and lyrics), the duo who scored a hit last year with 42 Balloons. Earth and Humanity (aka Hu) are personified as a couple and under this guise, their entire, increasingly troubling partnership is explored. Over the course of one breathless hour of back-to-back songs, the big breakthroughs of our species are reframed as our rocking what could have been a peaceful, happy relationship.  It’s a kooky concept, but this two-hander holds up surprisingly well in a production which Coote also directs, largely thanks...

It’s difficult to pinpoint why the moment Paddington walks on stage at the start of his new musical is quite so moving.  Spoiler alert: ‘Paddington’ is a small woman (Arti Shah) in a bear costume (by Tahra Zafar), with a regular-sized man (James Hameed) doing the voice and remote controlling the facial expressions from backstage. Which doesn’t sound groundbreaking but it’s enough to make us believe that Paddington is really in the room with us. Which is surely the point of the endeavor. He’s not the Paddington of the films: he looks different, more teddy-like, and Hameed’s voice is much younger and more boyish than Ben Whishaw’s. He looks more like the Paddington of Michael Bond’s books, but he’s not really him either, on account of all the singing he does and how much more wordy that makes him. He is a new Paddington. But he is, fundamentally, Paddington, right there in the room with us. Does that make it a good performance? I mean sure, he’s a triple threat: adorable, polite and also a bear. The normal rules for a musical theatre lead are suspended here. But Hameed can sing well, and there’s enough expression in both face and body for Paddington to feel genuinely alive to us. Shah doesn’t really dance, but a couple of elaborately choreographed sequences in which our hero pings around causing chaos are impressively physical. Main attraction aside, a fine creative team led by director Luke Sheppard has created a very enjoyable show indeed. It’s by and large a stage...

A Catholic upbringing has left me both terrible at lying and capable of looking guilty about more or less anything. As such I was morbidly convinced that I would get the tap on the shoulder designating me a traitor in this live recreation (you could call it immersive theatre if you wanted) of the smash BBC game show. This proved to be entirely correct and long story short I lasted four rounds until I was rumbled (though it was a close thing and involved me being inexplicably betrayed by my fellow traitor). And speaking as somebody who has barely watched the show: I had a blast. If you can swallow the cost (a little under £50 in the evening, but cheaper by day) and go in prepared to be eliminated early then The Traitors Live Experience is extremely good fun. As much as anything, this adaptation from Immersive Everywhere is extremely well organised. Clearly you can’t make a note-perfect recreation of a show that involves 25 contestants staying at a remote Scottish castle for three weeks. But what they’ve done captures a sense of it very nicely. In this much shorter format, a large number of participants book in for a given time slot and are then divided into groups of around 12. Each is spirited away to their own round table, which comes complete with its own Claudia Winkleman-substitute host. Ours was a chipper young man who did a great job of geeing things along with help from a pre-recorded Winkleman (wisely she’s only used sparingly). It’s such a rock-solid conceit that...

The big question with adapting The Hunger Games for the stage is that is it not totally nuts to adapt The Hunger Games for the stage? A substantial proportion of Suzanne Collins’s smash 2008 YA novel is set during the titular Games, which are a sort of gladiatorial reality TV contest in which heavily armed teens murder each other until there’s only one left,  Historically this sort of thing is not theatre’s strength. A cheeky duel, absolutely. But a half-hour plus nonstop combat sequence featuring 24 fighters and multiple sub-locations is… tricky. And to their credit, director Matthew Dunster and a top-notch creative team do a pretty damn good job of finding a way forward, deploying aerial work, pyro, video screens, some tightly drilled choreography, the odd song and a highly mobile, rapidly changing set from Miriam Buether to create a sequence that’s coherent and gripping, even if it’s hard to really hand on heart say this is as effective a representation as in the beloved Jennifer Lawrence film (as much as anything, without close ups it’s tricky to follow who all the minor characters are). But it’s solid, and I found it hard not to admire the quixotic but skilled attempt to translate something so action-packed to the stage. A hybrid of The Running Man and The Devil Wears Prada Dunster is not a subtle director, and in many ways that suits Collins’s novel. He picks out the themes of class oppression between the gaudy dandies of the Capitol and dirt poor folk of District 12...

Much-loved inter-London outdoor touring company Shakespeare in the Squares has never been afraid to take on one of the Bard’s less crowd-pleasing plays, and so it proves for 2026 – its tenth anniversary – as SitS tackles Love’s Labour’s Lost. Rarely staged (though oddly enough the Globe is doing it this year too), it follows a quartet of male nobles who’ve forsworn the company of women while they complete their studies. But then uh oh – a group of really hot women turn up... The complete touring schedule for Toby Gordon’s production is as follows: Jun 3 7pm – Leinster Square W2 Jun 4 7pm – Paultons Square SW3  Jun 5 7pm – Crystal Palace Park SE26  Jun 6 7pm – Nevern Square SW5 Jun 9 7pm – Montagu Square W1  Jun 10 7pm – The Charterhouse EC1  Jun 11 7pm – Canons House & Grounds CR4  Jun 12 7pm – Norland Square W11  Jun 13 7pm – St Peter’s Square W6 Jun 14 3pm – Coronation Gardens SW18  Jun 16 7pm – Arundel & Ladbroke Gardens W11  Jun 17 7pm – Connaught Square W2   Jun 18 7pm – Albert Square SW8 Jun 19 7pm – Barkston Gardens SW5 Jun 20 2.30pm and 7pm – Queen’s Park NW6  Jun 21 5pm – Onslow Square SW7 Jun 23 7pm – St Anne’s Church Garden SW18 Jun 24 7pm – Cornwall Gardens SW7  Jun 25 7pm – St James’s Gardens W11  Jun 26 7pm – Charlton House & Gardens SE7 Jun 27 5pm – Kensington Gardens Square W2  Jun 28 5pm Tredegar Square E3 Jun 30 7pm Fitzroy Square W1  Jul 1 and 2 7pm – Cleveland Square W2   Jul 3 7pm – Arundel & Elgin Gardens W11  Jul 4 7pm – Crescent Garden W9  Jul 5...

If you’ve recently found yourself on the Piccadilly Line during evening rush hour, you may have noticed fellow passengers sporting feather boas, bowler hats and other attempts at Belle Époque attire. They’re on the way to the latest immersive dining experience from The Lost Estate, creators of popular festive show The Great Christmas Feast.  The immersive specialists’ new production is set in 1890s Paris, specifically Le Chat Noir, the legendary Montmartre nightclub that birthed cabaret as we understand it. Stepping into a nondescript warehouse round the corner from West Kensington tube station, guests find themselves transported to a sumptuous, low-lit cabaret bar.  A lot of care has been taken over the design, which is replete with Art Nouveau touches, from Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s iconic feline prints adorning the walls and swirly Paris Métro-esque patterns decorating the banquette seating. The attention to detail extends all the way to the authentic 1890s adverts in the programme. There’s a lot more to like about Chat Noir! The show is based around the nightclub’s grand reopening following refurbishments that made it one of the first venues in Paris to boast electric lighting. The plot is well-researched, deftly bringing together a diverse range of Belle Époque references and characters. There’s music from the club’s sometime resident pianist, the composer Erik Satie and regular visitor Claude Debussy. Performers include celebrated illusionist Joseph Bautier,...

Even if you have literally never wanted to be part of the crew of a spaceship you’ll probably have a fun time at Parabolic Theatre’s Bridge Command, an immersive theatre show slash team-bonding exercise slash LARPer paradise that sees you and your fellow contestants take command of the, uh, bridge of a spaceship and undertake a variety of missions that run the gamut from diplomacy to warfare. Occupying the spot in the Vauxhall arches that formerly hosted renowned gay sauna Chariots, Bridge Command is not a slick, cutting-edge vision of the future, and presumably budgetary limitations are part of this. But that’s fine: it very much has its roots in a wobbly sets golden age of sci-fi, with the earlier iterations of Star Trek looming particularly large. After donning our military jumpsuits, we are ‘teleported’ into the depths of space and onto an Earth battleship that will form our base of operations. There is a background scenario here, wherein humans fled a polluted Earth, found a magic element in the depths of space, went back home to fix Earth, only a load of colonists stayed behind and set up new galactic dominions, and we’re out there looking for more of the magic element. It’s best not to think too hard about it, but at the same time the performers throw themselves into it with impressive conviction - I was particularly delighted when the person operating the teleporter earnestly fielded questions relating to my phobia of teleporters.  Following said teleportation...

Henry Moore’s bulbous and undulating sculptures were designed to be seen outside and surrounded by nature. So we’re happy to say that Kew is displaying a huge collection of his works as they were intended at this mega exhibition. The world’s biggest ever exhibition of Moore will open at the botanical gardens, with 30 sculptures on show in the open air and more than 90 works including carvings and drawings displayed in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery. Several of his famous and iconic reclining figures will be on view, as well as more abstract and amorphous pieces like the massive bronze marvel ‘Large Two Forms’. 

This is a big show of big paintings. Big, energetic, happy paintings which are just as enjoyable to stand in front of as one can imagine they were to make. Hurvin Anderson is the artist responsible, and the 80 paintings on show at Tate Britain amount to 30 years worth of work. Some date back to 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art; others were made this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). ‘Ball Watching’ hangs by the door, next to the entrance. Painted at art school, it captures a moment in Anderson’s youth living in Birmingham, the city in which he was born and raised after his parents emigrated from Jamaica. He and his friends would play football in Handsworth Park, often kicking the football into the lake – here, as the title suggests, they stand watching it. Compared with the sun-bleached, paint-dripped, tree-filled tropicana that fill the later rooms, the palette is darker, the figures less defined, the sky, rendered in broad brushstrokes, feels as though a foaming sponge has been dragged across a car windscreen. The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places What it establishes, however, is what has kept Hurvin Anderson returning to the studio for three decades: the urge to paint his experience as a Black man of Caribbean heritage, born and raised in the UK. That sense of inbetweenness – belonging to two places, either side of the Atlantic – plays out through...

For Brits of a certain age, James McNeill Whistler will always conjure memories of that scene in the Mr Bean film. But while Rowan Atkinson’s 1997 opus was a memorable introduction to the American Gilded Age painter, Tate Britain’s grand new retrospective will properly acquaint you with his work – minus any snot-related hijinks – through his paintings, prints, and a litany of personal effects.  Using decoration from his Chelsea studio, the opening room establishes Whistler as a bohemian and fashionable man, but the contextual statement also foreshadows his fall from social grace later in his career (thanks to a lawsuit that left him penniless – more on that later). Thus, a unique, non-linear curatorial narrative is introduced. After arriving from New England in Paris in 1855, Whistler prolifically produced moody etchings that express the stoic dinginess of the French capital with dense and dynamic shadows. His first attempts at oil painting also happened here. The medium became an even bigger preoccupation when he moved to an equally morose city: London. Whether it’s choked by smog or cluttered with cargo, the Thames is his muse during his early years in the Big Smoke. The chaotic figuration of ships floating past in Wapping and the spectral abstraction of a frozen river in Chelsea in Ice represent two extremes of how Whistler turns urban ugliness into visual harmony. Conducting tone, colour, and blankness with orchestral balance, he’s acutely aware of the musicality...

A stroll through Tracey Emin: A Second Life is an evocative experience. Positioned as a 40-year retrospective through the pioneering artist’s vast and varied repertoire, the show lays bare Emin’s life through her distinct and often unsettling art, from career highs – such as the iconic, Turner Prize-nominated ‘My Bed’, which is every bit as shocking and moving today as it was in 1998 – to stark personal lows in work depicting her experiences with sexual violence, abortion and recent life-threatening illness. As you can imagine, with such subject matter, it is not always a comfortable experience for the artist and the viewer alike. However, Emin’s flair for dark comedy adds moments of levity throughout. The second room of the exhibition features a large-scale projection of a work on video entitled ‘Why I Never Became A Dancer’. It begins with the artist recalling an incident in her youth when she entered a local dance competition only to run off stage mid-performance when a group of men with whom she’d previously had sexual encounters chanted ‘slag’ at her until she could no longer even hear the music. The film ends with a sequence of Emin dancing, totally uninhibited, to the disco classic ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ by Sylvester, and the work is dedicated to each of her aggressors, calling them out by name. It is the perfect encapsulation of both Emin’s defiant approach to life and her ability to turn traumatic experiences into mesmerising art. Longform video is an...

This renowned annual photography exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum for its 61st edition, showcasing the very best entries of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. On display are images of the most extraordinary species on the planet captured by professional and amateur photographers. This year’s entries are TBA right now, but the winners are reliably spectacular – pictured is last year’s champion Shane Gross, whose mesmirising underwater shot of western toad tadpoles involved snorkelled for hours in a lake on Vancouver Island, making sure not to disturb fine layers of silt and algae at the bottom. Don’t miss what is always a highlight in the NHM’s calendar.

If you find a London greengrocer selling lemons and oranges as plump, waxy, and gorgeous as the ones in Francisco de Zurbarán’s still lifes on view at the National Gallery, do let me know. The Baroque master trained as a painter in Seville, the land of citrus, so he was well placed to get his eye in, but even so, this first UK exhibition makes a persuasive case that Zurbarán’s brush turned them into something approaching the divine. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he painted so few of them; only 10 still lifes are known today, and most of the examples in this exhibition are attributed to his son Juan.  Maybe he simply didn’t have the time. It was the beginning of the 17th century; gold was flowing into Seville from the Americas, the Catholic revival was in full swing, and Seville’s religious orders were trying to outdo one another with ever grander, more extravagantly decorated churches. Zurbarán’s earliest dated work, The Crucifixion (1627), promptly sent him shooting up the Baroque algorithm, and commissions soon came flooding in. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble The Spanish artist and writer Antonio Palomino once wrote that ‘everyone who sees it, and does not know it, believes it to be a sculpture.’ It’s the first painting you encounter in the exhibition, and 399 years on, you understand what Palomino meant. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble against the pitch-black background, while the white cloth around his waist...

Portraits are tricky things: can you ever really sift the individual from the image? And it gets even harder when the subject is one of the most recognisable faces of all time – a woman who was seemingly born to appear on camera. Since she died in 1962 – aged just 36, and already perhaps the most famous person on the planet – Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself. Marking what would have been her 100th birthday, the National Portrait Gallery grapples with that iconic status in a show that’s both beautiful and troubling. ‘Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait’ sets out its stall early, emphasising Monroe’s agency in shaping her image: not an artist’s muse, but an active collaborator. Exploited by Hollywood, coerced and abused by her husbands, at least Monroe could claw back some control over the way she was portrayed. She spent hours poring over contact sheets, and forbade some images from being published. (In one photo here, an out-take print from her very last photoshoot, the actor has scratched out her face with a hairpin.) Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself Deliberately light on biography, the show goes big on the star’s work with individual photographers: big names like Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson, but also friends (Milton H Greene, Eve Arnold), lovers (André de Dienes) and collaborators...

Donald Locke shows don’t come around often. But like proverbial buses, you wait for ages, and then three arrive at once, in the form of this touring exhibition moving from Birmingham to Bristol and now Camden Art Centre in London.  It’s not the first time the late Guyanese-British artist has shown here, though you’d be forgiven for missing it. Back in 1970, Locke exhibited ceramics under the pseudonym Issorosano Ite. He arrived in the UK from Guyana in his mid-twenties to study ceramics in Bath and Edinburgh, even though painting was his initial obsession. ‘With the arrogance of youth, I was going to be the greatest painter in the world,’ he said of his early ambition. Well, he did both, yet what he made doesn’t sit neatly within a single camp. Rather, his practices – spanning painting, drawing, sculpture, and ceramics – would morph into one another. While the forms may appear a little abstract, the thinking behind them is not Take ‘Trophies of Empire’ (1972–74), one of his most iconic works and included in Resistant Forms. An open cabinet of 27 pigeonholes houses dark, cylindrical ceramic forms (bullets, we come to understand) cradled within trophy cups, spurs, and leather cuffs, sourced by Locke from Portobello Market. It’s not the last you’ll see of them. Look at the large, wild, black paintings next door, made a decade or two later while he was living in Phoenix and Atlanta. You’ll spot Queen Victoria, the Warhol-like revolver—now look again: those ‘trophies’ reappear...

Three emerging US artists – Jenna Bliss, Buck Ellison and Jasmine Gregory – explore ideas of class, inheritance and assumed values, framed by their experiences of coming of age in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Through different mediums – moving image, photography and painting and assemblage – each artist examines what it means to enter adulthood in an era of financial collapse, incorporating themes of wealth inequity, art as an asset class, and what commodity culture looks like today.   

Another London summer beckons: clouds clearing, days lengthening, an imaginative structure being erected in Kensington Gardens. Mexican architecture firm LANZA atelier has been chosen to design this 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, which features a ‘crinkle-crankle’ wall. Traditional structures seen in English architecture from the 18th century, these wavy partitions temper climate, create shelter, and are ideal for growing fruit. And fittingly, they’re also known as serpentine walls.  The prestigious architectural commission celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026, with a landmark series of talks programmed in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the charitable organisation founded by the late Iraqi-British architect, who designed the inaugural Pavilion 25 years ago. The programme kicks off with an Architects’ Talk hosted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, with a series of Family Days featuring hands-on workshops, creative activities and performances for all ages scheduled throughout the summer. Check out the Serpentine’s website for further details in due course.