Things to do in London today

Prepare for a feast for the eyes, but resist the urge to nibble! The sweetest festive event you’ll find, the Museum of Architecture’s edible exhibition tasks leading architects and designers to ditch their conventional building materials for dough bricks and sugar paste mortar to construct a miniature biscuit metropolis erected in King’s Cross’s Coal Drops Yard for the festive season. With a new theme each year, the exhibition aims to encourage innovation and future-forward city planning, and this year’s ‘Playful City’ theme has resulted in some really fun designs, from school buildings with slides between classrooms to candy-coloured climbing walls. As well as marvelling at all the confectionary craftsmanship on display, visitors can take part in a series of hands-on gingerbread house workshops where they’ll be able to construct a delicious souvenir to take home. 

Each year, Hyde Park gets transformed from pretty park to a dazzling, snow-covered, Alpine-themed, 350-acre festive funscape. One of the largest Christmas events in the UK, Winter Wonderland returns for its eighteenth year in 2025, and is expected to welcome around 2.5 million visitors over six magical weeks.  As you make your way around the space, you’ll find fairground rides, a child-friendly Santa Land (including a Santa’s Grotto, where presents lie in wait) and traditional Christmas markets where you’ll be able to buy gifts for all your loved ones, which has been freshly extended for 2025 with the addition of premium, artfully lit shopping spot Luminarie Lane. Other highlights include circus shows from Cirque Beserk, which take place three times each evening, and the biggest outdoor ice rink in the UK. Surrounding the park’s Victorian bandstand, the 1,795 square foot rink is sponsored by Mayfair’s new art museum Moco. Not only is it lit up by more than 100,000 lights, it’s also a rather cheerful shade of candyfloss pink in keeping with the museum’s logo. Continuing the chilly theme, there's also an ice sculpture exhibit that's been freshly reimagined as a 'Mystical, Mythical Fantasy World', a Real Ice Slide and ice sculpting workshops, after which you can warm yourself up later with frothing steins and steaming cups of mulled wine at the German-style Bavarian Village. ...

Every winter the Southbank Centre turns the banks of the Thames into a frosty wonderland, full of little wooden Alpine-style cabins selling gifts, warming drinks, and snacks. You’ll find huts serving up truffle burgers, duck wraps, mulled wine, Dutch pancakes, churros and many more tasty morsels to nibble on while you look through gifts, jewellery and decorations made by independent craft traders. Or, once you’re done browsing, snuggle up at pop-up king Jimmy Garcia’s riverside venue Fire And Fromage, where you can snaffle all you can eat raclette, sip on seriously decadent hot chocolates, and even toast your own marshmallows round a cosy fire pit.  When is Southbank Christmas Market open? The market opens at the start of November, and will stay open until Boxing Day, Friday, December 26, with a few pop-ups staying open slightly longer until the New Year. Do you need to buy a ticket? No, it's free to enter and have a wander. 

‘Yokimono’ means ‘good things’ in Japanese and you’ll find plenty of stuff that falls under that category at this Dalston market. Head here for a wide variety of Nippon-themed goodies, including ceramics, stationary, clothing, jewellery and more. Everything on sale here is either made in Japan or produced by Japanese artists in London, so you know it's authentic. While you shop, you can enjoy live performances by Japanese musicians and demonstrations in everything from fruit mochi making to furoshiki gift wrapping. Need sustenance to keep you going? There’ll be tons of yummy Japanese treats to enjoy, from onigiri to wagashi. Opening Dates: December 6-7 Best For: Picking up Japanese goodies without the expensive flight prices

Somerset House’s annual ice rink pop-up has long been one of the city’s favourite festive traditions, with thousands of Londoners and tourists alike making it part of their celebrations each year, and for good reason. Gliding (or nervously shuffling) around the rink, gazing upon the surrounding Georgian architecture and the courtyard’s magnificent 40ft Christmas tree feels like you’ve skated onto a movie set, ready to be watched by families settling in for their post-turkey food coma.  There’s more to this rink than just skating, though. There are seasonal drinks and warming food options available from a rinkside chalet, alongside a Shelter Boutique with takeovers from sought-after brands including Oliver Bonas, All Saints and Nobody’s Child in the run-up to Christmas. And there also a variety of events to keep you entertained throughout the season, including the venue's famous Skate Lates, where you can soar round the rink to a DJ soundtrack. The line-up for 2025 includes trailblazing women-run radio station Foundation FM, NTS Radio host Ruf Dug and queer dance party Sue Veneers. How much does Skate at Somerset House cost? Ticket prices for Skate at Somerset House vary depending on what time you visit, with cheaper tickets at less popular times, and concessions available for kids. They start at £11 for super off-peak times, reaching £26 for the most in-demand slots. Booking for the 2025-2026 goes live on Friday September 26 or you can sign up to the presale here for early...

There's arguably nowhere in London more Christmassy than Covent Garden's Piazza in December. Every year, the shopping district aims to outdo itself for sheer festive pizzaz. In 2025, the theme is 'The Theatre of Christmas', which means that there'll be decorations taking inspiration from the nearby playhouses and the performances in them. And of course, this year will also see the return of Covent Garden's 55ft Christmas tree, decked with 30,000 lights  Meanwhile, the roof of the Market Building is adorned with 40 gigantic bells, 12 giant baubles and 8 spinning mirror balls in a reprise of its oh-so-festive annual display. There'll also be pop-ups and events to enjoy as the season unfolds, including mulled wine stations and a Santa's sleigh photo op. 

Given that their nation is home to Lapland, is covered in snow for half the year and boasts a healthy population of wild reindeer, it’s no surprise than the Finns love Christmas. You can expect plenty of festive feels at this always-popular annual Christmas Market at Rotherhithe’s Finnish Church. Browse traditional Finnish toys, design pieces, Christmas cards and plenty of Moomin memorabilia before tucking into barbequed food, cinnamon buns and salmon sandwiches, all washed down with a glass of steaming glögg.  Find more Christmas markets and fairs in London

Dreaming of a kitsch Christmas? New York’s famous Miracle on Ninth Street bar is popping up in London for its seventh year, ‘50s Christmas decorations, nostalgic accessories and creative new spins on beloved cocktail favourites in tow. Past years have seen the bar slinging the likes of a Snowball Old Fashioned or a Christmapoliton, which includes cranberry sauce and absinthe mist – a take on Christmas trimmings that’s not for the faint-hearted. If you’re failing to get into the Christmas spirit, this is one great place to find it.

Backyard Cinema is back with a mega immersive cinema to give you all the festive feels. Roam through a fairylit winter forest and you'll find screenings of Christmas classics including Elf, Home Alone, Love Actually, How the Grinch Stole Christmas, The Holiday, The Muppet Christmas Carol, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Miracle on 34th Street, The Grinch, and It’s a Wonderful Life. Things begin in a Christmas cabaret room with live performances of festive classics and table service so you can enjoy seasonal refreshments. Then, you'll enter an enchanted forest, with real bark underfoot, surprise performances, themed bars and photo opportunities. Finally, you'll end up at the Forest Cinema, a retro-style cinema where snow flutters down before every screening. A trip to the movies really doesn't get more festive than this. 

What do an Enigma machine, an Apple AirTag and Lady Mountbatten’s silk underwear all have in common? Well, they’re all currently on display at the British Library’s riveting Secret Maps exhibition. Why are they all together? Because they all tell stories about how information is created, concealed, disseminated and controlled, via mapping. And that’s exactly what Secret Maps is all about.  Through more than 100 items, from hand-drawn naval charts gifted to Henry VIII, to Soviet Cold War-era cartographies, and modern-day satellite tracking technology (TL;DR: a whole lotta maps), the British Library illuminates how maps can be powerful political tools, create communities, and act as a form of protest.  It’s a dense, information-packed display with plenty of granular detail to get stuck into, so if you’re not, like, really into maps, then it may not be for you. But it’s sort of what you’d expect for an exhibition dedicated to maps hosted by the British Library. There are a few fun and interactive elements, too; visitors are invited to peer through secret spy holes, place their phones on a futuristic screen that tells them exactly how the tech overlords are mapping and harvesting their data (gulp), and find Wally in an original drawing from the children’s book.  For £20 you are guaranteed to see a lot of cool old shit The most compelling aspect of the exhibition is its anti-colonialist streak (other London museums could do with taking a leaf out of the British Library’s...

It’s hard to know if the creative team behind this wildly misguided immersive theatre adaptation of Douglas Adams’s satirical sci-fi classic loves the source material too much or not at all.  On the one hand, its incorporation of elements of the less well-known book So Long and Thanks for all the Fish suggest a deeper familiarity with the novel series and a desire to not simply do a straight retelling of the OG Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which has been famously already done via radio, novel, video game, TV series, film and various cult theatre shows (albeit none of this very recently). On the other hand, it seems to have been made by people who don’t get Adams’ humour, characters or why people like the first book, and uses the romance plot from So Long… to create a far more saccharine story than Adams himself did. The writer and co-creator is one Arvind Ethan David, a former Adams protege. So I assume he’s a fan. But this play hardly makes a case for his mentor’s brilliance. It begins (mostly) harmlessly enough. The first scene is set in the pub which – in the Adams telling – hapless Englishman Arthur Dent is dragged to by his eccentric friend Ford Prefect, on a very specific mission to drink six pints of bitter ahead of ‘hitchhiking’ aboard a spaceship belonging to the Vogons, the incredibly tedious alien race about to blow Earth up to build a galactic bypass. This all gets a bit immersive theatre’d up. There are novelty cocktails. There is audience interaction. We...

Cementing the Lyric Hammersmith’s place at the top of the London panto pantheon, here’s a wonderfully inventive new take on Jack and the Beanstalk for 2025.  I’ve seen some high-concept pantomimes take a swing and a miss, but returning writer Sonia Jalay and director Nicolai La Barrie are impressively assured as they relocate the bean-centric action to a strict Hammersmith school concealing a sinister secret. Siblings Jack (Joey James) and Jill (Sienna Widd) are newly enrolled at the ultra strict Fleshcreep Academy, and while John Patridge’s meat-obsessed (he even wears a meat-pattered suit) Fleshcreep bears zero resemblance to the rather scarier Katherine Birbalsingh, it’s not hard to see see the whole enjoyably unruly spectacle as a satire on the fetishisation of ‘strict’ modern schooling.  The imperious grandeur of regular Lyric dame Emmanuel Akwafo is somewhat missed, although replacement Sam Harrison is great fun when he’s allowed off the leash – his best moment is cracking himself up by ad libbing about the Lily Allan album to an audience of bemused primary schoolers. But there’s something fundamentally amusing about the plot point of his Momma Trott being worked in as the flamboyant new Fleshcreep Academy dinner lady, much to the mortification of her kids.  James is nice as socially anxious Jack who communicates with most people via a lairy sock puppet. And in her first named stage role, recent graduate Widd is scene-stealing good as the fearlessly bolshy Jill, a...

The Hackney panto’s USP is Clive Rowe: less a dame than a roiling force of nature, post pandemic he has not only starred in every panto at the Empire but directed them too, in what has increasingly felt like a one man (in a frock) show.  But what happens to the one-man show when the man (and his frock) aren’t there?  Rowe is such a panto purist that he refuses to perform in productions of Cinderella, reasoning that there is no dame role in it. So this year, he’s directing only. And it’s probably not a bad idea: the underlying fundamentals of this year’s panto are stronger than in recent years, where the secondary characters feel like they’ve been left to wither on the vine while Rowe swans off with the glory. This show’s heart lies with its villains: Alexandra Waite-Roberts is the very definition of ‘pantomime villain’ as Oblivia, Cinderella’s cacklingly evil stepmother who in this version offed her stepdaughter’s dad years previously and barely makes any effort to conceal the fact. ‘Ugly sisters’ is a term that has fallen out of fashion in recent years, but in the roles that used to be called that, George Heyworth and Kat B are great fun as Nausea and Flatula, two women who aren’t so much evil as incredibly dumb. In the absence of Rowe, the audience work falls to them – they make a solid enough job of it – and they memorably join forces with Nicholas McLean’s prissy Buttons for a run through ‘The Twelve Days of Christmas’ that lasts something like 10 minutes and heavily...

Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett on Lander 23: ‘it’s high stakes, high adrenaline’. Post 2022’s The Burnt City, immersive theatre legends Punchdrunk seem genuinely liberated by apparently ditching the mask-based format that’s defined most of their previous body of work. Viola’s Room (2024) was a focussed and unnerving hourlong plunge into a twisted fairytale; and Lander 23 is something completely different again, being a ‘stealth based exploration game’ based on ‘videogame mechanics’ that will see audiences deployed in teams of four onto an alien planet to try and find out the fate of the titular landing vehicle, which has disappeared mysteriously. This all feels very new and indeed, in acknowledgement of this the show is billed as ‘early access’, that is to say it’s effectively a work-in-progress for now (and there won’t be reviews, or at least not during this period). Exactly what will happen in it is vague beyond the above synopsis. What we do know is that Lander 23 will run to about 90 minutes, that it’s based on videogames, that it’s possible to ‘die’ in it (you’ll come back to life though), and that the set will be a ‘modded’ version of the Trojan cityscape from The Burnt City. You also have to technically see it in groups of four, meaning tickets are only purchasable in pairs, although if you want to come down solo you can ring the box office on 0208 191 1431. One half of the group will advise the other half what to do over radio, with roles swapping during the course of...

This is the tenth anniversary of the Palladium panto, which is remarkable in a way as it kind of feels like London’s biggest festive show has been around forever. In part that’s because there is, to be blunt, relatively little annual variation: a core cast of middle aged men who’ve been there since the beginning do amusing turns byt way of back up to Julian Clary, who effortlessly walks off with the show by playing a series of flimsily disguised variants on himself (this year he plays a character called King Julian), with every utterance is a virtuosically smutty innuendo that blessedly sails over the heads of primary schoolers. There’s usually a big guest headline star from the world of light entertainment too: this year it’s Catherine Tate, who’ll be playing Carabosse the Wicked Fairy. Palladium panto lifers Paul Zerdin and Nigel Havers are back, as are more recent additions to the crew Rob Madge, Jon Culshaw and Amonik Melaco. Compared to the likes of Hackney or the Lyric Hammersmith, the Palladium Panto is much closer to a series of variety turns than a work of theatre with a plot. But that’s all to the good at the Palladium, and ten blockbuster years on they’re perfectly entitled to subscribe to the old adage of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

Read our review of Paddington the Musical here. Have we finally reached Peak Paddington? The young Peruvian bear’s spectacular renaissance hasn’t just yielded a trilogy of hit films: there’s a TV series for younger kids, and 2024 saw the opening of official immersive attraction the Paddington Bear Experience. A really banging computer game aside, it’s hard to see what else there is to do with the character beyond ‘more films’. Apart from, of course, a big splashy West End musical. Which we’re now getting: West End super-producer Sonia Friedman has done the honours, assembling a crack team headed by playwright Jessica Swale doing the book and kids’ author and McFly member Tom Fletcher on songs, all directed by Luke Shepherd, who did such a good job with the smash revival of Starlight Express. The cast is now confirmed as Timi Akinyosade (Tony), Amy Booth-Steel (Lady Sloane), Tarinn Callender (Grant), Delilah Bennett-Cardy (Judy Brown), Adrian Der Gregorian (Mr. Brown), Tom Edden (Mr Curry), Brenda Edwards (Tanya), Amy Ellen Richardson (Mrs. Brown), Victoria Hamilton-Barritt (Millicent Clyde),  Teddy Kempner (Mr Gruber), Bonnie Langford (Mrs Bird). Plus there’s the bear himself who is being depicted by a team of two perfomers: Arti Shah will don a bear suit that makes her look alarmingly like a giant Paddington doll come to life, while James Hameed will be the ‘off-stage performer’, which sounds like it’ll involve doing Paddington’s voice and remote controlliung his facial...

A century ago, Noël Coward was the shit. Aged just 25, he was in a phase of his career when he couldn’t stop scoring hits. And he wasn’t simply some young fogey with a nice line in upmarket witticisms: his 1924 breakthrough play The Vortex had scandalised polite society with its depiction of drug abuse (which was furthermore an allegory for the even more verboten subject of homosexuality). And in 1925 came Fallen Angels, which discussed sex outside marriage and the (admittedly hypothetical) prospect of an affair with an insouciant casualness that scandalised a stiff upper lipped interwar England.  But in 2025, it feels silly to pretend Fallen Angels is anything more than a nicely crafted old-fashioned pleasure. Or certainly in this straight-down-the-line period revival. Yes, it’s amusing, but it’s amusing in a ‘half the jokes are about how the maid is unexpectedly clever’, type of way. Julia (Janie Dee) and Jane (Alexandra Gilbreath) are middle aged best friends. Julia is posh and poised. Jane is posh and shambolic. They are spending the weekend together while their distant husbands go off golfing.  But things get spicy, quickly: they receive word that Maurice, a Frenchman they both had sexual relationships with before marriage, is in town and intending to visit them. They freak out and start drinking heavily, convinced that Maurice will be wanting to play hide the saucisson with them both. And they’re sorely tempted to sample his charcuterie: it’s made clear that there’s...

This is the (new) King’s Head Theatre’s second go at panto after a luke-warm Cinderella in 2024. By all accounts their first one (written and directed, as is the case this year, by Andrew Pollard) was fine, if a little lacking in the ‘fun’ department. I’m glad to say the team working away four floors below Upper Street got the memo, as this year’s Jack and the Beanstalk is absolutely bursting with berserk energy (and fart jokes) from the word go.  Nominally set in Islington, there isn’t anything hugely conceptually different about this retelling of the fairy tale. What it does have is bags of vim. The whole thing is supercharged with anarchic, Saturday-morning telly kineticism. The boy and girl actors (Elliot Baker-Costello and Priscile Grace) emanate the energy of a thousand Labrador puppies. Even the fact the theatre is so damn deep underground helps generate an atmosphere. As you descend into what feels like the bowels of the earth to reach the stage, there’s a tangible sense of mounting excitement. By the time the kids are in their seats, gathered in what feels like a cross between a school gymnasium and the Manhattan Project, it’s all a bit febrile.  The two children I brought along were properly engrossed for 90 percent of the two-hour run time, which is good going. In fact, the intimacy of the venue means that not paying attention is actively difficult. The cast of six hurl themselves around Jake Evans’ brutally colourful (and dynamically lit) stage, gurning at the...

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...

Adult panto supremos He’s Behind You! – aka Jon Bradfield and Martin Hooper, aka the guys who did the Above the Stag panto back in the day – return to the Charing Cross Theatre for another year, this time with a ribald spin on Beauty and the Beast. This version is set in the wintry Scottish village of Lickmanochers, where pampered mummy’s boy Bertie finds himself imprisoned in the castle of a luxuriently hairy aristocrat. Matthew Baldwin will once again star as the dame in a show that’s strictly for over-18s only.

Hot on the heels of September’s merry-go-round of Fashion Weeks, the National Portrait Gallery’s latest opening is another moment to reflect on what fashion and beauty mean to us today. A second outing in five years for the trailblazing 20th century photographer, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World unfolds like a billowing ballgown; opulent and eye-catching, but it can’t help tripping over its long hem. The glittering charm, however, forgives its clumsiness.  Beaton’s previous outing at NPG in 2020 was cut short after only five days because of the pandemic. Rather than reviving Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things, this revamped exhibition presents him as more than just a photographer. Younger audiences are likely to find this show more relatable, through its emphasis on his contributions to costume and set design, given their ascendant roles in contemporary fashion. From curious beginnings to his rise through the cultural upper-class, his war photography and costume designs for My Fair Lady, we get a good look at how places and periods influenced Beaton’s style.  If anything, this show is about how big Beaton’s prop and costume chest is. Elaborately grandiose outfits screaming over intricate backgrounds made his early shots look like stills from the kind of plays Aristophanes would’ve put on during his day. Flirting with the avant-garde in Paris, Beaton’s staging and costumes turn weird and uncanny. Even during the war there’s a bold expressionism to his framing that only...

Video games are the medium for Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. The young artist uses them to ‘imaginatively archive and empower Black Trans stories’ - this isn’t just point-and-shoot, slack-jawed gaming for the sake of it, this is one of contemporary society’s most important cultural forms being used to give voice to marginalised identities. 

If you’re a non-disabled person, you may never have given any proper thought to the many ways in which the world is designed without regard for the needs of disabled members of our society.  Described as ‘both a celebration and a call to action’, this V&A exhibition seeks to rectify that, exploring the social history of design and disability from the 1940s to the present. Opening in summer 2025, it promises to highlight the contributions made by disabled, Deaf, and neurodiverse communities to art, design, fashion, photography and architecture, as well as outlining how design can be made more inclusive and accessible in the future.   

To the layperson, high-fashion shows can be a source of confusion. Why would anyone spend thousands on a dress constructed entirely of razor blades, or a pair of decrepit shoes that have been deliberately sullied or even torched? Well, because sometimes creating unwearable garments is actually the point, thank you very much. And that’s exactly what the Barbican’s latest fashion exhibition illustrates.  From the controversial £1,400 Balenciaga destroyed trainers, to Jordanluca’s pee-soaked jeans, and dresses that have been pulled out of bogs, Dirty Looks peers at the muckier side of fashion design. Don’t expect immaculate gowns displayed solemnly in glass cases. This isn’t a historical look at haute couture, or a glossy advert for a fashion house concealed inside a gallery show. The exhibition, featuring more than 120 garments from designers including Maison Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Issey Miyake, takes a clever thematic approach to the philosophy of dirt within fashion, showing how ideas around industrialisation, colonisation, the body, and waste, can be illustrated on the runway.  One particularly icky room is dedicated to bodily fluids, showing artificially sweat and period-stained garb, others to food stains, pieces made with rubbish and to trompe l’oeil faux-grimy clothing.Stand-out pieces include a torn and muddy lace dress from Alexander McQueen’s controversial ‘Highland Rape’ collection, a creepy Miss Havisham-esque Comme des Garçons...

The Anmatyerr artist Emily Kam Kngwarray only took up painting during the last decade of her life. Making up for lost time, she produced thousands of paintings in the years leading up to her death in 1996. She worked frenetically, changing her style multiple times. This, her first major European solo exhibition, presents just a sliver of her oeuvre. It’s an impressive introduction to a visionary artist and, to those unfamiliar with Aboriginal art, a new way of understanding art. Naturally, this show needs more exposition than most. It requires European audiences to let go of their art-historical baggage. For example, the colourful works on show here aren’t straightforwardly representational but it would be wrong to call them abstract. Rather than leave us to experience Kngwarray’s work on the familiar-but-inaccurate terms that define western art, the exhibition takes two rooms to provide a potted education on Aboriginal art and life and the artist’s place within it. Dreaming, for example, is an important religio-cultural term that pervades the exhibition, connecting Aboriginal Peoples with their ancestors through the land. This show needs more exposition than most The exhibition finds confident form in its third room, where more than a dozen large-scale acrylic paintings, all replete with coloured dots, surround a procession of batik prints on silk that hang from the ceiling. Interconnectedness is less a feature of these works than an underpinning of them. In each of the...

It’s not that long ago that British art bigwigs Gilbert & George grew so frustrated with what they saw as a lack of attention from the UK’s art institutions that they set up their very own museum dedicated to themselves. That big whinge seems a bit premature now that the Hayward is giving them a big exhibition looking at their work since the turn of the millennium, a period that has seen them satirising everything from hope and fear to sex and religion.

Every year, Tate Modern teams up with Hyundai for the Hyundai Commission – a chance for one artist to share an exciting new work in the museum’s iconic Turbine Hall. The chosen masterpiece that will be on display in 2025 will be announced in the coming months, but previous selections for the coveted spot include Mire Lee, Anicka Yi, El Anatsui, Superflex, Abraham Cruzvillegas, among others.

Get a dose of hip hop history at Somerset House this autumn, where the first major solo exhibition from British photographer Jennie Baptiste will be displayed. Having photographed everyone from NAS, to Jay Z, Estelle and Biggie Smalls, Baptiste’s work spanning the last three decades has been at the forefront of R&B, hip hop, fashion and youth culture, as she documented the influence of Black British communities on culture and art from the 1990s to today.   

Kerry James Marshall is an artist with a singular vision. He has become arguably the most important living American painter over the past few decades, with an ultra-distinctive body of work that celebrates the Black figure in an otherwise very ‘Western’ painting tradition. This big, ambitious show will be a joyful celebration of his lush, colourful approach to painting.

F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives. The novelist might have changed his tune if he’d happened across a young model called Lee Miller back in the New York of the late 1920s.Even back then, in her pixie-cropped fashionista era, the New Yorker must have exuded an unquenchable thirst for discovery and reinvention. Fast forward 30 or so years and she’d been a muse for Man Ray and the Surrealist movement, starred in films, become a famous photographer, decamped to Paris, Cairo and London, traversed war-torn Europe as a daredevil journalist and finally, haunted by the conflict, holed in a cosy corner of Sussex to host arty parties and pioneer avant garde recipes like ‘onion upside down cake’ and ‘marshmallow Coca-Cola ice cream’. She died fêted as a celebrity chef. Second act? She had a folio’s worth.  All of those eras are up on the Tate Britain’s walls for the duration of the gallery’s blockbuster exhibition. Dividing Miller’s extraordinary career chronologically, it’s a time-travelling experience as well as a showcase of her technical and compositional skills. ‘Before the Camera’, shows her as a beautiful young model in NYC in 1926, the daughter of a keen amateur photographer. Walk through a dozen or so rooms and there she is, in Hitler’s bathtub, world-famous and hollowed out, returning to self-portraiture to capture a shattered continent in one image.   If the shimmery black-and-white portraits she took – from a playful Charlie...