The best autumn events in London for 2024

The comically grotesque world of Tim Burton – the esteemed director behind ‘Corpse Bride’, ‘Edward Scissorhands’ and ‘Dark Shadows’ – is put under the spotlight at this exhibition, which concludes its decade-long world tour with a stint at Kensington’s Design Museum this autumn, shortly after his much-anticipated sequel ‘Beetlejuice 2’ lands in cinemas. Curated in collaboration with the famous goth himself, the collection draws from Burton’s personal archive of drawings, paintings, photographs, sketchbooks, moving-image works, sculptural installations, set and costume designs to shine a light on his distinctive, darkly humorous aesthetic. 

This year’s BFI London Film Festival will kick off on Wednesday, October 9 with Steve McQueen’s World War II drama Blitz at the Royal Festival Hall and cinemas across the UK.

From there, the UK’s biggest film festival will be pressing play on 11 days and nights of movies, big and small, at cinemas and venues across London and cities across England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. 

The binaural sound design by Gareth Fry on this production of Macbeth requires all audience members to wear headphones throughout, an unusual and somewhat distracting experience, or at least until you acclimatise.

Once you do, you start to get what’s being achieved with the different speech registers. David  Tennant, in particular, is one of the most nuanced, charismatic actors out there. He plays Macbeth as a hard-nosed political operator with little of the hesitancy or guilt the character is typically saddled with. As the bodies start to pile up, there’s a chilling casualness to his behaviour – his intimate suggestion to the two assassins that they murder Banquo and his son Fleance is offhand and matey, like he’s asking them to do something a little naughty as a favour. He makes it sound so plausible.

On the face of it a stage version of Stanley Kubrick’s immortal Cold War satire 'Dr Strangelove’ is as hubristic a conceit as adapting ‘2001’ or ‘Full Metal Jacket’: not only was the 1964 masterpiece intentionally shot in black and white, but it also boasted a lead performance from Peter Sellars – more accurately, a trio of lead performances – so iconic and singular as to seem literally impossible to replicate.

Nonetheless, here we are: the Kubrick estate has given the stage rights to master satirist Amando Iannucci (‘The Day Today’, ‘I’m Alan Partridge’, ‘The Think of It’, ‘Veep’. ‘The Death of Stalin’, etcetera etcetera) to adapt Kubrick’s classic about a rogue American general who decides to pre-emptively nuke Russia. Iannucci has in turn cast his old mucker Steve Coogan as the lead: it’s not entirely clear if the stage version will exactly mirror the film (Coogan is billed as playing ‘multiple roles’, not necessarily the same ones Sellars did), but certainly these are some very talented people doubtless giving it their best go.

It’s co-written and directed by Sean Foley: a safe pair of comic hands who is unlikely to reinvent the wheel but should ensure the laughs are front and centre.

Uncomfortably, uncannily human robots fill Geumheung Jeong’s world. The Korean artist dances with the animatronic figures, interacts and communicates with them. The result is an uncomfortably emotional exploration of consumerism, technology and desire. Can’t wait. 

25 Indian artists are being brought together for this exploration of art, love, friendship and society in a time of massive turbulence and upheaval. The period of 1975-1998 saw India go through untold changes, and these artists were there to document and react to all of it. 

This heavily adapted version of Sophocles’s ‘Oedipus Rex’ by erstwhile Almeida wunderkind Robert Icke first premiered in a Dutch language version for Internationaal Theater Amsterdam way back in 2018. Its journey to the London stage has been a fairly fraught one: it was due to arrive here in 2020 with Mark Strong in the title role and the great Helen Mirren as Oedipus’s mother-slash-wife Jocasta. Although there were efforts made to push it back to 2021, the pandemic essentially put paid to Mirren's involvement and it’s presumably now at least reasonably likely that her stage days are behind her.

Four years on, however, and Strong has stayed the course and will be joined by the magnificent Lesley Manville (technically too young to be Strong’s mother, but we’ll allow it). Like all Icke’s adaptations, his ‘Oedipus’ is entirely contemporary in terms of setting and language, aiming to convey the essence of the story and not the period trappings. This is set on the night of politician Oedipus’s great electoral victory – but some very disturbing revelations will come to light about his wife.

Claude Monet loved foggy old London. Between 1899 and 1901, the pioneering French artist came to the city three times, painting stunning, incandescent visions of views across the Thames. And now, for the first time, they’re going to be shown here when 21 paintings of Charing Cross Bridge, Waterloo Bridge and Houses of Parliament will go on show at the Courtauld Gallery, just a few hundred metres from the Savoy where many of the works were painted.

Charge the steins! You don’t have to travel all the way to Germany for a lederhosen-clad knees-up this Oktoberfest – and you don't even have to wait until October. Munich’s world-famous beer festival is very much on in London and starting this September; with big steins of beer, platters of excessively long wurst and loud oompah bands blowing brass like they don’t give a schnitzel. 

Whether you’re after a traditional take on the event or want to cut loose with some raucous table dancing, authentic Bavarian beers or east London craft IPAs, you can find the perfect Oktoberfest for you right here in London. Give yourself a warm willkommen at one of these London Oktoberfest events. 

RECOMMENDED: The best things to do in London this autumn.

As the nights get longer, the weather gets colder and the atmosphere on London’s streets gets spookier, Halloween comes ever closer. Before you know it, the whole city will be awash with pumpkins, spooky characters, scratchy wigs and events that will help you make this year’s fright-fest go off with a bang. Here’s how to get into the spirit and make the most of Halloween 2024.

Hew Locke’s last outing in a big London art institution saw him fill Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries with a raucous, kaleidoscopic carnival. Now he’s turning his colourful, critical eye on the British Museum’s collection, for a major new exhibition exploring the complex, often shocking stories of imperialism and colonialism told by the museum’s objects.

The Turner Prize is returning once again to London (every other year it goes to a different city, last year it was at the Towner Gallery in Eastbourne), bringing with it its annual celebration of the best artists in the country. This year’s shortlisted artists are Pio Abad, Claudette Johnson, Jasleen Kaur and Delaine Le Bas. The Turner Prize has lost almost all of its old ability shock, and even a lot of its ability to annoy, but it’s always an interesting snapshot of art in the UK.

With their big Autumn exhibition, the Royal Academy’s almost gone full Ninja Turtle. Only Donatello is missing as they take a look at the work of three giants of the Renaissance - Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael – and how for a brief time they weren’t just contemporaries, but rivals. Here’s hoping 2025 sees them doing a show about April O’Neil and her impact on the development of early conceptual installation art. 

Anyone who’s ever stepped inside the Royal Albert Hall will understand that it can’t be filled with just any old music – it needs scale and drama. And every year it gets exactly that with the BBC Proms, one of London’s best-loved and most dazzling cultural festivals. 

The Promenade Concerts (as they’re also known) have taken place in the RAH throughout the summer since way back in 1895. They’ve been organised by the BBC since 1927. 

The likes of Pete Tong, Stormzy, Kylie Minogue and even Dame Judi Dench have all made appearances at the Proms in the past, and this year the likes of Florence + the Machine and Sam Smith are set to perform. It’s not all orchestral renditions of classic classical pieces of music (although there will be plenty of that, too). 

Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst are artists at the forefront of AI-experimentation. ‘The Call’ will see them creating voices out of data collection and AI model-training, exploring the idea of the choir as an ancient form of primal human cooperation.

There's been a gaping chasm, an unfillable abyss, in London's recreational heart ever since the Trocadero finally closed its doors in 2011. It has left the city crying out for an arcade experience, somewhere to go and lose yourself in gaming. And now, Power Up is here to answer all of your RPG prayers. Admittedly, it doesn't have a rocket-shaped escalator or countless dark corners for snogging, but what it does have is bank after bank of classic videogames.

They've made an attempt at education with a wall of consoles from throughout history, from the Amiga to the Xbox, but you can ignore all that if you want and just concentrate on turning your eyes square.

Expect 'sensorial installations' and 'performative sculpture' in this major UK show by South Korean artist Haegue Yang, featuring work from throughout their career. Domestic items get transformed, folk traditions get morphed and politics get twisted into mind-bending immersive artworks. This show will see the world premiere of 'large-scale Venetian blind installation' which will almost certainly be more exciting than it sounds. 

Somerset House has a history of creating intruding and carefully-curated exhibitions about Black and queer culture. This autumn, it’s at it again with this deep dive into the largest cultural and historical archive of Black LGBTQ+ people in Britain: rukus!

Curated by artist and filmmaker Topher Campbell, the exhibition is a chance to see items from the award-winning rukus! archive (currently housed at the London Metropolitan Archives), including material showcasing the activism, artistic events and private lives of Black Queer Britains, work from UK Black Queer pioneers from the 1970’s until the present day, newly commissioned work and pieces from the ‘first out generation’ who have created greater visibility for the Black LGBTQ+ diaspora.

The exhibition opening coincides with 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair and is a wonderful and rare chance to get acquainted with an intimate slice of Black queer history in the UK that’s not often seen in public.