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Spend your week searching out Moomins at Kew Gardens, eating spicy pizza at Yard Sale or sipping your way through top-quality coffees at a whole festival dedicated to the stuff. Have a wicked week with the list below!
Things to do
March for the Strays, Cavendish Square, Tue, free. Raise awareness for abandoned cats and dogs and protest against the use of real fur on this anti-animal-cruelty march.
City Lit Takeover, The Nines, Wed-Sun, free-£10. The Nines in Peckham plays host to a programme of music, arts and parties curated by London’s adult learning institute, City Lit.
Bardeblah, Balham Bowls Club, Thu, free. Combining intelligent debate, opinionated players and good-humoured fun in a local boozer, Bardeblah is an intellectual game of persuasion centred on contemporary political and social issues.
Craftivist Collective: Mini Fashion Statements Workshop, Hackney Showroom, Thu, £10. Channel your inner craftivist at this papercraft workshop where you’ll help create mini scrolls with messages reminding consumers to be more aware about their clothes, including considering who made them and where they’ve come from.
Moomin Adventures at Kew Gardens, all week, £15. London just can’t get enough of those portly Moomin trolls. First they had their own exhibition at the Southbank Centre and now they’re departing Moominvalley to take part in Moomin Adventures at Kew Gardens.
Lindt Gold Bunny Hunt, Hampton Court Palace, all week, £11.50-£23. Seek out the golden bunnies hidden around Hampton Court Palace and learn about the history of ‘royal chocolate’.
The Baileys Prize Book Bar, Waterstones Tottenham Court Road, all week, free-£8. At this literary pop-up leaf through the books of the Baileys Prize shortlistees with a liqueur cocktail in hand or stop by for the bar’s programme of events that includes readings and talks by writers Sara Pascoe, Lisa McInerney, Nicci Gerrard, Diane Wei Liang, Val McDermid, Katy Brand and more.
Greenwich Painted Hall Ceiling Tours, Old Royal Naval College, all week, £5-£10. Take a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get up close to the ceiling of the Old Royal Naval College’s Painted Hall in this series of tours taking place while conservators restore 40,000 square feet of the ceiling’s painted surface.
…or check out more events happening in London this week
Eating and drinking
The London Coffee Festival, Old Truman Brewery, Thu-Sun, £16.50 adv, £22,50 door. A celebration of the city’s vibrant caffeine culture featuring gourmet coffee, speciality tea, artisanal food, demonstrations by world-class baristas, live music and a comprehensive ‘lab’ seminar programme.
Yard Sale Pizza x Rola Wala, all branches, all week. The pizza legend is combining forces with street food dudes Rola Wala to create an Indian-inspired pizza special.
…or check out the latest restaurant reviews
Live music
Samantha Crain, The Lexington, Tue, £9.50. Oklahoma folk singer Crain performs an acoustic solo set of delicate songs from her brilliant, intimate albums ‘Under Branch & Thorn & Tree’ and ‘Kid Face’.
Fences, Hoxton Square Bar & Kitchen, Tue, £10. The rock singer-songwriter performs his songs, including works from album ‘Lesser Oceans’, the lead single of which, ‘Arrows’, got 30 million hits on Spotify.
Bear’s Den, Eventim Apollo Hammersmith, Wed, £23.75. Anyone allergic to banjos or beards, be warned: this trio of hirsute Londoners have supported Mumford & Sons live and one of them co-runs Communion Records with the Mumfords’ Ben Lovett.
…or take a look at all the live music events in London this week
Film
Tufnell Park Film Club: ‘Chuck Berry – Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll’, The Star, Tue, £15 annual membership. Early on in this well-researched documentary and concert film about the legendary Chuck Berry, we see Berry outside the Fox Theatre in St Louis, from which he was excluded as a boy because of his colour, and which is about to be the scene of his sixtieth birthday concert.
Kennington Noir: ‘They Live by Night’, The Cinema Museum, Wed, £6. Nicholas Ray’s lovers-on-the-run classic ‘They Live by Night’ introduces its outcast heroes with the caption ‘This boy and this girl were never properly introduced to the world we live in.’
‘West Side Story’, Regent Street Cinema, Wed, £12, £11 concs. Reheating ‘Romeo and Juliet’ in the pressure cooker of late-’50s New York City, director Robert Wise and choreographer Jerome Robbins made a fine fist of transplanting the Bernstein-Sondheim Broadway play to the screen.
Or at the cinema...
Free Fire A dazzling cast, including Brie Larson and Cillian Murphy, assemble for Ben Wheatley’s blistering, bullets-flying action movie set in 1970s Boston.
Graduation The latest from the Romanian director of ‘4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days’ is a tough drama about a father who’ll stop at nothing to get his daughter ahead.
Fear Eats the Soul This story of the romance between a German woman and a Moroccan man remains one of the most moving films ever made.
…or see all of the latest releases
© Conrad Blakemore
Theatre
The Life, Southwark Playhouse, all week, £25. Legendary director Michael Blakemore directs a fringe revival of this Broadway musical about Times Square’s sleazy heyday.
Don Juan in Soho, Wyndham’s Theatre, all week, £10-£150. David Tennant shines in Patrick Marber’s iffy story of sexual adventure in Soho.
Big Guns, The Yard Theatre, all week, £15-£17. A new drama abut violence and entertainment from Nina Segal.
…or see our theatre critics’ choices
This week’s best new art
Christopher Williams: Open Letter – The Family Drama Refunctioned? (From the Point of View of Production), David Zwirner, all week, free. Christopher Williams studied under the legendary West Coast artist John Baldessari – and boy, does it show.
Cerith Wyn Evans: The Tate Britain Commission 2017, Tate Britain, all week, free. A neon glow is juddering through Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries. Cerith Wyn Evans’s new sculpture is a storm of monotone rays, dominating the natural daylight, arrogantly filling the space with artificiality.
The Japanese House: Architecture and Life after 1945, Barbican Centre, all week, £14.50. Snaking your way through the Barbican’s latest exhibition, you will probably feel an almost overwhelming desire to take off your shoes, so accurate is the 1:1 recreation of Ryue Nishizawa’s Moriyama House.
…or see all London art reviews
And finally
Win...an amazing trip for two to Hong Kong
Grab...cheap and discounted London theatre tickets
Book…these gigs while you still can
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