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There are some truly great things to get stuck into this week. Get gaming in a gallery with the Museum of Childhood’s late-night event, savour great sausages and beer at a Hoxton Oktoberfest celebration, or spice up your Tuesday night watching Goat play a bonkers show in Elephant & Castle.
Things to do
Bright Lights and Tourist Delights: 100 years of Piccadilly Circus, London Transport Museum, Tue, £10, concs £8. Architectural critic and writer Jonathan Glancey runs through the last 100 years of Piccadilly Circus and the developments that have taken place in the area.
Bloomsbury Festival, various Locations in Bloomsbury, Wed-Thu, prices vary. Bloomsbury Festival returns in 2016 with a packed line-up featuring performances, live music and events celebrating the rich heritage of the area.
Flat Iron Square Opening Day, Flat Iron Square, Thu, free. A new development on the Low Line in Southwark opens with a plethora of arts, food and drink venues flinging open their doors.
Gaming in the Galleries, V&A Museum of Childhood, Thu, £7. Board game café Draughts hosts a night of gaming with their expert players guiding guests through the likes of Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride and The Resistance.
Mighty Boosh Exhibition, The Book Club, Thu, free. To celebrate ten years of The Mighty Boosh Live, The Book Club is hosting an exhibition and events.
Made London, One Marylebone, Thu, £10, free under-14s. Made London returns with another huge range of colourful, beautiful and original craft and design products.
Shadow Over Southwark, various locations, Thu, £25-£30. This Halloween adventure will have participants cracking clues, working their way through dark paths and eery locations and using swish technology to gather the info they need.
One Sweet Social, Wunderlust, Thu, £3. Ben & Jerry’s and civil rights charity HOPE Not Hate have teamed up for this event in Lewisham. Head south for a night of sweet music from the likes of Speech Debelle, Josh Whitehouse and Trinket Soul. Plus there’s ice cream.
The Big Issue: Up from the Streets, Proud Camden, all week, free. 2016 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of The Big Issue and to celebrate a quarter century of publishing, they’re showcasing some of the best covers produced over the decades.
…or check out more events happening in London this week.
Eating and drinking
Market Porter's Great British Menu, The Table, Thu, £37.50. A seven-course tasting menu rustled up by chef of the moment Adam Rawson in collaboration with British produce specialist Market Porter.
Hoxtoberfest, Hoxton Docks, Thu, £30. Sausages, music and beer make the perfect trio at east London's version of Oktoberfest.
…or check out the latest restaurant reviews.
Live music
Angel Olsen, Koko, TONIGHT, £15. When otherworldly Chicago singer Olsen isn't playing with Emmett Kelly's experimental folk-rock band The Cairo Gang, she's a bewitching folk songwriter in her own right.
Goat, The Coronet, Tuesday, £18.50. Goat create ace voodoo psychedelia: chanting over bongos and widdly, Middle Eastern-influenced riffs smothered in reverb, dressing in colourful masks and providing one hell of an energetic, intense live experience.
Poliça, Roundhouse, Wed, £18. Vocoder-heavy Minneapolitans Poliça whipped up a storm of hype with their first album, 'Give You the Ghost' – its seductive blend of trip hop and synth-pop bought them high-profile fans including Jay Z and Justin Vernon of Bon Iver.
…or take a look at all the live music events in London this week.
© Kevin Lake Photography
Nightlife
Dusky, Oval Space, Wed, £14.50. Deep house DJ duo Dusky play an eclectic eight-hour set.
EYOE Presents Jamie Isaac, Corsica Studios, Wed, adv £9.56. The DJ and producer plus guests supplying dance all night long.
…or see all the parties planned this week.
Film
Science on Screen: ‘Wild Strawberries’ + intro, Barbican Centre, Tue, £11.50, £10.50 concs. Physicist Geoffrey West uses Ingmar Bergman’s elegiac road movie as a springboard to explore ideas of mortality and the science of ageing.
‘S is for Stanley’, Regent Street Cinema, Wed, £12, £11. Emilio D’Alessandro was an Italian immigrant who’d given up on his Formula 1 dreams and turned to cab driving in London when he was hired first as a chauffeur, then as an all-round fixer and sidekick for legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick.
Black Star: ‘Purple Rain’, BFI Southbank, Thu, £8.35–£11.75. The BFI’s epic season dedicated to great black screen idols gets underway with a tribute to the most performance-obsessed of them all, the mighty Prince.
Or at the cinema...
My Scientology Movie ★★★☆☆ Louis Theroux presents an entertaining but rather light doc on the infamous Church.
American Honey ★★★☆☆ British writer-director Andrea Arnold heads to the US for a bold, flawed road movie about American teens.
…or see all of the latest releases.
© David Monteith-Hodge
Theatre
Skin a Cat, The Bunker, Tue-Thu, £12-£19.50, £15 concs. London's newest (and deepest) theatre opens with this witty drama about a young woman's excruciating sexual adventures.
A Man of Good Hope, Young Vic, all week, £10 - £35. A heartbreaking opera set in a South African township.
The Mountaintop, Young Vic, all week, £10-£20. Superb mini-revival of Katori Hall's Olivier-winning MLK drama.
One Night In Miami…, Donmar Warehouse, all week, £10-£40. Cassius Clay, Malcolm X, Sam Cooke and Jim Brown 'enjoy' a night in.
…or see our theatre critics’ choices.
This week's best new art
The Non-Objective World: Art & Language, Ilya Kabakov, Sprovieri, Tue-Thu, free. Weirdly, the star artist of this exhibition isn’t actually in it. That would be Kazimir Malevich, the early-twentieth-century Russian pioneer of Suprematism who believed art could be distilled into the simplest of forms – a black square.
Affordable Art Fair Battersea, Battersea Evolution, Thu, £8-£15. The AAF does exactly what it says on the tin. Since its launch in 2008, it’s made buying art a far less exclusive affair – works are priced at a maximum of £5,000, and tips for buying are listed on the website.
Tala Madani: Shitty Disco, Pilar Corrias, all week, free. Madani’s dark nightclub scenes are filled with dancing punters lost in the music, standing in awe of bright streams of light erupting from all sorts of naughty places.
Feminist Avant-Garde Of The 1970s, Photographers' Gallery, all week, £3, concs £2.50. It’s a big one, this new exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery: 200-plus works by 48 artists from 20 countries. It’s also got a big name that some people will find pretty off-putting.
…or see all London art reviews.
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