Free things to do in London this week

Want to gawp at some of the masterpieces in the National Gallery but can’t face schlepping to central London? Croydon will be taken over with life-sized reproductions of some of the gallery’s biggest bangers in this free outdoor art exhibition. From Van Gogh, to Monet and Turner, CR0’s town centre will be awash with artwork. Locations to spot the paintings include the Queen’s Gardens, Croydon Minster, Whitgift Shopping Centre and Park Hill Park. Pieces will also be installed in Coulsdon, New Addington, Purley, Thornton Heath and Upper Norwood.

A new free photography exhibition illustrates the beauty and fragility of the Pantanal – the world’s largest wetland that sprawls across Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay. Over 60 images, captured by two of Brazil’s leading documentary photographers, will be displayed. Visitors will discover the Pantanal’s wonderful biodiversity – which includes jaguars, howler monkeys, caiman and marsh deer – alongside the ravages of wildfires and deforestation. 

Once again you can expect to see remarkable feats of astrophotography at the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition. It’s a chance to see magical views of both our own night sky and of galaxies far, far away. The winning spacey visions come from dozens of professional and amateur snappers in various categories including ‘Planets, Comets and Asteroids’, ‘Stars and Nebulae’, ‘Galaxies’ and ‘Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year’ for under-16s. Soar down to Greenwich to see the winners from 2025's competition on display. 

Get ready to scream, because the ‘rockstar of the English baroque’ – yep, you heard that right – is getting his own major exhibition in London this spring. Three hundred years after his death,  the OG ‘starchitect’ Sir John Vanbrugh will get a show dedicated to his iconic architecture at Sir John Soane’s museum. Vanbrugh brought England some of its most-admired country houses, including Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard, and is known for his dramatic use of light and shadow, recessions and projections. 

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...

Skate boarders, roller skaters and BMXers have been hanging out at the Southbank’s Undercroft since the ‘70s. Back then, the area had no chain restaurants, no street vendors and certainly no tourists. The Southbank was a barren stretch of pavement along the Thames that was home to ‘two pubs and a sweet shop’. Here, London’s first generation of skateboarders, borrowing from a culture that was growing in California, fell in love with the area’s abundance of make-shift concrete ramps (which they called ‘pigeon-shit banks’), open paved surfaces, blocks and railings. The Southbank Centre itself was an impenetrable office building, and the haughty people inside were not happy about the growing community of skaters that was gathering beneath it. Things are looking quite different these days.  In a new pay-what-you-can (and free for skaters) exhibition celebrating 50 years of the Southbank Skate Space (AKA the Undercroft), the Southbank Centre is telling the story of the iconic graffitied, low-ceilinged skate haven through oral histories, photographs, films and sound art.  As well as giving a granular timeline of the skate park, accompanied by vibrant photographs (although I would have liked a few more photos), Skate 50 is all about the Southbank’s resilient and pioneering skate community. There are recorded interviews with some of the park’s OG boarders – like Lorraine Rossdale, one of the first British female skaters in the 1970s. She recalls earning her stripes as the first...

Delcy Morelos spent a month filling the Barbican’s Sculpture Court with earth and clay. Working by hand, the Colombian artist and her team layered more than ten tonnes of the stuff to create origo, a mammoth, multi-sensory installation stretching 24 metres wide and 12 metres high, named after the Latin word for ‘origin’.  For more than a decade, Morelos has asked viewers to rethink their relationship with soil; not just as the brown stuff shaken from boots or scrubbed from under our fingernails, but as the substance from which all life emerges and depends. Growing up in Tierralta, northern Colombia, Morelos is influenced by an Andean view that sees landscapes not as resources to be extracted, but deserving of care and protection.  And so here, in the Barbican’s circular courtyard, we earthlings are invited to burrow through Morelos’ ovular structure, weaving through one of six entrances before arriving in the belly of the beast. Inside, you are plunged into near-total darkness, feeling your way along softly curving corridors lined with compact, hair-like roots. And unlike the dank, musty odour one might expect from a mound of soil, Morelos’ beast smells unexpectedly good: infused with clove and cinnamon and softened by the cool scent of earth after rain.   Then you emerge into the centre of the installation: the doughnut’s hole, open to the elements and flooded with light. Here, meditative activities such as tai chi are planned to take place, beneath the Brutalist tower...