Things to do in London today

FEATURE: Why has the world gone crazy for Paddington Bear again? Though you can buy all of Michael Bond’s books in the gift shop, let’s be clear here: the Paddington Bear Experience has very little to do with the first 50 or so years of the marmalade-loving ursine’s existence. Rather, the lavish new central London immersive experience makes no bones about fact it’s a live extension of the world of the two (soon to be three) StudioCanal movies. Theoretically I suppose that’s a shame. Debuting in print in 1958, Paddington has a rich history and London’s first proper attraction dedicated to him doesn’t explore it at all. But who are we kidding here? The Paul King films are modern masterpieces, and Paddington would be left as a beloved but past-his-prime nostalgia character if it weren’t for them. He’d have his little statue at the station. But nothing like this. You don’t absolutely need to have seen the films, but there are countless callbacks to them in this gentle adventure, which essentially an immersive theatre show. As we begin by waiting at a small recreation of Paddington Station to board our train to Windsor Gardens, we’re serenaded by a pre-recorded version of the band from the films playing ‘London is the Place for Me’; when we make it to Windsor Gardens for this year’s Marmalade Day Festival, designer Rebecca Brower has faithfully recreated the entire downstairs of the Brown’s boho Notting Hill pad. And then of course there’s Paddington himself - constantly teased...

Ever wished you could be someone else? How about trying out multiple personalities? That’s exactly what the ‘passengers’ of You Me Bum Bum Train get to do. The labour of love of its creators Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, who founded it in 2004, this immersive cult show has popped up in secret spots across London, taking participants one by one through a series of weird, wonderful, intense and exhilarating experiences. Each participant signs a non-disclosure agreement so that the mystery of what actually happens gets preserved and so everything is a total surprise. You are the star of each of the incredibly realistic scenes, with hundreds of volunteer actors (and the occasional celebrity) guiding you through – but how you react is entirely up to you. This is a safe space to unleash that main character energy and lean into different parts of your personality you had no idea were there, which can be a life changing experience. A shocked first timer I chatted to afterwards said that he would ‘never be the same again’; a 70-something veteran YMBBT rider exclaimed that these shows were the most memorable moments of his entire life.  In the early 2010s I went to more immersive theatrical events than I care to remember, including four YMBBTs. My immersive days are now long behind me but when it was announced that YMBBT was back after eight years, I knew I had to have another dose. Wearing my comfiest of clothes and ready for anything, I turned up at the secret West End location...

Alvaro Barrington is letting you in. He’s opening his arms, opening the doors to his childhood home, opening the windows into his memories.  To walk into the London-based artist’s Duveen commission is to walk into the Grenadian shack he grew up in. The sound of rain hammering on the tin roof echoes around the space as you sit on plastic-covered benches; you’re safe here, protected, just like Barrington felt as a kid with his grandmother. You’re brought into her home, her embrace. In the central gallery, a vast silver dancer is draped in fabrics on an enormous steel pan drum. This is Carnival, this is the Afro-Carribean diaspora at its freest, letting loose, dancing, expressing its soul, communing. You’re brought into the frenzy, the dance, the community. But the fun soon stops. The final space houses a dilapidated shop, built to the dimensions of an American prison cell, surrounded by chain link fencing. Its shutters creak open and slam shut automatically. This is a violent shock, a testimony to the dangers facing Black lives in the West: the police, the prison system, the barely concealed injustice.  After all the music and refuge of the rest of the installation, here, it’s like Barrington’s saying: ‘You want this? You want the carnival, the music, the culture? Then acknowledge the pain, the fear, the mistreatment, the subjugation too.’ I don’t think the paintings here are great, but painting’s not Barrington’s strong suit. He excels when he’s collaborating, sampling,...

Artists spent centuries making art about light – the divine rays of the Renaissance, the shimmering seascapes of Turner, the foggy hazes of the Impressionists – but it wasn’t until the 1970s that anyone really thought to make art with light. British artist Anthony McCall was one of the first, creating pioneering films that used projectors to trace shapes in the air, somehow seeming to turn nothingness solid. It was a trick that the world wasn’t ready for. His immersive, smoke-filled environments, shown in New York lofts, were met with relative indifference, so he left art behind for decades. But the world caught up, and a ubiquitous trend for immersive art in recent years has seen his work reappraised. Now he’s at Tate Modern, taking over the galleries that until recently were home to the blockbuster Yayoi Kusama ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’. It’s a tough immersive act to follow. Kusama’s work is big, glitzy, selfie-friendly, but McCall’s isn’t. And in the wider context of London and its epidemic of heinous Klimt and Dali light shows, or even the good stuff like you see at places like 180 The Strand, can McCall’s simple, geometric films keep pace? It feels physical, like the light is hitting you slap bang in the face. After a room of sketches and an early film showing men in white overalls lighting fires at dusk, you’re plunged into darkness. The four light works here are quiet, ultra-meditative things, nothing more than shafts of white in a pitch black room. In the earliest...

Everyone’s got an opinion of Barbie. Whether you adored playing with her growing up, loathed her for her wildly unrealistic body measurements, or came to appreciate her for her cultural impact, there’s no denying the 11.5inch leggy blonde is one of the most famous toys – if not women – on the planet. Now one year after Barbie-mania had London in a chokehold, Barbara Millicent Roberts has once again tottered back into the capital’s collective conscience, this time via a Design Museum exhibition celebrating 65 years of the iconic doll.  The clothes, the handbags, the mansion, the seemingly perfect boyfriend. Barbie has it all. And so does this exhibition. It provides an extensive look into how the toy was designed, how she has evolved over the years, and how she has influenced fashion, design and wider culture. Created in partnership with Mattel, Barbie’s parent company, the show looks at the toy not just as a kicky blonde doll, but as a brand, and from a design angle it can be considered a real success.  In a dark room filled with rainbow-coloured windows we are taken on an odyssey of all of Barbie’s different head and body shapes. I died a little inside learning about the 1968 Stacey, Barbie’s British friend who had stubby eyelashes, a pasty complexion and a funny shaped head who, in a cruel joke, is lined up next to the bronzed original Malibu Barbie.  In a section dedicated entirely to Barbie pink, we discover that Barb wasn’t always obsessed with the colour, and that it...

No object is just an object: everything is a symbol. And in Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke’s excellent exhibition of items from the British Museum’s endless archives and stores, every object is a symbol of power, dominance and exploitation. Locke (who recently filled Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries with a kaleidoscopic carnival) spent two years digging through the stores, finding maps, photos, sculptures and artefacts that tell countless clashing stories of empire, countless narrative threads. There’s the beautiful Queen Mother Idia mask that Locke uses to symbolise African culture, a golden replica of a British machine gun used to slaughter opposing armies, sculptures of sacred beings carved by Amerindian natives of Jamaica. Locke’s own masked figures sit above all the display cabinets, watching, protecting, judging and celebrating the death of empire. But the show isn’t a straightforward narrative. It’s complex. There’s a huge Medieval English ewer jug that was prized by the Asante court but looted back to Britain in 1895, there’s a canon traded to the Benin army by the Portuguese and then stolen 350 years later by the British, there’s a vast portrait of Queen Victoria wearing the enormous koh-i-noor diamond, which was stolen from the Sikhs in 1849, who in turn stole it from the Durrani Empire, who stole it from the Afsharid dynasty, who stole it from the Mughals. Power is not linear, and it’s not eternal, but its symbols survive. There’s so much shocking, harrowing...

If you like GDPR training, you’re in for a treat at the Serpentine. Tech experimenters Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst’s series of mediaeval church altars and choral compositions is actually a deep dive into the intricacies and legal frameworks of AI modelling. The quasi-historical approach helps to make you feel safe in the uncomfortable, scary waters of new technology. An organ made of computer cooling fans heralds your entry into the space, it whirrs and hums out melodies composed by the artists. Its structure is adorned with gold curlicues, flower motifs and an engraving of some holy baby as if it’s a relic from an impossible church that’s both of the past and the future.  Then a choir of voices starts echoing through the space, but these voices are not real: they’re generated. Herndon and Dryhurst created a dataset by recording English choirs singing hymns they’d composed, and then prompted an AI model to make new music out of the information. The sound of the human choir is played in one of the rooms, echoing out of another ecclesiastical, sombre, church-like structure in silver and gold, mixing with its AI progeny as both sets of sounds echo through the galleries. A final room allows you to sing and have an AI choir respond. It’s the only bit that doesn’t quite work, sounding more like a cheap harmoniser pedal than the sonic tech of the new millennium. It’s presented like the early stages of some new cult All the solemn mediaeval aesthetics here are a bit...

While the big, imposing, hefty men of mid-century American abstraction were trying to reshape the course of art, Joan Snyder was doing something quieter, but no less important. Now 84, Snyder has spent her life using abstraction not for grand gestures, but for smaller, personal ones. Written across the walls of this career-spanning show is a lifetime of emotions and feelings, of memories and experiences, in big bursts of shape and colour. Most of her career has been a tug of war between abstraction and figuration. The earliest works pull abstraction back from the edge. Thick strokes of paint coalesce into pink and blue landscapes, an almost-portrait of her grandma’s lifeless body. It’s abstract, but dragged back to reality. The best works of that era are collisions of viscous, fleshy pink and slabs of wool painted into the canvases. They look like two bodies coalescing, growing mouldy, becoming one. Very beautiful, very sensual things. Bubblegum pink gardens, toxic dripping landscapes Her 1970s works are even better. They’re filled with grids and thick lines of colour; some drip, some smear, they look like someone melted a Kandinsky. Each one feels like a landscape, a portrait, an outpouring of emotion, a formal exercise in mark making, a furious flurry of splashes and drips, they’re restrained but explosive, intense but free. You can read so much into these compositions of line, colour and drips because Snyder put so much into them. The 1980s works are pretty heinous...

Letizia Battaglia was a witness, she was there.  She saw the mafia tearing Italy apart in the 1970s, murdering its sons, raping its daughters, and she documented all of it with her camera. She started out as a late-budding journalist, an apprentice in her mid-30s for Palermo’s daily newspaper l’Ora. Camera in hand, she captured the bloody reality of life under the oppressive rule of the mafia. There are images in the opening room of parties, dances, kids, lovers. But they’re overpowered by the endless photos of death on display. Battaglia was first on the scene after judges were assassinated, politicians killed, henchmen murdered. There are bodies under sheets, abandoned in alleys, lying lifeless in cars; the blood staining the street is as normal as the rubbish that litters it. There’s no Godfather-esque glamourisation of mafia life here, just the mundane, basic, ordinary reality of everyday murder. Look at the photo of the little girl standing in sunlight, a huge terrifying man lurking in the darkness near her: that’s what this is about, life in the constant shadow of crime and violence. Life in the constant shadow of crime and violence It’s a violence that Battaglia was made personally aware of. A framed letter from the mafia threatens her life, because she’s ‘broken our balls too much’.  Eventually, Battaglia had enough of holding the mafia to account, of trying to expose injustice. Her final mafia picture is a solemn, quiet portrait of a widow mourning the murder of...

A platter of three glimmering grilled oysters are garnished with spring onions and thin slices of lemon; slices of wagyu sit plump and perfectly formed; bowls of ramen are topped with chopsticks poised perfectly in the air. Feeling hungry? Wait till you see it in person. But these dishes aren’t there to eat: every single one is made entirely from plastic. Welcome to ‘Looks Delicious!’, a tasty exploration of one of Japan’s centuries-old traditions, Shokuhin Sampuru - Japanese food replicas.  If you’ve been lucky enough to spend time in Japan, you will have seen food replicas locked in glass cabinets outside restaurants, or displayed proudly at the entrance. They might show classic Japanese cuisine - razor-sharp sushi, perfect little bento boxes, yakitori with caramelised edges - or they might show Western food - spaghetti alfredo, beef burgers with pillowy buns, and melty cheese on toast, stretching into a satisfying cheese pull. You’re definitely going to leave hungry Against the backdrop of these brightly-coloured meals, visitors are treated to some tasty little morsels of Japanese culinary history. A long table in the middle represents Japan’s islands, taking you from north to south via dishes from each of its 47 prefectures, forks floating above each of them (thanks to some nifty hidden wires) and little placards detailing what’s on each plate; oysters from Hiroshima Bay, Bara-sushi from Okayama, Naporitan spaghetti in Yokohama.  You’ll leave primed with new facts...