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A man and his dog walking down a path in Brockwell Park on a spring morning
Photograph: Chris Bethell for Time Out
Photograph: Chris Bethell for Time Out

Things to do in London today

The day’s best things to do all in one place

Rosie Hewitson
Written by Rosie Hewitson
Things to Do Editor, London
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In this city, you’re never too far away from a picturesque park, a lovely pub or a cracking cinema, and on any given day, you’ve got a wealth of world-class art shows, blockbuster theatre and top museum exhibitions to choose from if you’re twiddling your thumbs.

Use your spare time wisely with our roundup of the best things happening in London today, which gets updated every single day and includes a specially selected top pick from our Things to Do Editor seven days a week.

Bookmark this page, and you’ll have absolutely no excuse to be bored in London ever again!

Find even more inspiration with our curated round-ups of the best things to do in London this week and weekend

If you only do one thing...

Where to watch the World Cup 2026 in London

  • Things to do
  • Sport events
Where to watch the World Cup 2026 in London
Where to watch the World Cup 2026 in London
Photograph: Luis Kramer

Summer is here, and so is another hotly anticipated FIFA World Cup, bringing with it more thrills, spills, soaring highs and beer-soaked disappointments than 15 Wimbledons combined.

With its five goals, two penalties, one red card and several thousand headed Dan Burn headed clearances, a lot of people are calling the Three Lions’ victory against Mexico in the early hours of Monday morning England’s greatest game since 1966. And that was far from the end fo the drama this week.

Belgium put four past the USA, Egypt went two up against Argentina before the holders launched one of the greatest ever World Cup comebacks, and Switzerland vs Columbia went to penalties.

Hopefully you’ve just about managed to catch up on your sleep, because now it’s time for the business end of the tournament. The four quarter finals take place across the latter half of the week, including England’s Saturday night fixture against Norway. 

Practically every pub and bar in London will be getting in on the action and vying for your attendance during the World Cup’s biggest games. However, we’ve whittled it down to the places that offer the best atmosphere and the best view of the screen, wherever you station yourself. 

RECOMMENDED: The best football pubs in London.

When is the next England World Cup match?

After triumphing over hosts Mexico in extremely difficult circumstances, England head to Miami to play Norway this Saturday July 11, kicking off at 10pm BST. The Vikings might be participating in their first World Cup since 1998, but they’ve been a real threat so far this tournament, knocking out Brazil in the last round thanks to a brace from talismanic striker Erling Haaland. 

RECOMMENDED: Where to watch the quarter-finals if you support a different team.

How can I watch England’s matches at home?

World Cup coverage is split between BBC Sport and ITV. England’s game against Norway will be broadcast on ITV1, with the broadcast starting at 8.45pm. 

Read more

More things to do in London today

1. Soho Village Fête

  • Things to do
  • Festivals
  • Soho
Soho Village Fête
Soho Village Fête
A longstanding Soho tradition – going back more than half a century – this annual neighbourhood knees-up is organised by volunteers from the Soho Society, and sees the garden of Soho’s St Anne’s Church bursting with live music and entertainment.  The main draw of the day is the Soho Waiters’ Race. A tradition dating back to 1955, it starts at 3.15pm outside the French House, and sees a gaggle of waiters pelt through the streets of Soho, each holding a tray stacked with a bottle of champers, a glass and a napkin, all of which must be intact when they cross the finish line Another crowd favourite is the Soho Dog Show, which awards eight different prizes including ‘Dog who looks most like their owner’.  Alongside this, visitors can expect six hours of entertainment including live music, snail racing, a spaghetti-eating contest, a tug-of-war, a human fruit machine, foodie stalls, and The French House Bar. Best of all? It’s absolutely free to attend, although the gardens have a maximum capacity of 500, so turn up nice and early or be prepared to queue.

2. Everyman on the Canal

  • Things to do
  • Film events
  • King’s Cross
Everyman on the Canal
Everyman on the Canal
Photograph: Everyman
Popping up each summer on the steps where the Regent’s Canal passes Granary Square, Everyman’s Screen on the Canal is one of the city’s best loved outdoor cinemas, thanks to its atmospheric setting, eclectic programming and the fact that it doesn’t cost viewers a penny. Pop down on a sunny afternoon to catch live coverage from Wimbledon every day of the tournament, plus the usual mix of live sports, classic movies, family-friendly flicks and recent hits. So far we know that Devil Wears Prada, Dune: Part One, Some Like It Hot and Paddington in Peru are all on the lineup, and there are plenty more still to be revealed. Best enjoyed with a couple of tinned cocktails and some picky bits from the nearby Waitrose, or classic cinema snacks from Everyman’s on-site bar.  This year, the pop-up has been pimped out by local Kings Cross artist and UAL Central Saint Martin’s graduate Alice Wilson. She’s created a unique folklore-inspired design that will appear across popcorn and the screen itself.   
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3. MC Escher: The Exhibition

  • Things to do
  • Exhibitions
  • Aldwych
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
MC Escher: The Exhibition
MC Escher: The Exhibition
Photograph: Stephen Chung
Is it art, or is it maths? It’s a question even MC Escher himself couldn’t answer about his own work. While the Dutch printmaker known for his infinite staircases, metamorphosing tessellations and paradoxical buildings was rejected by the art world, he was revered by mathematicians, and is now one of the most famous optical illusionists of all time.  The OG creator of images that make you go ‘Huh?’ is going under the microscope in London with a blockbuster exhibition celebrating his life and work this summer. Created by Italian company Arthemisia and the immersive peeps at Fever, MC Escher: The Exhibition has arrived at Somerset House as part of its world tour.  The family-friendly display is surprisingly big. With more than 150 artworks on show, it tells the story of Escher’s life and work in chronological order, before it gets to the biggies – the ones that have been wheeled out in maths classrooms for decades – towards the end. You’ll see the originals of ‘Waterfall’, where water appears to run upwards, ‘Ascending and Descending’, the looping staircase that goes up and down simultaneously, and ‘Belvedere’ depicting an impossible tower. And you’ll learn about the techniques and mathematics that make these illusions possible along the way.  The meticulous craft that went into his totally baffling work is evident. On a personal level, I can see why Escher was rebuffed by the art world. Many of his works seem like something from a bad acid trip: giant, bulbous ants;...
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4. Liam Young: In Other Worlds

  • Things to do
  • Exhibitions
  • Barbican
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Liam Young: In Other Worlds
Liam Young: In Other Worlds
Photograph: Barbican Centre
This immersive exhibition from Australian filmmaker and architect Liam Young is impressively audacious, taking up multiple spaces in the Barbican, including a rather pungent underground carpark. What is In Other Worlds? Well, it’s not an art exhibition in the classic sense, but a sort of multimedia hybrid of visual art, storytelling, and speculative sci-fi, combined to make the point that while humanity has famously screwed up the planet, the means to un-screw it are within our grasp if we embrace radical solutions. If that sounds a bit worthy for you, then sure, it is kind of worthy. At the same time, it’s weird, psychedelic and vividly imaginative, offering more a sort of fever dream of a possible future than an actual pragmatic solution for climate change et al. At its centre is the mad vision of the Planet City, an unimaginably dense single urban environment in which all ten billion of Earth’s inhabitants live, while the rest of the planet is effectively allowed to rewild, with visits to nature confined to a sort of annual opportunity for every citizen on the planet to be dropped randomly somewhere on the planet. This is obviously an insane idea, but the vision Young and collaborators present is nonetheless really weird and cool. Physically, we’re presented with taller-than-a-person scale models of gargantuan tower blocks comprising of individual homes madly piled on top of one another, while a giant screen projects a Young-directed digital film shows us a vision of...
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5. Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive Experience

  • Things to do
  • Exhibitions
  • South Kensington
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive Experience
Smithsonian Starstruck: An Immersive Experience
Image: Smithsonian
While the Science Museum remains one of London’s quintessential free days out, there’s an ever-growing list of paying bolt-ons for those who are happy to spend a little (or a lot), from the glorious hands on experiments of the WonderLab to the retro videogames mecca of Power Up to a very decent science afternoon tea featuring petri dish jellies and test tubes filled with sweets. Joining them is Smithsonian Starstruck, a galactic VR experience from America’s prestigious Smithsonian Institution, in which the 360 digital imaginings of some of space’s most stunning and surreal vistas are rooted in hard astronomy, and not the fanciful slop that creeps into several nominally educational London VR experiences I could name.  It's basically a guide to all the mad shit in our galaxy, with a reassuring-voiced American man taking us on a virtual journey around various observatories and space telescopes, and the wild celestial phenomena they can nominally see. We watch the dawn of the universe. We visit an uninhabitable planet strewn with diamonds. We stand before the event horizon of a black hole. It is all, undeniably, pretty visually stunning: from a looming gigantic sun on another world to the bizarre spectacle of light being dragged into a physics-defying gravity well, this is spectacular (albeit, to be clear, often an interpretation of what these things might look like given available data). You’ll also learn a decent amount about the phenomena depicted without feeling...
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6. Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art

  • Things to do
  • Exhibitions
  • South Kensington
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
Photograph: David Parry
A hat in the shape of an upside-down shoe; a dress resembling an inside-out human body; embroidered jackets covered with gorgeous pink roses, sparkling zodiac symbols and vibrant vegetables. Elsa Schiaparelli made clothes that were as surprising as they were beautiful. The V&A has plundered the well of ingenuity that is Maison Schiaparelli in its latest landmark fashion exhibition – the first British exhibition dedicated to the Italian designer, who rose to fame in Paris between the World Wars – and there are some real treasures to be found.  With over 400 objects, including 100 ensembles and 50 artworks (by the likes of Salvador Dalí, Picasso and Man Ray), as well as accessories, jewellery, photographs, perfumes and an excellent collection of buttons, Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art presents a deep dive into the fantastical and surreal world of the fashion house. Founded on Paris’ Place Vendôme in 1927, the exhibition spans the 1920s to the present day, showing glorious garments from Creative Director Daniel Roseberry, who has been at the helm since 2019.  Excitingly, many of Schiaparelli’s 20th-century creations appear astoundingly contemporary. Knits from 1927, some of the designer’s first works, are patterned with pretty bows that the TikTok girlies of today would die for. There’s also an incredible gold chainmail headdress which wouldn’t look amiss on Florence Pugh in Dune, or on a ‘medievalcore’ Pinterest board. A shirred form-fitting dress with a visible zip – a...
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7. Gener8ion: Visions of 2034

  • Things to do
  • Exhibitions
  • Strand
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Gener8ion: Visions of 2034
Gener8ion: Visions of 2034
Photograph: Gener8ion
In April this year a Yung Lean music video went viral. Depicting schoolboys in Leeds, the excellent video shows the rapper as a menacing bully, cigarette dangling from his mouth, as he flushes heads down toilets, gets high in classrooms and rides through corridors on wheely tables. It also features some mesmerising choreography by Damien Jalet. Now this video is on display as part of a film exhibition at 180 Studios.  Created by Gener8ion, a creative duo comprising film director Romain Gavras and producer Surkin (real name Benoit Heitz), Visions of 2034 is promoting an audiovisual album, Love & Tears, made by the pair. It’s also a way for Gavras to show off several of his highly acclaimed music videos, created for the likes of MIA, Jamie xx, Foals frontman Yannis Philippakis and 070 Shake.  So what is the exhibition about? Imagine that it is the year 2034. Gavras and Surkin have created a series of short films (or are they music videos?) that postulate all the terrible things that will be happening in the world: Athens is uninhabitable thanks to toxic algae blooms; volcanoes are erupting; schoolboys are getting high on lithium from 6G antennas and bullying each other from within an inch of their lives.   Gavras and Surkin appear to have predicted the future In some of these films Gavras and Surkin appear to have predicted the future. In videos shot in 2010, 2018 and 2019, respectively, ICE-style raids round up redheads for social cleansing; an AI-type machine creates a...
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8. Lost Oasis

  • Things to do
  • Trafalgar Square
Lost Oasis
Lost Oasis
Photograph: courtesy of Lost Oasis
With its abundance of big protests, buskers, pigeons and tourists, Trafalgar Square is famously one of the least chill bits of central London. But all that is about to change this summer with a new pop-up, designed to bring some of the plant-filled peacefulness of Cornwall's Lost Gardens of Heligan to Zone 1. Lost Oasis is the handiwork of leading landscape designers, who are transforming the space outside St Martin-in-the-Fields church into a plant filled dining, drinking and entertainment spot.  Ferns, palms and fragrant jasmine will surround eating spots manned by a rotating line-up of top chefs including Nathan Outlaw, Simon Stallard, Jordan Bailey, Emily Scott, Adam Handling MBE and Sally Abé.  On the entertainment side, there'll be screenings of FIFA World Cup, Wimbledon, Formula 1 British Grand Prix, alongside live music provided by Sofar Sounds and live comedy. In need of refreshment? There'll be drinks at the Mud Maid Bar, inspired by a famous Heligan sculpture, as well as the chance to pour your own pints of the appley stuff from the Cornish Orchard Cider Tree. Just check online before you turn up: Lost Oasis is only open to public walk-ins on days when there's not a special ticketed event. 
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9. The Music is Black: A British Story

  • Things to do
  • Exhibitions
  • Olympic Park
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
The Music is Black: A British Story
The Music is Black: A British Story
Photograph: David Parry © Trustees of the V&A
Before I enter The Music is Black: A British Story I’m handed a pair of headphones with a sensor on top. These will be my auditory guide through an exhibition that tells the story of Black British music from the past 125 years. As I move through the show, my ears are blessed with the sounds of composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, ‘Silly Games’ singer Janet Kay, Sade, jungle pioneer Shy FX and Little Simz. What is a music exhibition without the melodies, after all?  Kicking things off with a bang, the V&A East’s first exhibition explores the trailblazers, visionaries and unsung heroes of Black music in the UK from the 1900s to the present day. From swing and jazz, to jungle, grime and trip hop, no genre goes uncovered. More than 200 objects from the V&A’s collection are displayed, with photographs, instruments, fashion, sheet music and artworks on show.  The Music is Black doesn’t shy away from the murky past. At the beginning, you are confronted with the horrifying realities of slavery and colonialism – from a graphic showing the volume of slave ship voyages through the 16th to 19th centuries, to the 1633 Royal charter legalising the trade of enslaved Africans. There are items, like an Ethiopian prayer book, marked as looted by British troops (although there’s no mention of returning it). The stark opening is a grave reminder that early protest music paved the way for the tunes we listen to today.  It’s a comprehensive and triumphant ode to some of the best...

10. NIGO: From Japan with Love

  • Things to do
  • Exhibitions
  • Kensington
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
NIGO: From Japan with Love
NIGO: From Japan with Love
Photograph: Luke Hayes
If streetwear is a religion, Nigo is one of its deities. The man behind A Bathing Ape (Bape, for short) is worshipped by hypebeasts the world over, not only for his pioneering approach to streetwear but also for his cultural footprint. Inextricably linked to hip hop – Nigo is besties with Pharell, and everyone from Biggie Smalls to Drake and Lil Wayne have donned his designs – the Japanese designer’s work is characterised by bold camo prints, Warholian pop-culture references and brash graphics.  For the first time, the man behind Bape and Human Made, and the creative director of Kenzo since 2021, has his own London retrospective. The Design Museum’s exhibition features 700 objects – 600 of which come from Nigo’s personal archive – including records, toys, magazines, music videos and a whole lotta clothes, spanning the ‘80s to the present day.  Nigo: From Japan With Love starts with a joyful recreation of the designer’s teenage bedroom – a dream of an ‘80s boudoir displaying Nigo’s own teenage relics: a lava lamp, a Kangol hat, stacks of hip hop records and his very first vintage piece – a shredded Levi’s type II denim jacket. It then moves through a selection of his most treasured objects, which range from Star Wars figurines to a Mr Peanut canvas jacket, and an absolutely amazing 1970s McDonald’s uniform from Hawaii, where the traditional flowers of the Hawaiian shirt are replaced by illustrations of burgers, fries and shakes. His obsession with Americana and vintage...
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Theatre on in London today

1. Here Comes J Edgar Hoover! A Comedy Musical

  • Musicals
  • Islington
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Here Comes J Edgar Hoover! A Comedy Musical
Here Comes J Edgar Hoover! A Comedy Musical
Photo: Mark Douet
This lightweight musical about the very ‘complicated’ FBI director J Edgar Hoover – who dominated America’s 20th century,  serving for 48 years – began life as a 1994 radio play starring Kelsey Grammar. Exactly how it ended up making its stage debut 32 years later at an off-West End theatre in Islington I am fairly unclear. But on some level it’s obviously something to do with the big name creative team: Harry Shearer (of The Simpsons and Spinal Tap), Tom Leopold (a writer for Cheers and Seinfeld) and Peter Matz (Barbra Streisand’s musical director, who died in 2002). Given Shearer – who seems to be the driving force behind this production – reputedly makes $300,000 per episode of The Simpsons, it’s not hard to imagine he’s thrown a bit of his own cash at a musical that – while modestly sized – is as big a show as the King's Head Theatre has ever staged. It even has a bona fide US star in the form of Bryan Batt (aka Mad Men’s Salvatore Romano) who plays Hoover. The man was infamous for harvesting kompromat on people he wanted to blackmail, (or people he might want to blackmail one day,) or whose love lives he was just generally interested in. He’s also alleged to have been a closeted gay man and crossdresser: there isn’t really hard public domain evidence for this, especially the crossdressing bit, but certainly he was a ‘confirmed bachelor’ who never married and lived with fellow agent Clyde Tolson, so, er, go figure. The musical goes all in on the idea that Hoover was...
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2. Greenwich Comedy Garden

  • Comedy
  • Greenwich
Greenwich Comedy Garden
Greenwich Comedy Garden
Photograph: Lloyd Winters
It’s all change – or quite a lot of change – at London’s biggest comedy festival, as the erstwhile Greenwich Comedy Festival moves two months ahead in the calendar and changs its name to the Greenwich Comedy Garden. Why? We’re not especially clear and it would probably be a mistake to overthink it, but the rebranded event is basically the same idea so long as you don’t turn up looking for it in September. Staged across five nights and two weekend afternoons, top-tier comedians will descend on the Old Royal Naval College for London’s largest and longest-running comedy festival. Take your pick from stellar line-ups fronted by a sucession of proper comedy A-listers, heavy on the television faves. Tom Allen, Josh Widdicombe, Alan Davies, Sarah Pascoe, David O’Doherty, Jack Dee, Chris McCauseland and Ross Noble each headine a bill of four comics.   The setting is pretty spectacular, too – performances take place in an outdoor stage with the Royal Naval College as the backdrop. Get there early to take advantage of the food stalls, bars and breezy summer vibes.
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3. Paddington the Musical

  • Musicals
  • Strand
  • Open run
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Paddington the Musical
Paddington the Musical
Photo: Johan Persson
It’s difficult to pinpoint why the moment Paddington walks on stage at the start of his new musical is quite so moving.  Spoiler alert: ‘Paddington’ is a small woman (Arti Shah) in a bear costume (by Tahra Zafar), with a regular-sized man (James Hameed) doing the voice and remote controlling the facial expressions from backstage. Which doesn’t sound groundbreaking but it’s enough to make us believe that Paddington is really in the room with us. Which is surely the point of the endeavor. He’s not the Paddington of the films: he looks different, more teddy-like, and Hameed’s voice is much younger and more boyish than Ben Whishaw’s. He looks more like the Paddington of Michael Bond’s books, but he’s not really him either, on account of all the singing he does and how much more wordy that makes him. He is a new Paddington. But he is, fundamentally, Paddington, right there in the room with us. Does that make it a good performance? I mean sure, he’s a triple threat: adorable, polite and also a bear. The normal rules for a musical theatre lead are suspended here. But Hameed can sing well, and there’s enough expression in both face and body for Paddington to feel genuinely alive to us. Shah doesn’t really dance, but a couple of elaborately choreographed sequences in which our hero pings around causing chaos are impressively physical. Main attraction aside, a fine creative team led by director Luke Sheppard has created a very enjoyable show indeed. It’s by and large a stage...
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4. My Neighbour Totoro

  • Drama
  • Covent Garden
  • Open run
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
My Neighbour Totoro
My Neighbour Totoro
Photo: Manuel Harlan
This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...
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5. Hot Mess

  • Musicals
  • Victoria
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Hot Mess
Hot Mess
Photo: Helen Murray
This review is from Southwark Playhouse in October 2025. Hot Mess returns for a summer 2026 run at The Other Palace While the millennia-old union between planet Earth and humanity might not be the first coupling that springs to mind when you think of unhealthy relationships, there’s no denying it is pretty toxic. The Earth gives! Humanity takes! The Earth had boundaries, and humanity violated ‘em – first digging up the ground to mine for coal and drill for oil, then jetting into space with a wandering eye, pushing the atmosphere to its limits in a bid to see what else was out there.   It’s safe to say we’ve put our hosting planet through the wringer physically, but what if we’ve left it feeling emotionally drained too? Could the climate crisis with its ruinous wild fires and unforgiving floods be a scorned Earth’s way of telling humanity to do one? It’s a theory! Or at least, it’s the premise of this pop musical romcom from Ellie Coote (book) and Jack Godfrey’s (music and lyrics), the duo who scored a hit last year with 42 Balloons. Earth and Humanity (aka Hu) are personified as a couple and under this guise, their entire, increasingly troubling partnership is explored. Over the course of one breathless hour of back-to-back songs, the big breakthroughs of our species are reframed as our rocking what could have been a peaceful, happy relationship.  It’s a kooky concept, but this two-hander holds up surprisingly well in a production which Coote also directs, largely thanks...
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6. Chat Noir!

  • Immersive
  • West Kensington
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Chat Noir!
Chat Noir!
Photo: Nick Ray
If you’ve recently found yourself on the Piccadilly Line during evening rush hour, you may have noticed fellow passengers sporting feather boas, bowler hats and other attempts at Belle Époque attire. They’re on the way to the latest immersive dining experience from The Lost Estate, creators of popular festive show The Great Christmas Feast.  The immersive specialists’ new production is set in 1890s Paris, specifically Le Chat Noir, the legendary Montmartre nightclub that birthed cabaret as we understand it. Stepping into a nondescript warehouse round the corner from West Kensington tube station, guests find themselves transported to a sumptuous, low-lit cabaret bar.  A lot of care has been taken over the design, which is replete with Art Nouveau touches, from Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen’s iconic feline prints adorning the walls and swirly Paris Métro-esque patterns decorating the banquette seating. The attention to detail extends all the way to the authentic 1890s adverts in the programme. There’s a lot more to like about Chat Noir! The show is based around the nightclub’s grand reopening following refurbishments that made it one of the first venues in Paris to boast electric lighting. The plot is well-researched, deftly bringing together a diverse range of Belle Époque references and characters. There’s music from the club’s sometime resident pianist, the composer Erik Satie and regular visitor Claude Debussy. Performers include celebrated illusionist Joseph Bautier,...
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7. The Traitors Live Experience

  • Immersive
  • Covent Garden
  • Open run
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
The Traitors Live Experience
The Traitors Live Experience
Photo: Grant Walker
A Catholic upbringing has left me both terrible at lying and capable of looking guilty about more or less anything. As such I was morbidly convinced that I would get the tap on the shoulder designating me a traitor in this live recreation (you could call it immersive theatre if you wanted) of the smash BBC game show. This proved to be entirely correct and long story short I lasted four rounds until I was rumbled (though it was a close thing and involved me being inexplicably betrayed by my fellow traitor). And speaking as somebody who has barely watched the show: I had a blast. If you can swallow the cost (a little under £50 in the evening, but cheaper by day) and go in prepared to be eliminated early then The Traitors Live Experience is extremely good fun. As much as anything, this adaptation from Immersive Everywhere is extremely well organised. Clearly you can’t make a note-perfect recreation of a show that involves 25 contestants staying at a remote Scottish castle for three weeks. But what they’ve done captures a sense of it very nicely. In this much shorter format, a large number of participants book in for a given time slot and are then divided into groups of around 12. Each is spirited away to their own round table, which comes complete with its own Claudia Winkleman-substitute host. Ours was a chipper young man who did a great job of geeing things along with help from a pre-recorded Winkleman (wisely she’s only used sparingly). It’s such a rock-solid conceit that...
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8. The Gruffalo

  • Children's
  • Shaftesbury Avenue
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
The Gruffalo
The Gruffalo
Photo: Mark Senior
There must be one thought on every parent’s mind as they shuffle themselves and whatever entourage of children they’ve brought with them into the Lyric Theatre to see ‘The Gruffalo’: please don’t mess this up. So beloved is Julia Donaldson and Axel Scheffler’s bedtime book that it’s not just a load of grumpy kids that’ll be left sitting there should the show not live up to expectations, it’s a room full of disappointed adults whose first few years of parenthood and the memories that come with them are likely to have been shaped by this story and its inimitable rhymes. Worry not, Gruffalo fans. This is a charming production from Tall Stories that has been running since 2001 with various tweaks and upgrades along the way, and it’s not hard to see why it’s managed to stay around so long. The familiar stuff’s all there – the jittery mouse, the sneering fox, the aloof owl and the sly snake, kitted out in imaginative costumes that add a nice bit of wonder to the experience – but it’s been bulked out to hit a one-hour run-time. Characters are given a bit more space to develop, and each has a rip-roaring song that takes the show from bouncing ska to slick disco before ending on a chugging grunge rock number that has everyone clapping along. If that doesn’t keep you gripped, there’s an extended section in which audience members are invited to crack out their finest gruffalo growls – hilarious for the kids, cathartic for the parents, chaos for the performers – but otherwise the show...
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9. Bridge Command

  • Immersive
  • Elephant & Castle
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Bridge Command
Bridge Command
Photo: Alex Brenner
Even if you have literally never wanted to be part of the crew of a spaceship you’ll probably have a fun time at Parabolic Theatre’s Bridge Command, an immersive theatre show slash team-bonding exercise slash LARPer paradise that sees you and your fellow contestants take command of the, uh, bridge of a spaceship and undertake a variety of missions that run the gamut from diplomacy to warfare. Occupying the spot in the Vauxhall arches that formerly hosted renowned gay sauna Chariots, Bridge Command is not a slick, cutting-edge vision of the future, and presumably budgetary limitations are part of this. But that’s fine: it very much has its roots in a wobbly sets golden age of sci-fi, with the earlier iterations of Star Trek looming particularly large. After donning our military jumpsuits, we are ‘teleported’ into the depths of space and onto an Earth battleship that will form our base of operations. There is a background scenario here, wherein humans fled a polluted Earth, found a magic element in the depths of space, went back home to fix Earth, only a load of colonists stayed behind and set up new galactic dominions, and we’re out there looking for more of the magic element. It’s best not to think too hard about it, but at the same time the performers throw themselves into it with impressive conviction - I was particularly delighted when the person operating the teleporter earnestly fielded questions relating to my phobia of teleporters.  Following said teleportation...
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10. Matilda the Musical

  • Musicals
  • Seven Dials
  • Open run
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Matilda the Musical
Matilda the Musical
'My mummy says I'm a miracle,' lisps a pampered mini-me at a purgatorial kiddies' birthday party at the outset of this delicious, treacly-dark family show. The obnoxious ma and pa of its titular, gifted, pint-sized heroine are not, of course, quite so doting. But 'Matilda' must be making its creators, playwright Dennis Kelly and comedian-songsmith Tim Minchin, a very pair of proud parents. Opening to rave reviews in Stratford-upon Avon before transferring to the West End in 2011 and snatching up Olivier Awards with all the alacrity of a sticky-fingered child in a sweetshop, Matthew Warchus's RSC production remains a treat. With hindsight, Kelly and Minchin's musical, born of the 1988 novel by that master of the splendidly grotesque Roald Dahl, is a little too long and, dramatically, a tad wayward. But like the curly-haired little girl in the famous nursery rhyme, when it is good, it is very, very good. And it's even better when it's horrid. The past few months have seen some cast changes, including, alas, the departure of Bertie Carvel's tremendous Miss Trunchbull, headmistress of the dread Crunchem Hall School, former Olympic hammer-thrower and a gorgon of monumental nastiness, complete with scarily Thatcher-esque tics of purse-lipped gentility and faux concern. David Leonard doesn't quite match the squirm-inducing, hair-raising detail of Carvel in the role, but his more butch, granite-faced version is fantastically horrible nonetheless. And if Paul Kaye as Matilda's...
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Exhibitions on in London today

1. Henry Moore: Monumental Nature

  • Art
  • Sculpture
  • Kew
Henry Moore: Monumental Nature
Henry Moore: Monumental Nature
Photographer: Jonty Wilde
Henry Moore’s bulbous and undulating sculptures were designed to be seen outside and surrounded by nature. So we’re happy to say that Kew is displaying a huge collection of his works as they were intended at this mega exhibition. The world’s biggest ever exhibition of Moore will open at the botanical gardens, with 30 sculptures on show in the open air and more than 90 works including carvings and drawings displayed in the Shirley Sherwood Gallery. Several of his famous and iconic reclining figures will be on view, as well as more abstract and amorphous pieces like the massive bronze marvel ‘Large Two Forms’. 

2. Hepworth and Nicholson: The Hampstead Studio Photographs

  • Art
  • Photography
  • Aldwych
Hepworth and Nicholson: The Hampstead Studio Photographs
Hepworth and Nicholson: The Hampstead Studio Photographs
Photograph: Courtesy of De Laszlo Collection of Paul Laib Negatives, Courtauld Institute of Art
There’s something irresistably fascinating about seeing into artist’s studios – messy materials, stacks of canvases, and a peek behind the curtain into the work spaces for some of the world’s best creative minds. To coincide with the Courtauld’s major Barbara Hepworth exhibition, the gallery is running a companion show of photographs taken by Paul Laib offering a look inside Hepworth’s London studio that she shared with Ben Nicholson in the 1930s. 
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3. Hepworth in Colour

  • Art
  • Sculpture
  • Aldwych
Hepworth in Colour
Hepworth in Colour
Photograph: Courtesy of the National Gallery of Victoria
As one of Britain’s most celebrated sculptors of the 20th century, Barbara Hepworth made stunning modern creations inspired by the nature and lanscapes of Cornwall, where she lived. Her abstract shapes often featured smooth ovals, holes, undulating surfaces and strings. This summer the Courtauld will stage an exhibition interested in one aspect of Hepworth’s practice: her obsession with colour, which often came up in her work in unexpected ways.  Featuring 20 of her most significant sculptures, alongside 30 drawings, Hepworth in Colour will unite for the first time her early innovative sculptures with colour of the 1940s with major examples of her work with colour from the 1950s and 1960s.  
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4. Hurvin Anderson

  • Art
  • Painting
  • Millbank
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Hurvin Anderson
Hurvin Anderson
Photograph: Tate Photography / Larina Annora Fernandes
This is a big show of big paintings. Big, energetic, happy paintings which are just as enjoyable to stand in front of as one can imagine they were to make. Hurvin Anderson is the artist responsible, and the 80 paintings on show at Tate Britain amount to 30 years worth of work. Some date back to 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art; others were made this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). ‘Ball Watching’ hangs by the door, next to the entrance. Painted at art school, it captures a moment in Anderson’s youth living in Birmingham, the city in which he was born and raised after his parents emigrated from Jamaica. He and his friends would play football in Handsworth Park, often kicking the football into the lake – here, as the title suggests, they stand watching it. Compared with the sun-bleached, paint-dripped, tree-filled tropicana that fill the later rooms, the palette is darker, the figures less defined, the sky, rendered in broad brushstrokes, feels as though a foaming sponge has been dragged across a car windscreen. The paintings do something similar for the viewer as they do for Anderson: they hold you between places What it establishes, however, is what has kept Hurvin Anderson returning to the studio for three decades: the urge to paint his experience as a Black man of Caribbean heritage, born and raised in the UK. That sense of inbetweenness – belonging to two places, either side of the Atlantic – plays out through...
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5. James McNeill Whistler

  • Art
  • Painting
  • Millbank
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
James McNeill Whistler
James McNeill Whistler
Image: National Gallery of Art, Washington.
For Brits of a certain age, James McNeill Whistler will always conjure memories of that scene in the Mr Bean film. But while Rowan Atkinson’s 1997 opus was a memorable introduction to the American Gilded Age painter, Tate Britain’s grand new retrospective will properly acquaint you with his work – minus any snot-related hijinks – through his paintings, prints, and a litany of personal effects.  Using decoration from his Chelsea studio, the opening room establishes Whistler as a bohemian and fashionable man, but the contextual statement also foreshadows his fall from social grace later in his career (thanks to a lawsuit that left him penniless – more on that later). Thus, a unique, non-linear curatorial narrative is introduced. After arriving from New England in Paris in 1855, Whistler prolifically produced moody etchings that express the stoic dinginess of the French capital with dense and dynamic shadows. His first attempts at oil painting also happened here. The medium became an even bigger preoccupation when he moved to an equally morose city: London. Whether it’s choked by smog or cluttered with cargo, the Thames is his muse during his early years in the Big Smoke. The chaotic figuration of ships floating past in Wapping and the spectral abstraction of a frozen river in Chelsea in Ice represent two extremes of how Whistler turns urban ugliness into visual harmony. Conducting tone, colour, and blankness with orchestral balance, he’s acutely aware of the musicality...
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6. Julio Le Parc

  • Art
  • Installation
  • Bankside
Julio Le Parc
Julio Le Parc
Image: Julio Le Parc, ‘Unique Continual Light Cylinder’ (1962-2012). Lent by the Atelier Le Parc 2026 © ADAGP, Paris and DACS, London 2025. Photo © Everton Ballardin, Galeria Nara Roesler (2013).
In our age of mind-boggling CGI and AI-optimised everything, it’s easy to forget how much pleasure can be had from the simple optical tricks of mirrors and lights. But not for Julio Le Parc. A key figure of the Kinetic and Op Art movements of the 1960s, the late Argentinian artist spent seven pioneering decades making illuminated, kinetic and participatory works, and was still making art at the ripe old age of 97 before his death this past May. This major retrospective celebrates his visionary seven-decade career, spanning from from his arrival in Paris in the late 1950s to his resurgence in the 2010s, with over 60 colourful, immersive (and extremely Instagrammable) works.
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7. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2026

  • Art
  • Piccadilly
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2026
The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition 2026
Photograph: © Royal Academy of Arts, London / David Parry
The Royal Academy’s first Summer Exhibition opened in 1769. That was the same year that Captain James Cook began his first voyage to the Pacific. In other words, this open-submission exhibition has been around for a very long time. This year, British sculptor Ryan Gander is at the helm, working under the broad curatorial theme of ‘Interconnectness’. Which is just as well, given there are nearly 2,000 works that he’s chosen to fill the galleries of the London institution. The result is that there really is something here for everyone. Paintings, sculptures, paintings of sculptures, and sculptures of paintings, such as Mark Alexander’s Mother and Child rendered in quartz sand. There are woodcuts of birds by Tom Hammick, and etchings camping under a starry sky by Heidrun Rathgeb. Some prints revel in solitude like the beautiful work of Lene Bladbjerg, while others, such as Karen Keogh’s views of a French village, are rendered with a level of detail that rivals a photograph – not that this exhibition is short of those either. Elsewhere, Paul Tecklenberg transforms discarded nitrous oxide canisters into a basketball hoop, while Joseph Grigely has constructed a leaning tower of wine-bottle capsules, almost ten metres high, from the foil found around the necks of bottles. It is the sort of exhibition where almost any material, subject, or idea can find a place.  Those looking for some art world bigwigs will find paintings by Frank Bowling, Gary Humes, Anselm Kiefer, and a...

8. Tracey Emin: A Second Life

  • Art
  • Bankside
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Tracey Emin: A Second Life
Tracey Emin: A Second Life
Photograph: Tracey Emin: ‘A Second Life’ at Tate Modern © Tate / Yili Liu
A stroll through Tracey Emin: A Second Life is an evocative experience. Positioned as a 40-year retrospective through the pioneering artist’s vast and varied repertoire, the show lays bare Emin’s life through her distinct and often unsettling art, from career highs – such as the iconic, Turner Prize-nominated ‘My Bed’, which is every bit as shocking and moving today as it was in 1998 – to stark personal lows in work depicting her experiences with sexual violence, abortion and recent life-threatening illness. As you can imagine, with such subject matter, it is not always a comfortable experience for the artist and the viewer alike. However, Emin’s flair for dark comedy adds moments of levity throughout. The second room of the exhibition features a large-scale projection of a work on video entitled ‘Why I Never Became A Dancer’. It begins with the artist recalling an incident in her youth when she entered a local dance competition only to run off stage mid-performance when a group of men with whom she’d previously had sexual encounters chanted ‘slag’ at her until she could no longer even hear the music. The film ends with a sequence of Emin dancing, totally uninhibited, to the disco classic ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ by Sylvester, and the work is dedicated to each of her aggressors, calling them out by name. It is the perfect encapsulation of both Emin’s defiant approach to life and her ability to turn traumatic experiences into mesmerising art. Longform video is an...
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9. Zurbarán

  • Art
  • Painting
  • Trafalgar Square
  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Zurbarán
Zurbarán
Zurbarán exhibition © The National Gallery, London
If you find a London greengrocer selling lemons and oranges as plump, waxy, and gorgeous as the ones in Francisco de Zurbarán’s still lifes on view at the National Gallery, do let me know. The Baroque master trained as a painter in Seville, the land of citrus, so he was well placed to get his eye in, but even so, this first UK exhibition makes a persuasive case that Zurbarán’s brush turned them into something approaching the divine. Which makes it all the more remarkable that he painted so few of them; only 10 still lifes are known today, and most of the examples in this exhibition are attributed to his son Juan.  Maybe he simply didn’t have the time. It was the beginning of the 17th century; gold was flowing into Seville from the Americas, the Catholic revival was in full swing, and Seville’s religious orders were trying to outdo one another with ever grander, more extravagantly decorated churches. Zurbarán’s earliest dated work, The Crucifixion (1627), promptly sent him shooting up the Baroque algorithm, and commissions soon came flooding in. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble The Spanish artist and writer Antonio Palomino once wrote that ‘everyone who sees it, and does not know it, believes it to be a sculpture.’ It’s the first painting you encounter in the exhibition, and 399 years on, you understand what Palomino meant. Christ’s translucent body gleams like polished marble against the pitch-black background, while the white cloth around his waist...

10. Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait

  • Art
  • Photography
  • Charing Cross Road
  • 3 out of 5 stars
  • Recommended
Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait
Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait
Image: © 1962 MM LLC (Photographs by Allan Grant), www.marilynslostphotos.com
Portraits are tricky things: can you ever really sift the individual from the image? And it gets even harder when the subject is one of the most recognisable faces of all time – a woman who was seemingly born to appear on camera. Since she died in 1962 – aged just 36, and already perhaps the most famous person on the planet – Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself. Marking what would have been her 100th birthday, the National Portrait Gallery grapples with that iconic status in a show that’s both beautiful and troubling. ‘Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait’ sets out its stall early, emphasising Monroe’s agency in shaping her image: not an artist’s muse, but an active collaborator. Exploited by Hollywood, coerced and abused by her husbands, at least Monroe could claw back some control over the way she was portrayed. She spent hours poring over contact sheets, and forbade some images from being published. (In one photo here, an out-take print from her very last photoshoot, the actor has scratched out her face with a hairpin.) Marilyn Monroe has transcended mere stardom to become an icon: the image of glamour, sex, tragedy and celebrity itself Deliberately light on biography, the show goes big on the star’s work with individual photographers: big names like Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon and Henri Cartier-Bresson, but also friends (Milton H Greene, Eve Arnold), lovers (André de Dienes) and collaborators...

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