Things to do in London today

Every winter the Southbank Centre turns the banks of the Thames into a frosty wonderland, full of little wooden Alpine-style cabins selling gifts, warming drinks, and snacks. You’ll find huts serving up truffle burgers, duck wraps, mulled wine, Dutch pancakes, churros and many more tasty morsels to nibble on while you look through gifts, jewellery and decorations made by independent craft traders. Or, once you’re done browsing, snuggle up at pop-up king Jimmy Garcia’s riverside venue Fire And Fromage, where you can snaffle all you can eat raclette, sip on seriously decadent hot chocolates, and even toast your own marshmallows round a cosy fire pit.  When is Southbank Christmas Market open? The market opens on November 2, and will stay open until January 3 in the New Year. Do you need to buy a ticket? No, it's free to enter and have a wander. 

This major exhibition from the V&A will transport visitors to one of the world’s great cities, exploring its best-known landmarks, from the Hippodrome and Hagia Sophia to Topkapı Palace and the Galata Tower. Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires will explore 1,600 years of this influential city. Once called Constantinople and now called Istanbul it was the imperial and religious capital at the heart of two successive empires: the Byzantine (AD 330– 1453) and the Ottoman (1453–1922), and this show will span AD 330 to 1922, it will bring together remarkable works of art, design and architecture to reveal the enduring creative legacy of an imperial capital that shaped the Mediterranean world and far beyond.  This will be the first exhibition in the UK to tell this story in full, serving up a new perspective on a city defined by artistic excellence across more than a millennium. Expect rarely seen objects dating back to 4th century, drawn from the V&A collection as well as national and international loans, including decorative arts such as fine silks and textiles, ceramic tiles, mosaics and tableware, precious metalwork and jewellery, as well as sculpture and architectural furnishings, works on paper, manuscripts and paintings. 

Oxford Street is one of the most iconic areas for London’s Christmas lights, and for good reason, given that a hefty proportion of us Londoners will see them lighting our way as we do battle for Yuletide gifts. This year, the lights are Harry Potter-themed to mark the release of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone TV show, scheduled to premiere on HBO on Christmas Day. Alongside the usual display, look out for the Hogwarts-themed designs. As is now tradition, the lights will be made from eco-friendly materials, including LED lights and recycled plastic. Featuring 5000 twinkling stars – they shine from 4pm to midnight daily until early January.  The switch-on, on November 4, will also coencide with the opening of the new Harry Potter Shop Oxford Street, which will be the largest shop in the UK to sell memorabilia from the magical franchise. 

Dreaming of a kitsch Christmas? New York’s famous Miracle on Ninth Street bar is popping up in London for its eighth year, ‘50s Christmas decorations, nostalgic accessories and creative new spins on beloved cocktail favourites in tow. For festive season 2026, it’s taking over 9 Russell Street in Covent Garden. Past years have seen the bar slinging the likes of a Snowball Old Fashioned or a Christmapoliton, which includes cranberry sauce and absinthe mist – a take on Christmas trimmings that’s not for the faint-hearted. If you’re failing to get into the Christmas spirit, this is one great place to find it.

Father Christmas clearly enjoys his posh new-ish Chelsea digs as for 2026 he’s returning to Anya Hindmarch’s Village store for the third year on the trot. In it, visitors will be guided through a wintry wonderland of candy cane forests and icicle caves. When they make it to their destination, they’ll be rewarded with a festive story by the fire and a gift from Saint Nick. Grown-ups get a free hot drink from the Anya Cafe, where there will be piles of mince pies, gingerbread men and Christmas cakes on sale. Exit through the gift shop to buy limited-edition Anya Hindmarch gifts and Christmas decorations, including ceramic tree baubles, crackers, puzzles, mugs, crayons and teddy bears. 

A month-long feast of contemporary Czech cinema, the Made in Prague Festival is back for its 30th edition with a thrilling selection of high-calibre dramas, comedies, docs and family films, hosted by the Regent Street Cinema and The Garden Cinema. This year’s programme brings together two distinct strands: the first celebrating the legacy of the Czechoslovak New Wave, and the second showcasing a selection of acclaimed new Czech films, all accompanied by live introductions and post-screening discussions. Highlights include the award-winning documentary Better Go Mad in the Wild, which follows a pair of 60-year-old twin brothers as they ‘booze, banter and bicker’ in their remote home in the Šumava mountains; the Oscar-nominated Father, which tackles a phenomenon known as ‘Forgotten Child Syndrome’; and Changes, the latest film from acclaimed director David Ondříček, which builds on his cult comedy, Loners, bringing together seven characters navigating life in modern-day Prague, each finding themselves at a crossroads and taking stock of their relationships, careers and personal ambitions. 

Returning for a fifth winter season in 2026, this ice-skating pop-up in the shadow of the rejuvenated Battersea Power Station is one of London’s most aesthetic. Returning to its usual spot right next to the Thames, it offers magnificent views over the riverside, a twinkling 30ft Christmas tree that forms the perfect backdrop for your on-ice selfies, and all the fun of the fair courtesy of an adjacent vintage fairground. It’s the perfect date night spot, Christmas party location or a well-earned reward after a hectic day of gift shopping.  Opening times: Varies throughout the week  Price: Adult £19.38-£22.80; child £11.98-£14.82  

Regent Street was actually the very first road in London to be adorned by Christmas lights back in 1954 – a tradition that happily still continues to this day. Each winter, the display comes to life as one of the most impressive in the capital and features 45 angels designed to look like they’re playing the trumpet. Very festive, very fun and very grand – the whole thing is made up of thousands of individual LED lights. Catch the lights for yourself from November 5, when the big switch-on takes place, with the lights shining daily from 3pm to 11pm until January. For even more festive cheer, nearby St James’s Market will also be home to an illuminated Wishing Tree, which visitors can tap to donate £5 to Felix, a charity dedicated to rescuing surplus food and redistributing it to communities in need across the UK. Each donation triggers a display of twinkling lights.  Find more Christmas lights in London Find more festive fun with our guide to Christmas in London

Korean film is way more than just Bong Joon-ho and Park Chan-wook, supreme though they are. In fact, Korea arguably has one of the world’s most exciting and mercurial film cultures, as proved by this splashy annual festival. Showcased at the BFI Southbank, Ciné Lumière, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and various other prestigious London picture houses, the line-up features 22 films screened across a fortnight, kicking off with Kim Mi-jo’s The Journey to Gyeong-ju (2025), a star-studded crime drama with grieving matriarch Ok-sil (Parasite’s Lee Jung-eun) and her three daughters (Gong Hyo-jin, Park So-dam, Lee Yeon) embarking on a road trip to avenge the murder of the youngest family member, followed by a Q&A with director Kim and actor Lee Jung-eun. While the closing gala, is the UK Premiere of Park Hoon-jung’s Tristes Tropiques (2025), alongside a Q&A with the filmmaker. Well-known for his gritty and ruthless action dramas, this film is a bloodbath triggered by the death of a kill-squad leader. It won the Nouveau Genre Grand Prize, the top honour in the international competition at the 32nd L’Étrange Festival. Have a butchers at the full programme here. 

Leicester Square is well used to becoming a glimmering Christmas hub each winter. Every year, stalls serving steaming mulled wine and warm mince pies, and huts decked out with traditional Christmas gifts pop up next to the spiegeltent, where entertainment is provided courtesy of alternative circus and cabaret show La Clique. But now, for the first time, there’ll be an open-air ice rink slap bang in the middle of it all. The new rink will encircle the square’s Shakespeare statue and suurounded by the familiar Christmas market stalls. It’ll be London’s only ice rink offering skate sessions every 15 minutes, available for both bookings and walk-ins. 

Although Top Girls and A Number pop up relatively frequently, most of the great Caryl Churchill’s other works are simply too out there to revive with any regularity, and despite its renown her breakthrough play Cloud 9 hasn’t actually had a major London production in 30 years. This autumn, however, is the time, as the National Theatre’s leisurely series of Lyttelton revivals (Top Girls and A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire have both happened recently-ish) continues with Dominic Cooke’s take on Cloud 9. Set in both colonial Africa and ’70s England – with its characters only aging 25 years in a 125-year jump – the play is anything but straightforward but basically draws a line between sexual and colonial repression via its dizzying array of characters. Although hardly racist, its depictions of racism and colonialism are somewhat informed by it being written in a very different era and it’ll be interesting to see if Churchill has updated it in any way.  Rebecca Humphries, Eloka Ivo, Tom Mothersdale, Charlotte Ritchie, Ellen Robertson, Stuart Thompson and Sam Troughton star.

London hasn’t had a big sleb-centric Hamlet in long while – although James Norton’s doing it next year – but the recent trend for slightly alternative takes on Shakespeare’s greatest play reaches something like its apotheosis with the RSC’s Hamlet Hail to the Thief. Debuting at Manchester’s Factory International last year, the show – directed by Christine Jones and Steven Hoggett – does indeed combine Thom Yorke’s specially rearranged score of tracks from Radiohead’s sixth album Hail to the Thief, with a very edited version of (duh) Hamlet. It’s a pretty mad idea and reviews were slightly mixed. Buf Hoggett has suggested it’ll be a tweaked version of the show. With a live band – not Radiohead – playing the rearranged songs (the most famous which is the top five hit ‘There There’), it’s a short, gloomy, strange take on the play with moments of spine-tingling magic when songs and story do hit mesh perfectly.  Though the cast has been somewhat overshadowed by the songs when it comes to talking aboyt the show, it’s a very decent ensemble – largely retained from Manchester – with Samuel Blenkin as Hamlet and Paul Hilton as Claudius. 

Read our review of The Lives of Others HERE. It’s shaping up to be a good year for Brit auteur Rob Icke: his superb take on Oedipus wrapped up an acclaimed Broadway run in February and was rewarded with seven Tony nominations; his idiosyncratic version of Romeo & Juliet is a hit and further shows his pull with big names by bagging the UK stage debut of Sadie Sink; and now he’s got a second original West End show lined up for 2026 in The Lives of Others.  If you’re reasonably au fait with global cinema you’ll recognise that this is an adaptation of the Oscar-winning 2006 German film about a playwright and his mistress being surveilled by Stasi agents in ’80s East Germany. It’s the first time Icke – who has adapted many a classic play – has done the same for a film, but the clautrophobic source material built around a small number of characters feels perfect for adaptation, and Icke is an expert with human emotions, often deepeningthe classics. He’s also got some bloody good names here: Bridgerton man Luke Thompson will play playwright Georg Dreyman, with Stephen Dillane as Hauptmann Gerd Wiesler, the agent somewhat reluctantly spying on him. But the big coup is Keira Knightley, returning to the stage for the first time in 15 years to star as Christa-Maria Sieland, Dreyman’s actress lover. It’s the big class celebrity drama of the autumn.

A baker, a witch and a boy with a cow walk into the woods. It sounds like the set-up to a dodgy Christmas cracker joke, but plenty of Londoners already know how this one ends, given Jordan Fein’s lavish revival of Sondheim’s subversive fairytale musical Into the Woods spent last year packing out the Bridge and hoovering up Oliviers. Now it’s crossed the river to the Noël Coward with a mostly new cast, and it’s every bit as good.  Sondheim and book writer James Lapine throw Cinderella, Jack, Rapunzel and Little Red Riding Hood into the same forest as a childless baker and his wife, and then ask what happens after ‘happily ever after.’ It’s the show’s first West End run since 1991, and if your only previous encounter with it is Meryl Streep and James Corden on Disney+, you’re in for a much stranger night.  Kate Fleetwood is back as the Witch and she owns every inch of stage. She first appears looking thoroughly fed up, like the cynical aunt you only see at Christmas who’s had beef with your parents for decades. She stands on the kitchen table barking orders at the Baker and his Wife, then sprawls across the counter to finish the job, lounging as if she’s on a sunbed while they scurry about beneath her. The Baker and his Wife are petrified, but Fleetwood keeps slipping in moments where she’s a bit ridiculous, even a bit sad, and those are what makes her more memorable than a panto baddie.  John Dagleish and Laura Pitt-Pulford are new as the Baker and his Wife, and they’re a...

Helen Edmundson’s new play Some Woman is described as a thriller, but the experience of watching it is more like a slow strangulation – one that leaves you feeling thoroughly shaken and queasy on the other side.  The ever luminous Anne-Marie Duff plays Julie, a downtrodden mother and divorcee, who puts everyone before herself to such a degree her own needs and opinions are barely a footnote in the minds of her family.  Her ex-husband, Richard (Geoffrey Streatfield), is attempting to chivvy her through the sale of the family home so that he can do it all again with a younger woman. Elder daughter Kate (Hannah Onslow in a cracking stage debut), is sharp-tongued and dismissive – she’s on the fast track to conventional success with a swanky corporate job in Spain, and keen to put as many miles between herself and her dysfunctional family as possible. Younger daughter Ginny (Grace Doherty) is the polar opposite: her mental health struggles make the thought of her leaving home for university seem like an impossibly big mountain.  Stuff’s not much better at Julie’s demanding but dead-end job doing admin in a school. She’s just been overlooked for a promotion that went to some young guy with letters after his name but no common sense.  If it sounds amazingly pedestrian thus far, that’s the point: Julie is an every-woman! But to top it off, she’s had a bad day. An 11-year-old boy called her a ‘fucking bitch’ out of the blue, and Julie takes this as the moment to prove to herself...

You know what they say: they fuck you up, your mum and dad. And in Danny Lee Wynter’s new play, based on his own experiences, so do your sisters. Here we are in a big, busy family home in Ilford – both in 1995 and in 1980 – effervescent with life. In the 90s, Ted (an impressive stage debut from Leo Whitfield Harris) is an awkward, mixed-race teen trying to work out his place in the world. He, along with his mother Tillie (Ria Zmitrowicz) and her dysfunctional family of sisters – the sour-tongued and fiercely loyal Jackie, and the youngest and feistiest, Anne – is off to the funeral of his grandmother Elaine, one of the few people who made him feel genuinely at home. Grief swells around the family, in shadows and memories, as they try to sift through the sadmin and prepare to put the house they grew up in on the market. And then there’s Patrick (a sparkling Craig Stein), a former professional dancer known, not-so-affectionately, to some of the family as ‘Pat the poof’. Tillie’s childhood best friend, he shows up to pay his respects to her mother, who opened her heart and home to him when his own father beat him for his sexuality. Wynter’s dialogue feels like it could be lifted straight from a sitcom; we get all the colour and expletives you’d expect from a close-knit family, fractured by clashing personalities and worldviews. But the play is at its best when Pat and Ted begin to form a bond. Pat – a Black gay man, and a fan of big show tunes like Elaine – opens up a whole...

Three teenage girls are dancing round their bedroom under flashing rainbow lights, squealing over boys, when everything goes dark and the screaming starts. It’s a jolting opening to a play, and it sets the rhythm for everything that follows in Theresa Ikoko’s Girls. You’re laughing one minute and holding your breath the next. Ikoko’s debut play won the Alfred Fagon Award in 2015, years before she co-wrote the BAFTA-nominated film Rocks. It follows Tisana, Haleema and Ruhab, three best friends taken from their village by militant insurgents. It’s set in Nigeria in 2014, the year Boko Haram abducted 276 schoolgirls. Twelve years on – with around 90 of those girls still believed to be missing – director Ewa Dina brings its first UK revival to the Young Vic’s intimate Maria studio. Captivity doesn’t stop the trio being teenagers. They act out TV shows to pass the time, handing out roses Bachelor-style, collecting awards for best performance in a hostage situation, and playing newsreaders and politicians who sip water and remind us all to vote. It’s so convincing that you sometimes forget where they are, until Elliot Griggs’ lighting snaps to black, Munotida Chinyanga’s sound design floods the room with men’s voices, or the girls jerk to attention at a noise outside, and you’re yanked straight back into the camp with them.  Hannah Akhalu’s Tisana is the dreamer, forever insisting someone will be coming to help. It’s unsettling how often she drifts off to play on her own while...

This review is from 2023. SplitLip’s delightful spoof WW2 musical has been heading inexorably for the West End for something like five years now. It’s a fringe theatre comet that’s gathered mass and momentum via seasons at the New Diorama, Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios, and has now made impact in Theatreland – wiping out a West End dinosaur to boot, as it displaces ‘The Woman in Black’ after over 30 years at the Fortune Theatre. And it’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company, which consists of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Robert. All bar Hagan perform in the show, with Claire Marie Hall and Jak Malone rounding out the cast. This is very much their triumph. And though it’s been redirected for the West End by Robert Hastie, ‘Operation Mincemeat’ is at heart the same show it always was. There are no added backing dancers or bombastic reorchestrations. It’s slicker and bigger in its way, but still feels endearingly shambolic where it counts. It’s a very larky account of the World War 2 Operation Mincemeat, a ploy from British intelligence to feed the German army disinformation via a briefcase of false war plans strapped to a corpse that they hoped to pass off as a downed British pilot (yes, there was a recent film with exactly the same name, about exactly the same thing, and yes they do make a joke about this). The story centres on Charles Cholmondeley (Cumming), the socially inept MI5 operative who dreams up the plan, and...

Obviously it would be lovely if the final musical from Spring Awakening composer Duncan Sheik and his lyrical partner Steven Sater was a masterpiece.  It’s not. Nero isn’t entirely new, either – a very different version entitled Nero (Another Golden Rome) ran in San Francisco back in 2006 (back then it was billed as a play with songs rather than a musical). But Sater has been actively working on this Southwark Playhouse production from veteran British director Lindsay Posner and so I don’t suppose we can really shrug it off as an early, sophomoric work: this is Nero’s final form. The concept is fun: it imagines the Roman Emperor Nero as a sort of frivolous theater kid who is blindsided when his scheming mother Agrippina (Sally Dexter) murders everyone in his path to the throne. Sater’s book is lurid into the extreme, with Andrew Barth Feldman’s Nero an omnisexual cross-dressing horndog who fritters Rome’s wealth away on golden monuments to himself and maintains a semblance of control by impressive deliveries of the speeches written for him by pragmatic advisor Seneca (Stephen Carlile). This is, to be fair, congruent with ancient histories: which may or may not have been accurate but clearly that’s the version of the man that intrigued Sater and Sheik.  Nero is an omnisexual cross-dressing horndog And that’s fine but the problem is Sater’s book and lyrics make so little effort to understand where Nero is coming from that it loses any emotional impact it might have had. You...

This review is of the original 2021 cast.  Jamie Muscato and Joy Woods will play the Emcee and Sally Bowles from May 25 to Sep 19 (Muscato) and Sep 5 (Woods); Skylar Astin and Sarah Hyland will take over the roles from Sep 21, to Dec 12 (Astin) and Jan 23 2027 (Hyland). Come to the cabaret, old chums, and see the stage performance of the year from Jessie Buckley! Gasp at the terrific supporting cast in Rebecca Frecknall’s luxury revival of Kander & Ebb’s musical masterpiece, foremost Omari Douglas’s passionate, tender, little boy lost Clifford! Be wowed by Tom Scutt’s literally transformative design! Wonder at the free schnapps you’re offered on the way in, and nod in polite appreciation at the pre-show entertainment! Also… there’s Eddie Redmayne. Now, I have absolutely nothing against the guy. But the presence of any hugely famous, Oscar-winning star is bound to distort the role of the Emcee of the Kit Kat Club, the Weimar-era Berlin bar in which Cabaret’s tragic heroine Sally Bowles plies her trade. The Emcee is a vital supporting role: his sardonic songs set the mood of the show, and map Germany’s descent into darkness. But it’s in no way the lead part – in fact, the character barely interacts with the actual story. Putting by far the most famous actor in the show in the role would be enormously distracting even if Redmayne didn’t do… all this. Wearing a series of beautiful, subtly sinister outfits that kind of feel like they’re trying to process every single one of...

If Tate’s 2025 programme was big on the 80s – thanks to Photographing Britain and Leigh Bowery! – then 2026 is all about The 90s! Following on from a major Tracey Emin retrospective at Tate Modern, its sister gallery Tate Britain will host a blockbuster autumn show about British art, fashion, photography and pop culture in the final decade of the last millenium. And if that isn’t already a tasty enough prospect, it’s being curated by none other than former British Vogue editor Edward Enninful OBE. Expect flashy photography from the likes of Juergen Teller, Nick Knight, David Sims and Corrine Day, iconic looks from Vivienne Westwood and Alexander McQueen, and era-defining artworks by Damien Hirst, Gillian Wearing, and Yinka Shonibare. The opening party will no doubt give the Met Gala a run for its money.

In a massive coup for the British Museum and for London as a whole, the Bayeux Tapestry is on display in Britain for the first time in 900 years. The 70-metre-long artwork is an intricately embroidered depiction of the 1066 Battle of Hastings, in which William the Conquerer took the English throne, and it’s coming to the British Museum. Although it’s believed to have been embroidered in Canterbury, the tapestry has resided in Bayeux, Normandy for the past nine centuries. Despite numerous attempts from Brits to borrow the masterpiece over the past century, it is finally on show on British soil for the first time, nearly 1000 years after it was made. You absolutely don’t want to miss an exhibition which feels like the most significant thing British Museum has done in our lifetimes. Read our full review of the exhibition here.

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’. 

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.

‘This painting makes me so happy,’ said my usually gallery-averse friend, pulling me over to Salman Toor’s ‘The Women’, on display in the painter’s first solo museum show in Europe, at the Courtauld Gallery. ‘We’ve had so many Sunday mornings like this.’ In the painting in front of us were three women slumped across a bed, each propping her head up with one arm. In our version, we’d probably be debriefing on the events of the night before. The painting is small, the room cosy and cocooned from the outside world in Toor’s characteristic velvety green, laid down in thick, parallel strokes of oil paint. At the dresser stands a boy. Toor has said that if he were to write a collection of stories, this image would be the first: ‘a coming-of-age moment for the boy experiencing a blossoming sense of self.’ Toor was born in Lahore, Pakistan, into a middle-class Muslim family. At 20, he moved to the US to study painting, and eventually settled in New York. It was there that he began painting the world that now fills his canvases: queer South Asian men drinking, dancing, flirting, scrolling, lying around with friends, falling in love and being alone. His figures aren’t portraits of real people, but they come from a world he knows. They occupy the sometimes uncomfortable territories between intimacy and exposure, belonging and estrangement. His work draws as much from the Old Masters and the traditions of Western painting as it does from the art history of Pakistan and South Asia,...

Tim Walker is a phenomenal fashion photographer. The 55-year-old has created iconic spread after iconic spread for the likes of British Vogue, i-D and Vanity Fair, and he’s shot famous faces including Tilda Swinton, Kate Moss and Harry Styles. Walker's surreal, Alice in Wonderland-inspired style is whimsical, always surprising, and somehow still cool. So then, why is the majority of this landmark show made up of boring celebrity portraits taken on plain grey backgrounds? The premise of Fairyland: Love and Legends is simple: a celebration of queerness comprising 250 portraits, all shot by Walker, of LGBTQ+ activists, artists, actors, singers and allies, taken across six years. Walker got the idea for the exhibition when he stumbled across the plaque commemorating the first gay rights demonstration in Britain while walking in Highbury Fields. A replica of this triangular plaque is displayed proudly at the entrance to the exhibition.  Some of it is subversive and exciting Fairyland opens with stronger works, in a room dedicated to gay rights campaigners of the ‘70s and ‘80s, all defiantly posing in portraits that mimic the style of Tudor painters Hans Holbein the Younger and Nicholas Hilliard. Olivette Cole-Wilson, a founding member of Stonewall, delicately holds a blackbird in jewellery-encrusted hands that are framed by a thick gilded frame. Musician and longtime supporter of the London Lesbian and Gay Switchboard Tom Robinson smirks at the camera, holding a kestrel and...

There’s this great quote from the American photographer Cindy Sherman that goes ‘I’m disgusted with how people get themselves to look beautiful.’ The American artist has spent decades exploring the construction of identity in her elaborate, consciously artificial self-portraits, where she performs the roles of make-up artist, stylist, model, photographer and director all in one go. Over her five-decade career, she’s skewered everything from silent movie-era Hollywood to men’s magazines, and now she’s focusing her attention on the fashion and beauty industries’ attitudes towards older women with ‘Fabric Matrons’, a series ncorporating draped fabrics, backdrops and jewellery from Chanel’s archives.

Photography turns 200 this year. The earliest surviving photograph, ‘View from the Window at Le Gras’, is thought to have been taken by Nicéphore Niépce in 1826, making 2026 the bicentenary of a medium that has been called both an art and a science. So it’s as good a time as any to look back on photography’s early years. Light and Magic, the new show at Tate Modern, starts in the 1880s - more than half a century after Niépce’s heliograph. Yet photography was still in its infancy. The exhibition is subtitled The Birth of Art Photography, but its subject is pictorialism, an expressive, often vaguely defined, style of photography that emerged in the late 19th century as a deliberate attempt to position photography not as an instrument of observation, as it had been thought of up until this point, but as an art in and of itself.  Early on in the exhibition, we’re introduced to Emma Barton’s photographs, which are essentially staged scenes comparable to those painted by the Pre-Raphaelites. Other artists, like the French photographer Robert Demachy, went further, manipulating their prints by hand until the resulting images no longer looked like photographs at all. Demachy’s pictures of ballerinas appear as though they were drawn in charcoal. It wants us to broaden our understanding of photography Light and Magic wants us to broaden our understanding of photography, both in its definition and its history. The curators have collected a broad body of work to show the range of...

When William Eggleston’s photographs were shown at New York’s MoMA gallery in 1976, the reaction was mixed. It was ‘the most hated show of the year,’ according to the New York Times. ‘Just plain dull,’ said one review. ‘Perfectly boring,’ wrote another. Why all the hooha? Well, for one thing, Eggleston’s photographs are, on one level, boring. That is to say, they show boring things. Eggleston’s ‘democratic photography’ was about photographing your environment: a trash can, say, or that pink toilet in the bathroom. The sort of photograph your dad looks at and says, ‘I could've taken that!’  But such quotidian subjects had been photographed before. The real reason behind the critical commotion was that Eggleston had shot his work in colour. MoMA had shown colour photographs before, but Eggleston’s show represented a new era. Colour was no longer just for tacky magazine spreads. Now, it was art. And people weren’t happy.  The exhibition celebrates Eggleston’s work in all its saturated ordinariness The years since have been kinder. Eggleston’s work has been exhibited in countless retrospectives, the latest being All That Goes Unnoticed, now open at The Photographers’ Gallery. The show gives a broad overview of Eggleston’s career, including a wall of early black-and-white images from when he was still developing his eye. Coming 50 years after that notorious MoMA debut, the exhibition celebrates Eggleston’s work in all its saturated ordinariness: the gas stations, the abandoned...

This renowned annual photography exhibition returns to the Natural History Museum for its 62nd edition, showcasing the very best entries of the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. On display are images of the most extraordinary species on the planet captured by professional and amateur photographers. This year’s entries are TBA right now, but the winners are reliably spectacular – pictured is the 2024 champion Shane Gross, whose mesmirising underwater shot of western toad tadpoles involved snorkelled for hours in a lake on Vancouver Island, making sure not to disturb fine layers of silt and algae at the bottom. Don’t miss what is always a highlight in the NHM’s calendar.