Things to do in London today

Each year, Hyde Park gets transformed from pretty park to a dazzling, snow-covered, Alpine-themed, 350-acre festive funscape. One of the largest Christmas events in the UK, Winter Wonderland returns for its eighteenth year in 2025, and is expected to welcome around 2.5 million visitors over six magical weeks.  As you make your way around the space, you’ll find fairground rides, a child-friendly Santa Land (including a Santa’s Grotto, where presents lie in wait) and traditional Christmas markets where you’ll be able to buy gifts for all your loved ones, which has been freshly extended for 2025 with the addition of premium, artfully lit shopping spot Luminarie Lane. Other highlights include circus shows from Cirque Beserk, which take place three times each evening, and the biggest outdoor ice rink in the UK. Surrounding the park’s Victorian bandstand, the 1,795 square foot rink is sponsored by Mayfair’s new art museum Moco. Not only is it lit up by more than 100,000 lights, it’s also a rather cheerful shade of candyfloss pink in keeping with the museum’s logo. Continuing the chilly theme, there's also an ice sculpture exhibit that's been freshly reimagined as a 'Mystical, Mythical Fantasy World', a Real Ice Slide and ice sculpting workshops, after which you can warm yourself up later with frothing steins and steaming cups of mulled wine at the German-style Bavarian Village. ...

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 at the start of November, and will stay open until Boxing Day, Friday, December 26, with a few pop-ups staying open slightly longer until the New Year. Do you need to buy a ticket? No, it's free to enter and have a wander. 

There is literally nothing else on this planet as bombastic as a volcanic eruption. And yet somehow, this immersive exhibition dedicated to the destruction of the Roman town of Pompeii by the fury of Mount Vesuvius does endeavour to be ‘a bit much’.  The Last Days of Pompeii: The Immersive Exhibition is the third show to hit London this year from the Spanish company Madrid Artes Digitales (aka MAD), who also made The Legend of the Titanic (which I didn’t see) and Tutankhamun (which I did). The first thing you notice here is the thunderously loud and doomy soundtrack, which permeates every room. Later on you’ll discover that it’s the accompanying music to an immersive film that forms the centrepiece of the show.  But you won’t get to it for at least half an hour, and there’s something very silly about the nominally sober first area – an introduction to the Roman town of Pompeii and its pre-eruption history – being soundtracked by apocalyptic strings and eruption noises. Similarly, the second room contains casts of inhabitants of Pompeii in their final poses before they were entombed in ash. I’m not saying we need to be massively respectful to 2,000-year old dead Romans, but the figures are actually very moving – and would be even more so if you could turn off the overwrought score. Undoubtedly pretty sick if you’re 10, which is surely the point While the rooms at the start are intended to be sensible, this all flies out of the window by the time we start with the immersive...

What do an Enigma machine, an Apple AirTag and Lady Mountbatten’s silk underwear all have in common? Well, they’re all currently on display at the British Library’s riveting Secret Maps exhibition. Why are they all together? Because they all tell stories about how information is created, concealed, disseminated and controlled, via mapping. And that’s exactly what Secret Maps is all about.  Through more than 100 items, from hand-drawn naval charts gifted to Henry VIII, to Soviet Cold War-era cartographies, and modern-day satellite tracking technology (TL;DR: a whole lotta maps), the British Library illuminates how maps can be powerful political tools, create communities, and act as a form of protest.  It’s a dense, information-packed display with plenty of granular detail to get stuck into, so if you’re not, like, really into maps, then it may not be for you. But it’s sort of what you’d expect for an exhibition dedicated to maps hosted by the British Library. There are a few fun and interactive elements, too; visitors are invited to peer through secret spy holes, place their phones on a futuristic screen that tells them exactly how the tech overlords are mapping and harvesting their data (gulp), and find Wally in an original drawing from the children’s book.  For £20 you are guaranteed to see a lot of cool old shit The most compelling aspect of the exhibition is its anti-colonialist streak (other London museums could do with taking a leaf out of the British Library’s...

There's arguably nowhere in London more Christmassy than Covent Garden's Piazza in December. Every year, the shopping district aims to outdo itself for sheer festive pizzaz. In 2025, the theme is 'The Theatre of Christmas', which means that there'll be decorations taking inspiration from the nearby playhouses and the performances in them. And of course, this year will also see the return of Covent Garden's 55ft Christmas tree, decked with 30,000 lights  Meanwhile, the roof of the Market Building is adorned with 40 gigantic bells, 12 giant baubles and 8 spinning mirror balls in a reprise of its oh-so-festive annual display. There'll also be pop-ups and events to enjoy as the season unfolds, including mulled wine stations and a Santa's sleigh photo op. 

Somerset House’s annual ice rink pop-up has long been one of the city’s favourite festive traditions, with thousands of Londoners and tourists alike making it part of their celebrations each year, and for good reason. Gliding (or nervously shuffling) around the rink, gazing upon the surrounding Georgian architecture and the courtyard’s magnificent 40ft Christmas tree feels like you’ve skated onto a movie set, ready to be watched by families settling in for their post-turkey food coma.  There’s more to this rink than just skating, though. There are seasonal drinks and warming food options available from a rinkside chalet, alongside a Shelter Boutique with takeovers from sought-after brands including Oliver Bonas, All Saints and Nobody’s Child in the run-up to Christmas. And there also a variety of events to keep you entertained throughout the season, including the venue's famous Skate Lates, where you can soar round the rink to a DJ soundtrack. The line-up for 2025 includes trailblazing women-run radio station Foundation FM, NTS Radio host Ruf Dug and queer dance party Sue Veneers. How much does Skate at Somerset House cost? Ticket prices for Skate at Somerset House vary depending on what time you visit, with cheaper tickets at less popular times, and concessions available for kids. They start at £11 for super off-peak times, reaching £26 for the most in-demand slots. Booking for the 2025-2026 goes live on Friday September 26 or you can sign up to the presale here for early...

Escape the Oxford Street crowds with a detour into pretty Carnaby Street, which puts on memorable Christmas light displays each year. A revamp of last year’s ‘Into the Light’ display, 2025’s ‘All is Bright’ features giant cuboid Christmas crackers and stars illumin illuminated in bright neons by more than 60,000 LED lights, and apparently captures ‘the joy and optimism of the season while reflecting the creativity and vibrancy that make Soho unique’. Find more fabulous Christmas light displays in London

Dreaming of a kitsch Christmas? New York’s famous Miracle on Ninth Street bar is popping up in London for its seventh year, ‘50s Christmas decorations, nostalgic accessories and creative new spins on beloved cocktail favourites in tow. 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.

A humongous light trail that takes over south west London’s 300-acre World Heritage Site botanic garden, Christmas at Kew has become a key date in London’s festive calendar since its first iteration in 2013. Visitors embarking on the 3km trail will get see the space lit up with dozens of larger-than-life illuminations, with both the venue’s glass houses and the trees that cover its grounds drenched in different hues. The whole thing is stunning, but don’t miss the lake, where you’ll catch reflections of the vibrant bulbs dancing on the water, taking the magical feeling to another level. For 2025, Kew’s iconic Great Pagoda will be adorned with festive lights for the very first time, too. Keep yourself toasty along the way with warming winter snacks from food vendors curated by Kerb, and make sure say hi to Father Christmas himself as you walk past.  How to get Christmas at Kew 2025 btickets  As the UK’s original festive light trail, tickets to this illuminated adventure tend to sell out fast. Keep an eye on Kew Garden’s booking page, which tells you what dates and times at each of the different entrances are available. If you’re willing to wait until the New Year, there are normally a decent number of tickets available for the first week of January. And if your desired dates are booked up, it’s worth checking back regularly for returns.  What are the prices and opening times? Tickets for non-members start at £27.50 for off-peak slots and £34 at peak times. Members can get...

Looking for a Scandinavian winter wonderland right in the heart of London? The Norwegian Church in Rotherhithe is once again hosting its much-loved Christmas Fair. Expect stalls brimming with Nordic crafts, handmade gifts, beautiful design pieces, and plenty of traditional Norwegian treats to feast on. Grab yourself a steaming cup of gløgg, an open sandwich and a cinammon bun, and lean into the festive atmosphere with live music and good cheer.

I’m going to be honest and say that I was worried I’d not be able to take a drama about a porn addict entirely seriously. It’s an unusual subject! And certainly the early sections of Josie Rourke’s production of Sophie Chetin-Leuner’s Porn Play are happy to make relatively light of protagonist Ani’s habit. A successful English lecturer with a speciality in Milton, we first meet Ambika Mod’s Ani in the company of her soon to be ex, Liam (WIll Close). She has just won a big award for her work; he has chosen this moment to say he’s concerned about the amount of violent pornography she’s consuming. But her defence is pretty good: she doesn’t deny it at all, but instead compares wanking to having a glass of wine to unwind after a long day. She deftly flips the conversion on its head, and accuses him of exaggerating the problem out of jealousy over her award. He meekly agrees.  Rourke’s production is staged on a remarkable Yimei Zhao set: it transforms the Royal Court’s Upstairs theatre into a sort of gigantic flesh-coloured sofa with what I’m going to go ahead and say is a big hole that’s meant to be evocative of a vaginal opening as its focal point. And there’s a playful sensuality to the early stages, as the actors delve into the fleshy fabric of the set to pull out props, while there are scenes in which actor Lizzy Connolly flits around in a gauzy dress as a sort of spirit of desire (who also helps out with the scene transitions). But Ani is not okay, and over the course of...

Belgian super director Ivo van Hove got his big English-language break with 2014’s astounding production of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, and a couple of years later lucky New Yorkers got a deluxe production of The Crucible that scored warm reviews (maddeningly it never played here despite its largely British and Irish cast). Since then, Van Hove’s career has gone into overdrive and he’s famous dedicated a lot of time to making stage adaptations of classic films, to mercurial effect.  It would be entirely misunderstanding Van Hove to imagine that he’s returning to the safety of Miller as a result of last year’s colossal West End flop Opening Night. But there will certainly be those glad he’d doing so as he tackles the US playwright’s first big hit, All My Sons.  Set in 1943, the drama concerns Joe Keller, an upstanding pillar of the local community whose business partner has been found guilty of selling faulty parts to the US Airforce. Joe has escaped any blame. But should he have? Van Hove has assembled a proper A-grade cast here, with US star Bryan Cranston – who led the director’s 2017 hit Network –  as Joe, with the wondrous Marianne Jean-Baptiste as his wife Kate and Paapa Essiedu as their son Chris. 

Halloween is over but witches are still haunting the Kiln Theatre. Well, alleged witches, the victims of the 1633 Pendle Witch Trials whose half-known stories have been set to music by composers Rebecca Brewer and Daisy Chute. It’s a very rare thing: a brand new musical that isn’t based on an existing book or film, with an original score and, rarest of all in musical theatre, an entirely female cast and creative team. You can put it in a bracket with Sylvia and Six as a defiant feminist retelling of history, but it’s doing its own thing in a weird and interesting way.The opening scenes – a little slow and dialogue-heavy, in need of an establishing banger – introduce us to Jenet Sellers, who once accused her whole family of witchcraft and has now been accused of the same thing herself 20 years later, locked up with other condemned women. These cellmates’ backstories (based on real people, by and large) are drip-fed in songs which fuse folk, protest song, anthemic pop and ritualistic spells.Woven in amid the main story are ideas around common land, manipulation of children to give false evidence and the importance of community over divisive ideologies that lead us to denounce other people as, for example, witches.One woman has been raped by the wealthy local landowner – Lauryn Redding brings great depth and bite and likability as the gobby Rose – while that landowner’s wife Frances is there, too, having just lost a baby; there's herbalist Maggie and midwife Nell, too. But...

Punchdrunk’s Felix Barrett on Lander 23: ‘it’s high stakes, high adrenaline’. Post 2022’s The Burnt City, immersive theatre legends Punchdrunk seem genuinely liberated by apparently ditching the mask-based format that’s defined most of their previous body of work. Viola’s Room (2024) was a focussed and unnerving hourlong plunge into a twisted fairytale; and Lander 23 is something completely different again, being a ‘stealth based exploration game’ based on ‘videogame mechanics’ that will see audiences deployed in teams of four onto an alien planet to try and find out the fate of the titular landing vehicle, which has disappeared mysteriously. This all feels very new and indeed, in acknowledgement of this the show is billed as ‘early access’, that is to say it’s effectively a work-in-progress for now (and there won’t be reviews, or at least not during this period). Exactly what will happen in it is vague beyond the above synopsis. What we do know is that Lander 23 will run to about 90 minutes, that it’s based on videogames, that it’s possible to ‘die’ in it (you’ll come back to life though), and that the set will be a ‘modded’ version of the Trojan cityscape from The Burnt City. You also have to technically see it in groups of four, meaning tickets are only purchasable in pairs, although if you want to come down solo you can ring the box office on 0208 191 1431. One half of the group will advise the other half what to do over radio, with roles swapping during the course of...

Though it would be pushing it to say Tom Morris directs Othello as a comedy, he certainly wrings more laughs than usual out of Shakespeare’s great tragedy. To be fair I don’t think I’d appreciated the extent to which other productions must try to avoid audience giggles every time a character describes the villainous Iago –  the greatest snake in English literature – as ‘honest’. Morris just cheerily milks it, and the result is a lighter-than-usual take on the play. Not out-and-out hilarious, but with a glossiness that speaks of a desire to go easy on a West End audience.  The title role is played by David Harewood, who returns to the part 28 years after he was the first Black actor to star as the doomed Moorish general at the National Theatre. His new Othello is a precise, confident, seemingly unflappable man who shows little sign of jealousy or doubt for a long time. But his extreme rationalism proves his downfall: once Toby Jones’s Iago presents ‘proof’ of Othello’s wife Desdemona (Caitlin FitzGerald) being unfaithful, her husband simply accepts it, something that speaks as much of misogyny as insecurity or insanity.  Jones is a thoroughly entertaining Iago, who tackles Shakespeare's elegant verse with a coarse vigour that helps explain why the other characters like him so much: he comes across as plainspoken, dowe to earth, and funny.  Why does he want to destroy Othello? Being overlooked for a promotion in favour of Luke Treadway’s dashing Cassio is the initial...

Have we finally reached Peak Paddington? The young Peruvian bear’s spectacular renaissance hasn’t just yielded a trilogy of hit films: there’s a TV series for younger kids, and 2024 saw the opening of official immersive attraction the Paddington Bear Experience. A really banging computer game aside, it’s hard to see what else there is to do with the character beyond ‘more films’. Apart from, of course, a big splashy West End musical. Which we’re now getting: West End super-producer Sonia Friedman has done the honours, assembling a crack team headed by playwright Jessica Swale doing the book and kids’ author and McFly member Tom Fletcher on songs, all directed by Luke Shepherd, who did such a good job with the smash revival of Starlight Express. The cast is now confirmed as Timi Akinyosade (Tony), Amy Booth-Steel (Lady Sloane), Tarinn Callender (Grant), Delilah Bennett-Cardy (Judy Brown), Adrian Der Gregorian (Mr. Brown), Tom Edden (Mr Curry), Brenda Edwards (Tanya), Amy Ellen Richardson (Mrs. Brown), Victoria Hamilton-Barritt (Millicent Clyde),  Teddy Kempner (Mr Gruber), Bonnie Langford (Mrs Bird). Plus there’s the bear himself who is being depicted by a team of two perfomers: Arti Shah will don a bear suit that makes her look alarmingly like a giant Paddington doll come to life, while James Hameed will be the ‘off-stage performer’, which sounds like it’ll involve doing Paddington’s voice and remote controlliung his facial expressions. Although not conformed, it seems...

Nicola Walker is a brilliant TV actor: her sullen, sarcastic charisma brings an edge to sundry MOR terrestrial Brit dramas – we’re talking Spooks, Last Tango in Halifax, River, The Split, Annika – in which her career has flourished. But even though she has done some great stuff on stage – notably her excellent turn in Ivo van Hove’s landmark production of A View from the Bridge – I’m not sure Nicola Walker has ever truly successfully brought her innate Nicola Walkerness to bear in a theatre role. Until now.  Nick Payne’s new Royal Court play The Unbelievers isn’t the instant classic his last one (2012’s Constellations) was. But its star gives a turn that is absolutely, magnificently, unfettered Nicola Walker. Her unique gift for proper nuanced acting filtered via an unshakeable deadpan grumpiness is harnessed to perfection as she plays a grieving mother whose sorrow and grief at the unexplained disappearance of her son has curdled into something darker and more disturbing. The play is set in three timelines, albeit heavily jumbled up and somewhat blurred. There’s the immediate aftermath of Oscar’s disappearance, when Walker’s Miriam is terse and snappy but fundamentally reasonable in both her grief and her burning desire to make progress on the case. There’s one year on, where things are beginning to slip with her. The play opens with a scene from this timeline in which a somewhat out of it Miriam is tending to a wounded hand which has arisen from a complicated series of...

Alfie (Clive Owen) is dying of cancer. Julie (Saskia Reeves) is not. A couple since their twenties, their lives are about to diverge dramatically, though precisely how dramatically is up for grabs. David Eldridge’s new play begins with a physically ailing Alfie telling Julie he wants to stop treatment, before proceeding to splurge all manner of wild thoughts, theories and plans about his imminent death.  End follows Eldridge’s Beginning and Middle at the National Theatre. I’m not sure I’d call them his mid-life-crisis trilogy. But certainly in sum they are about as rigorous an interrogation of middle age as exists in the British theatrical canon. The fizzy, sexy smash Beginning was about the rush of first attraction between a 38-year-old and a divorced 42-year-old. Middle was about a slightly older couple stuck in the rut of a predictable long-term marriage.  With their handsome-looking north London house, Alfie and Julie are initially coded as the sort of monied older couple that has popped up in English theatre for centuries. The fact they’re actually just 59 comes as a slight surprise (Owen and Reeves are actually a few years older), but it’s their cultural references that feel the most startling. It soon transpires that Alfie was a big time acid house DJ, a subject he basically never stops talking about; there’s something disconcerting about thinking of that generation as ‘old’ now. End is not about Gen X dying out en masse: it’s kind of a point of the play that Julie...

John Le Carré’s landmark Cold War novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold has a huge reputation but is relatively under-adapted compared to the later, connected Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. There was a critically acclaimed but now largely forgotten Richard Burton film in 1965 (two years after the novel was published), and not a lot since, although a TV adaptation has been in the works for years, seemingly without much progress. Well, here’s a theatre version, transferring to London after an acclaimed run at Chichester last year. Written by David Eldridge and directed by Jeremy Herrin, it stars Rory Keenan as battle weary British intelligence officer Alec Leanas, ready to ‘come in from the cold’ but pressed into one more job by spymaster George Smiley (John Ramm). Posing as dishonourably discharged in an effort to be recruited by East German spy Hans-Dieter Mundt (Gunnar Cauthery), he sets off a dangerous chain of events after falling for well-meaning lefty librarian Liz Gold (Agnes O’Casey).

  At the National Theatre last Christmas, Max Webster’s vividly queer take on Oscar Wilde’s magnum opus felt quite a lot like The Ncuti Gatwa Show. Back on stage for the first time since he hit the big time, the Doctor Who actor’s stupendously arch take on dashing young protagonist Algernon Montcrieff had an ultra-knowing quality that defined the production. It’s very, very obvious that in Webster’s take, Algenon and his cousin-slash-BFF Jack are meant to be closeted gay men (it begins with a dragged up Algie writhing away at a grand piano, and doesn’t get noticiably straighter). But whereas Gatwa’s sardonically adult interpretation of Algernon seemed very aware of his own sexuality, that’s not necessarily the case in the West End cast. Gatwa’s replacement is fellow Russell T Davies alumnus Ollie Alexander, and he plays Algie with a waspish dandyishness that feels childish, not adult, a little boy roleplaying his whirlwind romance with Jessica Whitehurst’s bolshy Cicily. Likewise, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett‘s Jack is basically a gigantic overgrown puppy, wagging his tail in delight at the attentions of Kitty Hawthorn’s Gwendolyn, but with zero sexual intent.  All four ‘lovers’ go about their relationships with the breezy silliness of a group of primary schoolers playing mummies and daddies. Webster’s interpretation amps up Wilde’s wit by unburdening it of any need for us to believe in the romance. Indeed, the contrived plotting – Bunburying, the women only being into guys...

If you’re a non-disabled person, you may never have given any proper thought to the many ways in which the world is designed without regard for the needs of disabled members of our society.  Described as ‘both a celebration and a call to action’, this V&A exhibition seeks to rectify that, exploring the social history of design and disability from the 1940s to the present. Opening in summer 2025, it promises to highlight the contributions made by disabled, Deaf, and neurodiverse communities to art, design, fashion, photography and architecture, as well as outlining how design can be made more inclusive and accessible in the future.   

To the layperson, high-fashion shows can be a source of confusion. Why would anyone spend thousands on a dress constructed entirely of razor blades, or a pair of decrepit shoes that have been deliberately sullied or even torched? Well, because sometimes creating unwearable garments is actually the point, thank you very much. And that’s exactly what the Barbican’s latest fashion exhibition illustrates.  From the controversial £1,400 Balenciaga destroyed trainers, to Jordanluca’s pee-soaked jeans, and dresses that have been pulled out of bogs, Dirty Looks peers at the muckier side of fashion design. Don’t expect immaculate gowns displayed solemnly in glass cases. This isn’t a historical look at haute couture, or a glossy advert for a fashion house concealed inside a gallery show. The exhibition, featuring more than 120 garments from designers including Maison Margiela, Alexander McQueen, Vivienne Westwood and Issey Miyake, takes a clever thematic approach to the philosophy of dirt within fashion, showing how ideas around industrialisation, colonisation, the body, and waste, can be illustrated on the runway.  One particularly icky room is dedicated to bodily fluids, showing artificially sweat and period-stained garb, others to food stains, pieces made with rubbish and to trompe l’oeil faux-grimy clothing.Stand-out pieces include a torn and muddy lace dress from Alexander McQueen’s controversial ‘Highland Rape’ collection, a creepy Miss Havisham-esque Comme des Garçons...

The Anmatyerr artist Emily Kam Kngwarray only took up painting during the last decade of her life. Making up for lost time, she produced thousands of paintings in the years leading up to her death in 1996. She worked frenetically, changing her style multiple times. This, her first major European solo exhibition, presents just a sliver of her oeuvre. It’s an impressive introduction to a visionary artist and, to those unfamiliar with Aboriginal art, a new way of understanding art. Naturally, this show needs more exposition than most. It requires European audiences to let go of their art-historical baggage. For example, the colourful works on show here aren’t straightforwardly representational but it would be wrong to call them abstract. Rather than leave us to experience Kngwarray’s work on the familiar-but-inaccurate terms that define western art, the exhibition takes two rooms to provide a potted education on Aboriginal art and life and the artist’s place within it. Dreaming, for example, is an important religio-cultural term that pervades the exhibition, connecting Aboriginal Peoples with their ancestors through the land. This show needs more exposition than most The exhibition finds confident form in its third room, where more than a dozen large-scale acrylic paintings, all replete with coloured dots, surround a procession of batik prints on silk that hang from the ceiling. Interconnectedness is less a feature of these works than an underpinning of them. In each of the...

Every year, Tate Modern teams up with Hyundai for the Hyundai Commission – a chance for one artist to share an exciting new work in the museum’s iconic Turbine Hall. The chosen masterpiece that will be on display in 2025 will be announced in the coming months, but previous selections for the coveted spot include Mire Lee, Anicka Yi, El Anatsui, Superflex, Abraham Cruzvillegas, among others.

Get a dose of hip hop history at Somerset House this autumn, where the first major solo exhibition from British photographer Jennie Baptiste will be displayed. Having photographed everyone from NAS, to Jay Z, Estelle and Biggie Smalls, Baptiste’s work spanning the last three decades has been at the forefront of R&B, hip hop, fashion and youth culture, as she documented the influence of Black British communities on culture and art from the 1990s to today.   

2025 will see the launch of the most extensive retrospective of Lee Miller’s photography in the UK, celebrating the trailblazing surrealist as one of the 20th century’s most urgent artistic voices. Around 250 vintage and modern prints will be on display – including some previously unseen gems – capturing the photographer’s vision and spirit.

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too. It starts, like any good procession, with a load of geezers with trumpets, parping to herald the arrival of victorious Caesar. As they blare, a Black soldier in gorgeous, gilded armour looks back, leading you to the next panel where statues of gods are paraded on carts. Then come the spoils of war, with mounds of seized weapons and armour piled high, then come vases and sacrificial animals, riders on elephant-back, men struggling to carry the loot that symbolises their victory. The final panel, Caesar himself bringing up the rear, remains in Hampton Court, so there is no conclusion here, just a steady, unstoppable stream of glory and rejoicing.  The paintings are faded and damaged, and have been so badly lit that you can only see them properly from a distance and at an angle. But still, they remain breathtaking in their sweeping, chaotic beauty.  Partly, this massive work is a celebration of the glories of the classical world and its brilliance, seen from the other side of some very dark ages. But along with its rise, you can’t help but also think of Rome's demise, of what would eventually...

You could say that Marie Antoinette was the original celebrity. The last Queen of France worked with personal stylists, had her barnet done by celebrity hairdressers, and set the agenda for the fashion of the day. She had her own personal brand – an elegant ‘MA’ monogram – which she plastered all over her jewellery, furniture, belongings, and even most intimate toiletries. Like many celebs today, the queen’s dodgy reputation, founded on obscene rumours of debauchery, promiscuity and gorging on cake, was created by tabloid sensationalism. So it’s only fitting that a comprehensive exhibition dedicated to the style of the world’s most fashionable and infamous monarch should be just as fabulous, bold, sparkly and, at times, salacious. Featuring 250 objects, including loans from Versailles that have never been exhibited outside of France before now, Marie Antoinette Style takes visitors on a journey through the ill-fated queen’s forward-thinking wardrobe, dizzyingly elaborate jewellery, lavish interiors, huge hairstyles and enduring influence on fashion and art today. Alongside the myriad guffaw-inducing riches on display (a replica of the most expensive necklace ever made in France is particularly astonishing), mysteries surrounding the queen are confidently dispelled. Did she really say, ‘Let them eat cake’? (No.) Was the coupette glass actually modelled on her breast? (No, but a very realistic porcelain ‘breast bowl’ commissioned by Antoinette is on display.) What appears...

‘Nigerian Modernism’ celebrates the achievements of Nigerian artists working on either side of a decade of independence from British colonial rule in 1960. As well as traversing networks in the country’s locales of Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos and Enugu, it also looks further afield to London, Munich and Paris, exploring how artistic collectives fused Nigerian, African and European techniques and traditions in their multidimensional works.

House of Music, the latest solo exhibition by Peter Doig, marks new territory for the artist who is increasingly known for being Europe’s most expensive painter, thanks to his works repeatedly selling for record-breaking, eye-watering sums on the secondary market. The show is Doig’s first foray into integrating sound into his work, through the inclusion of two sets of restored, cinema-standard analogue speakers which take centre stage in the Serpentine South Gallery, surrounded by a series of new and old paintings which relate to the artist’s love of music. The aim appears to be to transform the gallery into a listening space, something akin to the many hi-fi listening bars which have been popping up in spades around the UK in recent years, or Devon Turnbull’s excellent and hugely popular Hi-Fi Listening Room at Lisson Gallery the year before last. A smattering of plush recliners and chic tables and chairs are dotted around the various rooms, inviting art lovers to sit and enjoy the sounds of Doig’s personal vinyl collection as you take in the sights of his mesmerising, large scale paintings inspired by his time spent living in Trinidad, observing the country’s sound system culture which seemingly had a profound effect on the Scottish painter.  The only problem is, despite going to great lengths to acquire these mammoth speakers - they were ‘harvested from derelict cinemas’ by Doig’s collaborator Laurence Passera - you can’t actually hear the music very well. A private...