Things to do in London today

Ever wanted to have a nosy around some of London’s coolest private buildings? Open House London gives guests free access to architectural wonders that are not normally open to the public – from schools and offices to places of worship. It’s an often rare chance to explore iconic or just interesting buildings that make up the capital’s storied history, while the programme usually includes tons of workshops, exhibitions and more, as well as the usual tours. This year, the full programme will be announced on July 15, with bookings opening on August 19. Get practising your clicking now – these tickets go faster than Glastonbury.  

London is widely recognised as one of the design capitals of the world. Cementing this title is the annual Design Festival, a colourful and thought-provoking celebration of some of the world's best designers, who interrogate the boundaries of design through events, exhibitions and installations. The 2026 programme is packed full of surprising installations and intriguing collaborations. Wander down the Strand in Covent Garden and you'll spot The Pangolin Shield, a pavilion inspired by the endangered scaly beasts, situated opposite India's High Commission as a comment on the movement of people and species across borders, and the legacy of colonialisation.  Head to the Barbican and you'll have the opportunity to lounge on a comfy installation by MADE, as part of an interiors collection inspired by this architectural landscape. Over at the V&A, Craft x Tech will show works made in collaboration between international designers and Japanese craftspeople. There'll also be an immersive sound installation by L-Acoustics at Wapping Hydraulic Power Station, a retrospective of Kenzo's designer Nigo at London Design Museum, and Reviving Craft, a group exhibition exploring Chinese craftsmanship in new eras.  The festival's events will be spread between 11 distinct design districts, designed to highlight the places where creative Londoners cluster: Bankside, Brompton, Chelsea, Dalston to Stokey, EC1, Fleet Street Quarter, Mayfair, Park Royal, Shoreditch Design Week, Blackhorse Creates...

Every year, London’s famous river gets a whole festival of art installations, performances, and talks devoted to her watery charms, many of which are free to check out. This year’s Totally Thames Festival has scores of events throughout September, all dotted along riverside locations from Richmond to Barking & Dagenham. This year, look out for The Waterfront Journals, (Sep 6), a promenade performance of New York City artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s monologues, Turning the Tide (Sep 17-20), a site-specific film installation by Turner Prize-nominated artist Catherine Yass projected onto the columns of the disused Blackfriars Railway Bridge and Where the River Holds Us (Sep 27-28), a site-responsive opera on Victoria Embankment. There’ll also be a dance performance from ex-Rambert dancers in the atmospheric Brunel Museum Tunnel Shaft (Sep 24) and recitals aboard Victorian steamship the SS Robin (Sep 26). Old favourites will also be making an appearance, including the Great River Race (Sep 12) from Tower Hamlets to Richmond – where 330 crews from across the world spending the morning speeding down the Thames on wooden rowboats, many of them in fancy dress costumes – and the St Katharine Docks Classic Boat Festival (Sep 12-13), where visitors can clamber aboard more than 50 historic vessels. You can also join a river exploration session as part of Mudlarking Weekend (Sep 5-6), take part in paddlesports sessions and a fishing competition as part of Tidefest (Sep 6)...

How many philosophy and music festivals do you know? Well, this is the world’s largest, and it’s serving up an all-you-can-eat buffet of debates, music and comedy. If you’re missing your uni years – not the clubbing, but the classes – then HowTheLightGetsIn is for you. Promising two days of debate and discussion, this Hampstead Heath festival is the thinking man’s Reading Fest. Hear from physicist Roger Penrose, astrophysicist Priya Natarajan, cosmologist Neil Turok, broadcaster Louis Theroux, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, former First Minister of Scotland Nicola Sturgeon, former US National Security Adviser John Bolton, and more at over 300 debates, screenings, musical performances and comedy sets. For when you've done enough pondering Plato, Foucault and Sartre, comedy will be provided by Harriet Kemsley (Last One Laughing) and Fathiya Saleh, while tunes will be supplied by Patrick Wolf, The Turbans and Prima Queen. As the world's largest philosophy and music festival, it's sure to keep your brain buzzing long after it ends.

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...

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...

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...

The sign from the London Astoria, the sound monitor from the Haçienda and the hefty metal doors from The End are just some of the relics you can see at the V&A’s new display that shines a light on some of the UK’s closed-down music venues. Compiled from an open call-out, the museum has curated a free exhibition that spotlights 50 former independent venues through more than 150 objects, including photographs, band merch, clothing, flyers and posters.   You don’t have to be an ageing rocker or former clubber to get something out of this display, as there’s something for all ages. People who came of age at any time between the ‘70s and the 2010s might be hit with a Proustian rush when confronted with a collage of gig tickets from the Rainbow Theatre (a pass for Blondie was just £2.50), or noughties flyers from Plastic People. And nostalgia-loving Gen Zs will get to see what living through indie sleaze was really like – there are spotlights on the ‘toilet circuit’ (the network of small, grubby venues where up-and-coming bands would cut their teeth), amazing, sweaty photos from indie discos at Madame Jojo’s, and oral histories explain that in the pre-smartphone era, you would just turn up at the party and hope your mates were there. What a concept! Nostalgia-loving Gen Zs will see what living through indie sleaze was really like. But the most winning aspect of Lost Music Venues is the fabulous immersive design by Misty Buckley. Buckley’s recreation of a grassroots venue will...

The V&A is staying open after hours again, for another of its brilliant lates. This time around, it’s being put on in conjunction with the London Design Festival, which has a hub at the museum, has the theme ‘Awakenings’, and will be ‘illuminating the unseen forces shaping our lives’. Head along after 6pm for a programme of free live music, performances, workshops, and talks all aiming to confront us with the forces shaping our futures. There’ll also be installations to explore showing how technology is reshaping our world and showcasing inspiring new thinking around identity, modern spiritualities, and the non-human world. Expect everything from embroidery workshops, interactive installations on soil, an eclectic DJ set from Holy Harm and conversations on ‘art labour’. 

This chi chi festival is a relatively new addition to London's cultural scene, but it's got an impressively high-profile line-up of names involved. After last year's inaugural edition, it's back with four days of events from the worlds of art, performance, music and literature. Things kick off with a conversation between Bella Freud and Susie Cave (Sep 16), talking about Nick Cave's new literary tribute to his wife. There's also an evening with Bernardine Evaristo and friends (Sep 17), a celebby reading of A Poem For Every Night of The Year with guests including Asa Butterfield, Tamsin Greig, Giles Terera MBE and Samantha Spiro (Sep 18), and an edition of Diaries of Note with Celia Imrie (Sep 19). There are also a series of big name comedy nights including shows by George Lewis and Sarah Keyworth, a Saturday morning show by dance company Rambert, and even a special line-up of arty in store events from local icon Peter Jones. 

Kimberly Akimbo has the sort of outlandish premise that makes you wonder if it’s going to be another entry in the annals of ‘mad things that only Americans are interested in’. But any  musical that wins five Tony awards and tempts the legendary Maria Friedman out of unofficial retirement is probably going to be alright, isn’t it? Well yes. In David Lindsay-Abaire’s adaptation of his own, more obscure 2001 play, Friedman stars as Kimberly LeVaco, a 15-year-old New Jersey schoolgirl who suffers from an unnamed condition which makes her age at four times the usual speed. This is obviously not a real thing that could really happen (or not in such a neat way). But this inverted suburban Benjamin Button allows itself the one wild metaphysical flourish and plays it with a beautifully straight bat. And of course, it’s a metaphor. Kimberly laconically notes early on that not many kids with the condition live beyond the age of 16. It could have been a musical about a teen with cancer or other more tangible terminal condition. But making it weird stops it feeling like a mawkish weepie about a dying girl and opens it up – Kimberly’s condition feels as much a metaphor for the transience of childhood and the fleetingness of life in general than a story to view literally. It’s also a rare gift of a role to a sixtysomething actor and – like Victoria Clark, who won a Tony for the Broadway production - Friedman absolutely seizes it in Michael Longhurst’s UK premiere. She is sensational as...

TOWIE meets Blasted by way of the Iliad in this breezily provocative fourth play from rising star playwright Ava Pickett. Bloodsport is both fresh but also pleasingly of a piece with Pickett’s other work, insofar as like her previous plays – even breakthrough Tudor smash 1536 – it’s set in Essex. In fact it’s not even her first play set in a slightly vulgar Essex living room (although the decor here is a lot whiter than in her very funny adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma). Bloodsport takes place in the aftermath of a Trojan War of sorts, although there’s no Greece or Troy but rather some kind of civil unrest that’s gripped the UK. Smartly, Pickett never defines precisely what this is or exactly what has happened: it may have been a gang war, it may have been closer to the recent nationalist protests (it’s clear the Trojan equivalents were deemed to be ‘foreign’ on some level), it may have been a full-scale civil war. When Gerard Monaco’s terrifyingly toxic Agamemnon-proxy Mario comes back into the home he shares with his wife Cee (Laura Aikman), he talks about ‘New England’, as if the country has been remade wholesale. He’s joined by his malleable younger brother Marcus (Jay Taylor, in the Menelaus role) and a traumatised, blood-spattered Helen (Michelle Dockery), shivering in her nightwear, who everyone seems to be trying to ignore.  After an awkward homecoming defined by Mario’s triumphal belligerence, all signs - including the intro from Ethan Moorhouse’s poetic...

Almost a century on and I think we can be adult about the fact that 20th century American playwright Clifford Odets was never in the same league as the older Eugene O’Neill, or the younger Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller (who both clearly owed him a debt). Golden Boy, from 1937, is a fine play but clunkier than any of those writers at their best, with rougher-drawn characters and a somewhat on-the-nose consideration of art versus violence as embodied by protagonist Joe Bonaparte, a sensitive Italian-American violinist who throws himself into the world of boxing, with ultimately tragic results.  But it’s boring to quibble about the flaws of a worthwhile revival: not every US play from the middle of the last century can be A View from the Bridge. Though elements of Sam Yates’ stylish take will doubtless prove to be divisive, I thought it was great, a crack cast meeting a bold vision that seeks to do more than just squeeze Golden Boy into standard naturalist tragedy shapes. The story opens with Tom, a down-on-his-luck boxer manager in ‘30s New York. He’s played by Daniel Mays with a not entirely dissimilar note to his Nathan Detroit in the Bridge Theatre's recent Guys & Dolls: all comic bluster and goggling eyes. Like Nathan, he even has a girlfriend he won’t marry, although Hayley Squires' Lorna is a more intense character, and the chief impediment to their wedded bliss is that Tom already has a wife.  Business is bad, but then step into the ring – first metaphorically,...

As the world around us has burned or flooded this summer, the environmental themes of Lucy Kirkwood’s pointedly allegorical drama The Children have only grown more relevant in the decade since it debuted – as Lyric Hammersmith artistic director Rachel O’Riordan’s anniversary revival production makes clear. Ex-nuclear physicists and long-married couple Hazel (Meera Syal) and Robin (Declan Conlon) are living on a remote part of the British coast, trying to eke out a life in the radioactive aftermath of a disaster at a nuclear facility they originally helped set up. When ex-colleague Rose (Kerry Fox) suddenly reappears, the fallout from their past has ramifications for the future. The actors conjure an effectively brittle and on-edge atmosphere as the nuclear plant looms – literally and symbolically – over them in the form of the enormous reactor tunnel of Gary McCann’s set. It acts as the backdrop and frame for Hazel and Robin’s darkly post-apocalyptic The Good Life-style organic lifestyle. Ever-present and impossible to ignore, the aesthetic neatly evokes the situation’s blunt urgency. Syal’s Hazel, dressed in muted, earthy tones, is prickly and defensive, wielding a tight smile, yoga and healthy living as her defence against Rose’s incursion. Fox is nervy, frustration fuelling her too-loud laughter and as out of place in the couple’s tautly beige domesticity as her blue jacket. As Robin, Conlon rolls in with a forced jollity that deflates like a punctured balloon....

Thelma & Louise songwriter Neko Case interviewed: ‘the way we deal with sexual violence has gotten much worse’ This musical version of Thelma & Louise has many things going for it, notably some thrilling songs from alt-country legend Neko Case, a great cast led by Amy Lennox and Rachel Turner, and some sparking dialogue from Callie Khouri, screenwriter of the classic 1991 Ridley Scott feminist road movie.  It doesn’t quite work though, in large part because it doesn’t make a convincing argument for why this story needs this treatment. Not to say there shouldn’t be a Thelma & Louise musical. But I think Khouri and co could have done more with the medium than offer up the exact plot of Thelma & Louise (the film) with songs bolted on. It’s still decent and on the whole the more we’re left alone with just the leads, the better it is: Tucker is very good as the sensible one with the traumatic past (Louise); Amy Lennox is borderline sensational as the married one who loosens up, hits the bottle and gets laid on the road (Louise). And it gets extra good during the wilder, more concert-like sections at the start of each half, when it threatens to break into something quite formally different. But for the most part we get the film’s linear road-movie plot, slowed down and gummed up by the deployment of the ensemble in every scene. That and the frequent need to cut away to the relatively superfluous figure of Hal (Trevor Dion), the kind-hearted homicide detective who comes on board...

Fifty years on, For Colored Girls still hits. Ntozake Shange’s 1976 choreopoem arrives at the Yard Theatre with all the love, rage, grief, humour and sisterhood that made it a landmark — and thematically, not nearly as dated as you’d expect. Upon arrival, the first thing you’ll notice is that there’s nothing on stage. No elaborate set or props to hide behind. Instead, director Diane Page has the women watch one another from the edges, gather, separate and occasionally become silhouettes against the light. When one woman speaks, the others are there to witness her, responding with hums and snaps of assent and giving the individual poems a sense of continuity and collective experience. It’s a smart choice, particularly given that some previous productions have allowed the individual poems to feel disconnected: a series of turns, not a cohesive work. The 2022 Broadway revival, for example, was praised for its exuberance but also criticised for throwing in so much spectacle and movement that the text occasionally got lost. Shange coined the term ‘choreopoem’ for this thrilling collision of poetry, music and movement. Her longtime collaborator Dianne McIntyre described the process as responding to the energy and meaning of Shange’s words: everybody thinking in motion, with the boundaries between dancer, actor and singer deliberately blurred. There are moments at the Yard’s first UK revival in when the movement feels a little too conscious of itself as choreography rather than...

Tracey Scott Wilson’s US newspaper drama The Story is definitely more red top than broadsheet in tone. But there’s always a place for some thrills in the theatre. Making its UK debut almost a quarter century after its 2003 US one, its roots stretch even further back in time: it’s inspired by the story of Janet Cooke, a promising young Black reporter for the Washington Post who was forced to return her Pulitzer Prize after her 1980 story about child heroin addicts on the streets of DC turned out to be largely fabricated.  Wilson has her mind on more ambitious stuff than that, however, as she takes us into the ‘Vanguard’ section of a Post-alike newspaper in an unspecified American city. Manned by a somewhat eccentric team of three reporters, all Black, Vanguard is nominally an ‘around town’ style gossip section that has been repurposed as a African American community news by Pat (Lorraine Toussaint), the steely Civil Rights veteran who rules over the section with an iron fist.  She is supported by Neil (Ashley Thomas), her chief underling and longterm mentee, who knows his place. And she enjoys a somewhat frosty relationship with newbie Yvonne (Letitia Wright), an impressive young reporter who has a less easy relationship with the Black community than her co-workers. Bullied by her Black peers as a child, stints in boarding school and Harvard have left her feeling like an outsider, and she is engaged in a clandestine relationship with the paper’s white head of news, nepo...

Comedies that are 400 years old and French don’t always age that well. Adding a comedy vicar with false teeth helps a bit, but doesn’t entirely save this Moliere remix. Director and adapter Darren Raymond has put a decent spin on the 1664 comedy about faith, following in the vein of his similar remixes of Shakespeare plays in order to open classics up to new audiences.  Here, a priest pretending piety one again inveigles his way into a devout family whose young scions are about to marry — and fleeces them. But Raymond adds a thick extra layer which deals with the culture clash of a Jamaican and a Nigerian family coming together in marriage.  Raymond has fun with the idea, especially with two comedy crotchety grandmas whose disdain for the young and their wayward ways raises a few laughs, and he gets at some interesting stuff about faith. But it’s a slow trudge through two and a half hours of enervating rhyming couplets (as in the original) which seem frequently to trip up a few of the cast members.  Craig Blake as Delroy and Nakeba Buchanan as Elmire the wronged wife hold the stage enjoyably, while Morenike Onajobi as the bride’s best friend Kemi brings bolshiness and adds touches of humour beyond just the gags in her lines.  Then, sticking out like a seventies variety act is Mark Rylance as the rooking priest Pastor Blake. His performance is false teeth forward, all salivary, with comically raised eyebrows directed at the audience. He pulls on all the tricks that made him...

There are lots of highlights to the Royal Court’s seventieth anniversary season. But where the Gary Oldman-starring production of Krapp’s Last Tape and the hit Broadway play John Proctor is the Villain would have been expected to come to London eventually, Man to Man is altogether more of a surprise. Manfred Karge’s hallucinatory solo play about a widow who assumes her late husband’s job and identity in inter-war Germany had its UK premiere at Edinburgh Traverse Theatre in 1987 before transferring to the Court the following year. Stephen Unwin’s production provided a breakthrough for an androgynous young actor named Tilda Swinton, starting her down the path to global cult fame.  Now, in a similar way to the Court’s 2025 revival of 4.48 Psychosis, the whole band is back together for a revival of Man to Man once again starring Swinton and directed by Unwin. Although Swinton has starred in the odd stage role in Europe since, she’s not performed in the UK for over three decades, and who knows if she’ll do so again.

As You Like It is mostly a play about a large assortment of oddballs living in a forest for some reason. It definitely has a plot, but it also kind of plays out like an eccentric Tudor sketch show. And I’ve seen a lot of productions get lost in the woods (badoom) of its teeming character and their largely low-stakes adventures – you can watch this show a dozen times and not be entirely clear who, say, Silvius is if the director doesn’t lead you through it. Fortunately dual directors Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine – plus their creative team headed by designer Paul Wills – are excellent guides though the trees.  This is not a production that (as far as I can tell) comes with a high concept. I don’t think the reason why the opening court-set scene sees the characters dressed in a sort of eye-poppingly absurd 17th century style – big wigs; insanely silhouetted dresses; vaguely kinky; general Marie Antoinette-on-acid vibes – comes with any great point other than that it looks awesome and it sets up a contrast with the longer more rustic sequence that follows when most of the key cast are banished or have run away to the Forest of Arden. It is very fun to spend time in designer Paul Wills’ whiteboard forest But by making every character as vivid as possible, visually and personality-wise, it’s just a great, boisterous production where you don’t find yourself questioning ‘and who is THAT guy?’ two hours in. From Lola Shalam’s highly strung romantic lead Rosalind and Grace...

Another London summer beckons: clouds clearing, days lengthening, an imaginative structure being erected in Kensington Gardens. Mexican architecture firm LANZA atelier has been chosen to design this 2026 Serpentine Pavilion, which features a ‘crinkle-crankle’ wall. Traditional structures seen in English architecture from the 18th century, these wavy partitions temper climate, create shelter, and are ideal for growing fruit. And fittingly, they’re also known as serpentine walls.  The prestigious architectural commission celebrates its 25th anniversary in 2026, with a landmark series of talks programmed in collaboration with the Zaha Hadid Foundation, the charitable organisation founded by the late Iraqi-British architect, who designed the inaugural Pavilion 25 years ago. The programme kicks off with an Architects’ Talk hosted by Hans Ulrich Obrist, with a series of Family Days featuring hands-on workshops, creative activities and performances for all ages scheduled throughout the summer. Check out the Serpentine’s website for further details in due course.   

The Wellcome Collection’s big spring exhibition is a deep dive into perceptions of ageing. Expect the Euston Road institution’s typical blend of art, science and pop culture in the 120+ artworks and objects on display, which range from16th century woodcuts made by German printmaker Sebald Beham to Deborah Roberts’ contemporary collages exploring Black childhood. There’ll also be a spotlight on the Wellcome Trust-funded health research project Age of Wonder – one of the largest studies of adoloscence in the world – and an exploration of how societies can adapt to improve everyone’s experience of ageing.

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’. 

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. 

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...

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.

There’s a painting that hangs in the Pre-Raphaelite room of Tate Britain that Freddy Mercury used to drag his Queen bandmates to see time and again. It’s a fantastical scene from Romeo and Juliet alive with fairies and mythical creatures, including the legendary fairy Queen Mab, who rushes through the night planting dreams in people’s heads. Mercury was so captivated by it that he wrote and named a song after it: ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’. The painting is the work of the often overlooked Victorian artist named Richard Dadd. The Royal Academy has reunited it with dozens of his other works in Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, the first major exhibition devoted to the artist in more than 50 years. Dadd spent nearly a decade completing ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ while confined to Bethlem Hospital—better known as Bedlam—after killing his father in a severe psychotic episode. In 1864, he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1886. The exhibition, however, doesn’t begin there. Instead, it returns to Dadd’s days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, just across from where this exhibition hangs today. While there, he became a founding member of one of Britain’s OG artistic cliques (named the ‘Clique’). Formed by a group of fellow students, its members drew inspiration from Shakespeare and Byron, dressing one another as literary and historical figures to practise their painting. Several of these...

Since its inaugural edition in 1980, this long-standing portaiture competition has attracted more than 40,000 entries from over 100 countries and has been seen by more than six million people. The highly competitive award showcases the best of contemporary portrait painters, whose styles range from the abstract to the classic. Last year the top prize was awarded to British painter Moira Cameron for her non-naturalistic self-portrait, ‘A Life Lived’, which depicts the painter slumped in an armchair in vivid colours.   

Got a pesky neighbour who keeps pinching your parking spot? Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying’s father knew the feeling. In car-clogged Taipei, he came up with an ingenious solution: an inflatable decoy of his Toyota Corolla E100. Whenever he drove off in the morning, he’d leave the blow-up Corolla in its place. When he returned later from work, he’d deflate the decoy, roll it up, stow it in the boot and reclaim his space. He might have to fight for his spot for the next six weeks, though, as his trusty decoy is currently parked at the Hayward Gallery as part of his son’s exhibition, A Life of Navigation. It’s one of four works exploring the strange and ingenious ways we navigate our busy, high-stress urban lives. Working across installation, video, photography and sculptural objects, and often incorporating performance, Chihying approaches those pressures with a sense of humour. Another (literal) aisle Chihying explores in this urban obstacle course is the supermarket. ‘The Jog’ (2014), a two-channel video, sees Chihying don his running gear and jog against the checkout conveyor belt as if it were a treadmill, while an unimpressed cashier looks on. It’s an entertaining take on the endless cycles of consumerism and the repetitive grind of city life. On a more immediate level, all the stretching and athleisure makes it a silent, considerably less sexed-up version of Eric Prydz’s ‘Call on Me’ music video. It’s an entertaining take on the repetitive grind of city life...

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.