Things to do in London today

Each year, London Literature Festival aims to bring together readers of all ages to ‘celebrate the power of the written and spoken word’, with a big name celebrity curator leading the charge. And excitingly, the 2026 edition will have popstar and Service95 Book Club founder Dua Lipa in the hot seat, in a festival that runs from Wednesday October 21 - Sunday November 1.  Dua has already proven that she's a massive advocate for fiction from around the world with her monthly fiction podcast, where she interviews a different author each month. She's also spoken up for marginalised readers facing incarceration or book bans. Her lineup for the festival includes a conversation with Zadie Smith about her 2000 novel White Teeth (Oct 24), a sit down with Sudanese-Canadian singer-songwriter Mustafa to discuss his poetry publication NOUR (Oct 24) and a chat with Patti Smith about her memoir Bread of Angels (Oct 25).  Elsewhere in the week there’ll be a showcase of translated fiction (Oct 28), events with Hernan Diaz (Oct 21) and Malorie Blackman (Oct 28), a celebration of debut London authors (Oct 25), an evening discussing  threats to free expression faced by writers, journalists and the UK public (Oct 31) and a creative writing masterclass with Pulitzer Prize-winning author Hisham Matar. That only scratches the surface of the festival’s stacked programme – see everything that’s lined up on the Southbank Centre's official website. 

Having debuted in 2024, it looks like Kew’s Halloween trails – from the producers of Kew Gardens’ beloved Christmas trail – is here to stay and a permanent seasonal fixture. It’s a light trail, basically, but a souped up one: we’re promised eerie illuminated trees, ghoulish installations, fire performers and more, with a troupe of actors on hand to stoke up our horrors (in a family friendly way, of course). There are three timeslots: only available in half-term week, Daylight sessions run during the daytime and are intended for younger audiences who want an absolute minimum of spookiness (or simply not be out too late); Twlight slots are between 6pm and 7.30pm and things are definitely getting a bit scarier (ie darker); finally the Moonlight slots run after 7.30pm when it should be fully dark. It’s worth stressing that the trail is suitable for all ages at all times, but certainly there are ways a means of managing the spook factor and fitting it around the bedtime of younger audiences. If none of that’s your bag, there will be a host of activities themed around beloved Julia Donaldson children’s book Zog-themed running at Kew until November 3. Halloween at Kew opening dates Halloween at Kew 2026 begins Friday October 16 and runs until Sunday November 1. From October 16 to October 24 it will run 6pm to 10pm; from Octover 24 to Novemeber 1 it will run 4pm to 10pm. Tickets and pricing Tickets for Halloween at Kew cost £19.50 for adults during off-peak times, or £24 during...

Things are getting spooky on High Street Ken for Halloween. The west London thoroughfare will play host to a Halloween trail between October 24-31, complete with ghoulishly themed workshops, seasonal treats and scary surprises (all appropriately family-friendly, it is half-term after all). Then, on Halloween itself, Holland Park will transform into a theatrical playground of spooky characters, immersive installations and interactive games and live entertainment between 4pm and 7pm. Plus, there’ll be the chance to take part in the capital's best trick-or-treating, with the neighbourhood’s houses once again putting on their legendary Halloween displays. Make a day of it by heading to the Big Kensington Vintage Flea (10am to 4.30pm), which will have a Gothic twist for the day, with stalls packed with grand candelabras, Victorian-inspired gowns, black lace and moody florals.  

It’s the perfect time of year to explore the grand, gloomy corridors and courtyards of Henry VIII’s haunted palace. Last year Hampton Court’s Halloween celebrations escaped the walls of Henry VIII’s palace and moved to the outside, and October half-term 2026 will be similar as its Wilderness area (as it’s now dubbed) returns, offering ‘a bewitching autumnal trail filled with pumpkins, scarecrows, and seasonal surprises’.   Although the inside of the palace is a little less ‘halloweeny’ than it was before the spooky celebrations encompassed the outside, there is still plenty of phantasmal fun to be had, notably various ghosts wandering the halls (actors, but still might be scary to youngsters) plus a 15-minute storytelling session in William III’s apartments every 45 minutes, sharing ‘The Return of Boo in Wren’s Revenge’. 

Doc’n Roll Film Festival shines a spotlight on some of the movers and shakers who’ve lit up the music world with intriguing and eclectic sounds via an 18-day programme of music documentaries covering a wealth of genres and scenes, and screened in London cinema staples like the Barbican, BFI Southbank and Dalston’s Rio. The 13th edition of the festival boasts 21 feature documentaries and five shorts, with screenings often accompanied by Q&As with the musicians and/or filmmakers, and even one or two live performances.  Highlights this year include an Opening Night screening of Wolf, Christian Cargill’s portrait of English singer Patrick Wolf via intimate conversations with his longtime friend Tilda Swinton, the world premiere of Peven Everett: Voice of a Generation, documenting Chicago musician’s pioneering impact on house music and featuring interviews with peers including Damon Albarn and The Twilite Tone, and Kevin Wright’s Punk Brighton, documenting the lively punk scene that revolved around legendary Brighton music venue The Vaults in the ’70s and ’80s. There’ll also be a UK premier at BFI IMAX of Newport And The Great Folk Dream, Robert Gordon’s documentary delving into the spirit of protest and rebellion that epitomised the music festival, and its influence on the music of Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Johnny Cash, plus another UK premiere for You Fuckers Figure It Out: A Jason Mollina Story, a tribute to the late indie-rocker by his high school friend and first-time...

The history of the Tower of London goes back a whopping 900 years, which covers a hell of a lot of torture, prisoners and executions – most famously the beheading of Anne Boleyn. It‘s no surprise then that the landmark is notorious for ghostly sightings. Visit over October half term and follow a spooky trail around the ancient landmark and see if you can spot medieval queens, Roman soldiers, wizards and indeed ghost bear lurking about the place.  Halloween at the Tower is, to be clear, more treat than trick and don’t expect massive jump scares, but rather friendly ghosts and fun themed areas including the Haunted Forge, the Enchanted Wishing Well, and the Raven’s Observatory

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...

London Month Of The Dead’s annual programme returns this spooky season to get you in the mood for Halloween with a programme of more than 60 fascinatingly macabre events investigating our city’s relationship with death. The line-up offers a plethora of ghostly tours that will take you around crypts, cemeteries, undertakers, execution sites and other eerie locations across the city, alongside talks exploring everything from Victorian child bereavement to anthropodermic leather. Highlights of this year’s programme also include a bat skeleton mounting workshop, a magic shadow show in West Norwood Cemetery, a five hour immersive forensics workshop, a screening of eerie classic The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari with live piano accompaniment by Stephen Horne, and creepy Halloween festival A Danse Macabre. It doesn’t get more gothic than that! Check out the full programme here. 

Turn picking your pumpkin into a whole seasonal extravaganza at Berkshire's Wasing Estate, which has laid on plenty of fun add ons to the main event. Cast your wish at a wishing well, explore a mysterious witches apothecary, and spot woodland creatures at this whimsical October spectacular. There's also a dining tent on offer, serving up locally grown delights including, naturally, pumpkin soup.

Marking 250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the United States, the Science Museum’s new free exhibition is casting an eye on how science and technology shaped the development of the United States of America. Across the exhibition, you’ll find stories of how Anglo-American colonists, enslaved and free people of African descent, and Indigenous Americans used their knowledge, skills and tools to live, cultivate the land and exert power. Through maps, paintings and scientific instruments and artefacts, Becoming America will chart four decisive decades in the history of North America: beginning in the 1760s, when Britain took over territorial control from France, through the founding of the United States to the first US presidency in 1790s.  Look out for a rare surviving copy of the Declaration, notable items used by King George III and George Washington, and a pioneering map made by Benjamin Franklin, which will be among over a hundred objects on display in an exhibition created with the support of the Library of Congress.

While the old rocksteady Les Mis has been running in the West End pretty much unchanged since 1985, this other musical by its creators Alain Boublil and composer Claude-Michel Schonberg, also based on French history, has never been able to find its perfect form. Every time Martin Guerre has been revived since its poorly received premiere in 1996, the tale of the 16th-century peasant has received not only a tinkering around the edges but a complete gutting and reconstituting. Surely if anyone can solve its complex plot of false identities and time jumps, it’s Matthew Warchus, originator of so many great musicals from Matilda to Groundhog Day, who attempts in his final act as the Old Vic’s artistic director finally to make Martin Guerre work.  But if this is the best version of the show, then we’ve got a problem. It’s not that it’s bad. Warchus and librettist Boublil and composer Schonberg have heavily streamlined proceedings. This becomes a simple story barrelling in one direction: man marries woman, is driven out of village, returns seven years later, may not be all he seems. Even in this semi-staged form, Warchus and designer Rob Howell make it look great with Traitors-esque black robes and simple splashes of colour coming from scarves and sashes, while red grit covers the floor, suggesting blood and soil and much else besides.  But it just all sounds so much like someone writing a less good version of Les Mis, with added lute for that 16th century tang. The bones are the...

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...

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...

Having missed the press night I decided the logistically sensible thing to do was to see this cult Irish immersive horror show on my own, late at night (I slotted it in after seeing another immersive horror, Room 13). This was either a terrible idea or a brilliant one: even some of the relatively sympathetic costumed beings that inhabit this pair of scary mazes – plus shorter one-room vignettes – looked at me in slight concern when they realised I was flying solo.  I can well imagine that with a group of friends, and after a few drinks, The Nightmare Realm verges on camp and is quite a good laugh. Arguably I did in fact do it the only authentic way: even blessedly aware that none of the actors were allowed to touch me I still flinched and yelled repeatedly as I passed through its two dimly lit, twisty turny labyrinths in which a seemingly endless stream of abominations leap out at you from any given corner.  I flinched and yelled repeatedly The mazes don’t so much have plots as themes. In Sundown Manor you’re invited to dinner with… well, lots of scary people, but let’s call them a coven of witches. I was too on edge to entirely follow what was going on, but it’s all very well done, as you push through decrepit halls and rotting sides of meat (NB fake) while being constantly menaced from the shadows, eventually arriving at your final encounter with eyeless manor proprietor Lady Sundown. In Avery Hill Asylum you’re edging through a chaotic madhouse where the patients have...

The key to what makes Daniel Bailey’s touring revival of August Wilson’s 1985 play – now at the Lyric Hammersmith – so good is how intimately devastating it is. The sweep of the generational and national tragedy so deftly portrayed by Wilson is always anchored by its impact on one family. At this production’s heart is Ray Fearon as Troy, a fiercely proud Black man whose struggle to support his family and anger at the racism of 1950s America, on the cusp of painful postwar change, becomes destructively entangled with his inability to let go of the past. As he relentlessly builds a fence around his home in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, is he keeping the world out or trapping his family inside? Lily Arnold’s gorgeous set – a two-story house façade, with peeling paint and fading features – is a richly realised domestic space in which the drama feels real and rooted. As characters laugh, argue or fight in the yard, we see others at bedroom windows, on the stairs or answering the phone. At some points, the house pivots 360 degrees – briefly revealing, almost in tableaux, the interior. These small, telling moments, coupled with Khalil Madovi’s soulful sound design and the moments when the cast interrupt the naturalism to sing alone to us, add to the production’s richly textured emotional authenticity. Fearon gives a tour-de-force performance as Troy, his face quickly switching from easy charm to ugly menace when his character feels his authority challenged. He conveys the deep...

The Cherry Orchard is, of course, one of Chekhov’s great plays, and follows an aiing aristocratic family as they contemplate the end of their beloved country estate and the sale of its beloved orchard. It was last seen in London a couple of years back in an absolutely bonkers production at the Donmar. Expect something less eccentric but powerfully poignant from the great director Ian Rickson, who turned in a fine Uncle Vanya on the cusp of the pandemic. This production will reunite him with Kristin Scott Thomas, who almost 20 years ago starred in his Royal Court production of The Seagull. She’ll play big hearted but finanically irresponsible aristocract Lyubov Ranevskaya, with Stephen Mangan co-starring as awkward nouveau riche interloper Lopakhin.

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...

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,...

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...

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.

New-York based artist Autumn Knight constructs installations and performances inspired by her background in theatre and psychology. In I Can’t Complain, her first major presentation in the UK, she explores the act of complaining and the ways in which it can be cathartic, frustrating and politically empowering. At the centre of the show is an audio installation that collates coversations about everyday irritations, exposing how minor things like food quality can be indicative of deeper inequalities. On select days (October 1,12 and 15), Knight will be in the space for solo performances that delve further into the concept of complaining, asking questions about who gets to complain? And how are those complaints received?     

You may not have realised, but at some point in your life you’ve probably encountered the work of Es Devlin. If you’ve been to an Adele concert, watched a Super Bowl half-time show, or tuned in to the 2012 Olympics closing ceremony, you will most likely have come face to face with creations by the British artist and stage designer.  To call Es Devlin impressive would be an understatement. The designer’s contact book is like a who’s who of the world’s biggest A-listers  – she’s conjured up ingenious staging for the Weeknd, Lorde, Beyoncé, Dua Lipa, the Pet Shop Boys and U2. Devlin has made otherworldly sets for some of the world’s most esteemed theatres and opera houses, from the National Theatre to Milan’s La Scala. She’s also the proud owner of three Olivier Awards, one Tony, three Emmys, one Ivor Novello, the London Design Medal… you get the picture.  With such an illustrious career, it’s no wonder the Design Museum has deemed Devlin worthy of a retrospective, staging her first European solo show as its big autumn opening. But how does all this awe-inspiring stage design come across when it’s not actually on a stage? We enter into a recreation of Devlin’s studio, with messy bookshelves and drawings strewn all over the place. In a video projection Devlin tells us her life story: she was named after a witch, whose name her parents found in a crossword puzzle; her great-grandfather was an architect; she studied literature at university and then her mind was awakened at art...

‘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,...

London’s art lovers go mad for a bit of French Impressionism, so it’s a little surprising that the capital hasn’t hosted an exhibition on one of its leading figures, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, since the National Gallery’s 2007 show on his landscapes nearly 20 years ago. And now, just weeks after France’s most recent high profile art heist targeted the Musée Renoir, the Trafalgar Square institution once again hosts a major exhibition dedicated to the divisive painter. Created in partnership with Paris’s Musée d’Orsay, Paris, and Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Renoir and Love will focus on the most significant and prolific years of the artist’s career, from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s. Opening in October 2026, it will feature several of Renoir’s most iconic works, including  the 1876 painting Bal au Moulin de la Galette, exhibited for the first time ever in the UK. 

Anyone who’s ever done a bit of DIY at home will know the struggle of picking the right shade of white paint. That lovely, warm, buttery hue you’ve eyed up in the brochure inevitably turns into the jarring white of a doctor’s surgery once it’s on your own walls. The American artist Robert Ryman knew a thing or two about this, devoting his nearly 60-year painting career to exploring how paint, surface and light can transform what we see.  Ryman wanted to ‘paint the paint’, you see. That is, he wasn’t interested in depicting people, places or things, but rather in how paint – more often than not white – behaved on different surfaces, catching and responding to real light rather than simply creating the illusion of it. A major retrospective at the Barbican, Robert Ryman... The Real Thing, brings together more than 60 works spanning his career, from his earliest experiments in the 1950s to his final paintings in the 2000s. Many might look deceptively similar at first glance, but it’s close up, with your nose inches away from the canvas, where things get interesting. A young Ryman discovered the great rewards of looking at paintings while working as a guard at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (a job also once held by British Museum director Nicholas Cullinan) . It was during those years that he made the first painting he would ever exhibit, which is on view here: ‘Gertrud Mellon’, named after the individual who bought it for $70 at the 1958 staff exhibition. Consisting 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.

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...