Things to do in London today

What is Bubble Planet? Having opened at the tail end of 2023, Bubble Planet is another manifestation of the popular phenomenon that I’m calling Instagrammable immersive family experiences. This one is a particularly close kin to the now defunct Balloon Museum. Where is Bubble Planet? Located in the increasingly culturally vibrant Wembley Park, I’m about 75 percent certain it’s in the same building the last Secret Cinema show was in, just a few minutes walk from the station. What happens at Bubble Planet? The theme is nominally bubbles, though this is interpreted extremely freely, from a balloon room and a ball pool, to a computer generated ocean and a VR experience, both of which do technically feature bubbles. There is a lot of descriptive text on the wall, but it’s mostly waffle rather than anything you need to pay attention to. Is it any good? God help me, I have been to a lot of these things with my children and maybe I’m developing Stockholm Syndrome but I’d say Bubble Planet is the best example in London of This Sort Of Thing: I have literally seen some of these rooms (or something very close to them) before, but not in a combination that so conspicuously maximises the fun. Unburdened by the weird artistic pretensions of the Balloon Museum or the penchant for padding out the attraction with rubbishy little rooms where not much happens a la most of the other experiences, Bubble Planet all killer no filler, if by ‘killer’ you mean ‘room full of giant balloons that keep bu

FEATURE: Why has the world gone crazy for Paddington Bear again? Though you can buy all of Michael Bond’s books in the gift shop, let’s be clear here: the Paddington Bear Experience has very little to do with the first 50 or so years of the marmalade-loving ursine’s existence. Rather, the lavish new central London immersive experience makes no bones about fact it’s a live extension of the world of the two (soon to be three) StudioCanal movies. Theoretically I suppose that’s a shame. Debuting in print in 1958, Paddington has a rich history and London’s first proper attraction dedicated to him doesn’t explore it at all. But who are we kidding here? The Paul King films are modern masterpieces, and Paddington would be left as a beloved but past-his-prime nostalgia character if it weren’t for them. He’d have his little statue at the station. But nothing like this. You don’t absolutely need to have seen the films, but there are countless callbacks to them in this gentle adventure, which essentially an immersive theatre show. As we begin by waiting at a small recreation of Paddington Station to board our train to Windsor Gardens, we’re serenaded by a pre-recorded version of the band from the films playing ‘London is the Place for Me’; when we make it to Windsor Gardens for this year’s Marmalade Day Festival, designer Rebecca Brower has faithfully recreated the entire downstairs of the Brown’s boho Notting Hill pad. And then of course there’s Paddington himself - constantly teased as

What were you like as a teenager? Did you often find yourself crippled with social anxiety, blasting My Chemical Romance at full volume in your bedroom, back combing a side fringe to frightening new heights? Well, you were not alone. Championing what was arguably the last proper music-meets-fashion subculture, ‘I'm Not Okay’ is an audience-created love letter to all things emo, created in partnership with the Museum of Youth Culture via an open call to the internet for submissions.  If you were there, you’ll remember downloading the latest, pirated The Used album onto your iPod Classic, and using up all the storage on your Motorola Sidekick taking blurry gig shots and snapping your friends rocking smudged eyeliner and bright red, orange or black hair, all of which is documented on the walls of the Barbican’s Music Library.  The exhibition's main draw is a collection of photographs and video footage dredged up from forgotten MySpace and Bebo pages. There’s even a screen showing footage of people’s bedrooms, as they talk you through their Kerrang! poster collections and piles of dusty CDs, local gigs and snaps of friends messing around. It captures the community spirit that was an inherent part of the subculture Though the stereotype of an emo is a loner, the exhibition does well to capture the community spirit that was an inherent part of the subculture. Screenshots of MSN chats and MySpace profiles illustrate how these early social media platforms allowed people to make frie

Alvaro Barrington is letting you in. He’s opening his arms, opening the doors to his childhood home, opening the windows into his memories.  To walk into the London-based artist’s Duveen commission is to walk into the Grenadian shack he grew up in. The sound of rain hammering on the tin roof echoes around the space as you sit on plastic-covered benches; you’re safe here, protected, just like Barrington felt as a kid with his grandmother. You’re brought into her home, her embrace. In the central gallery, a vast silver dancer is draped in fabrics on an enormous steel pan drum. This is Carnival, this is the Afro-Carribean diaspora at its freest, letting loose, dancing, expressing its soul, communing. You’re brought into the frenzy, the dance, the community. But the fun soon stops. The final space houses a dilapidated shop, built to the dimensions of an American prison cell, surrounded by chain link fencing. Its shutters creak open and slam shut automatically. This is a violent shock, a testimony to the dangers facing Black lives in the West: the police, the prison system, the barely concealed injustice.  After all the music and refuge of the rest of the installation, here, it’s like Barrington’s saying: ‘You want this? You want the carnival, the music, the culture? Then acknowledge the pain, the fear, the mistreatment, the subjugation too.’ I don’t think the paintings here are great, but painting’s not Barrington’s strong suit. He excels when he’s collaborating, sampling, sharin

Artists spent centuries making art about light – the divine rays of the Renaissance, the shimmering seascapes of Turner, the foggy hazes of the Impressionists – but it wasn’t until the 1970s that anyone really thought to make art with light. British artist Anthony McCall was one of the first, creating pioneering films that used projectors to trace shapes in the air, somehow seeming to turn nothingness solid. It was a trick that the world wasn’t ready for. His immersive, smoke-filled environments, shown in New York lofts, were met with relative indifference, so he left art behind for decades. But the world caught up, and a ubiquitous trend for immersive art in recent years has seen his work reappraised. Now he’s at Tate Modern, taking over the galleries that until recently were home to the blockbuster Yayoi Kusama ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’. It’s a tough immersive act to follow. Kusama’s work is big, glitzy, selfie-friendly, but McCall’s isn’t. And in the wider context of London and its epidemic of heinous Klimt and Dali light shows, or even the good stuff like you see at places like 180 The Strand, can McCall’s simple, geometric films keep pace? It feels physical, like the light is hitting you slap bang in the face. After a room of sketches and an early film showing men in white overalls lighting fires at dusk, you’re plunged into darkness. The four light works here are quiet, ultra-meditative things, nothing more than shafts of white in a pitch black room. In the earliest work,

Everyone’s got an opinion of Barbie. Whether you adored playing with her growing up, loathed her for her wildly unrealistic body measurements, or came to appreciate her for her cultural impact, there’s no denying the 11.5inch leggy blonde is one of the most famous toys – if not women – on the planet. Now one year after Barbie-mania had London in a chokehold, Barbara Millicent Roberts has once again tottered back into the capital’s collective conscience, this time via a Design Museum exhibition celebrating 65 years of the iconic doll.  The clothes, the handbags, the mansion, the seemingly perfect boyfriend. Barbie has it all. And so does this exhibition. It provides an extensive look into how the toy was designed, how she has evolved over the years, and how she has influenced fashion, design and wider culture. Created in partnership with Mattel, Barbie’s parent company, the show looks at the toy not just as a kicky blonde doll, but as a brand, and from a design angle it can be considered a real success.  In a dark room filled with rainbow-coloured windows we are taken on an odyssey of all of Barbie’s different head and body shapes. I died a little inside learning about the 1968 Stacey, Barbie’s British friend who had stubby eyelashes, a pasty complexion and a funny shaped head who, in a cruel joke, is lined up next to the bronzed original Malibu Barbie.  In a section dedicated entirely to Barbie pink, we discover that Barb wasn’t always obsessed with the colour, and that it wa

While its permanent collections are showing their age now – that age being approximately 163 years – the Natural History Museum’s temporary exhibits are a world apart. Modern, witty, spacious and hi-tech: they’re a window into what might be if the NHM was refounded in the twenty-first century. ‘Birds: Brilliant & Bizarre’ doesn’t have an especially incisive story to tell beyond ‘birds are great!’ (It would be weird if it was ‘birds are terrible!’) but it is is, nonetheless, a beautifully put together journey through the story of our avian pals that mixes slick techy stuff with a thoughtful delve into the museum’s vast taxidermy vaults (if your archive includes an entire family of stuffed hummingbirds – including the nesting babies – you might as well give it a public airing occasionally). One great thing for younger audiences is that our feathered friends are an offshoot of dinosaurs - hence licence for the first quarter or so of ‘Birds’ to concern itself with their prehistoric ancestors, with particular attention paid to dino-bird crossover creature archaeopteryx. After that it’s an entertaining grab bag, a nicely laid out mix of… bird stuff, with a striking early piece being the gigantic stuffed albatross suspended from the ceiling with its gigantic fluffy chick under it. We’re told the mother was killed by a fishing trawler, which sets up the eco undertones of the rest of the exhibit. It’s not just about wacky bird facts, but the sense that these creatures’ lives are in ou

Money can buy a lot of things, but it can’t buy taste. Luckily, Sir Elton John would probably know his art from his elbow even if he hadn’t become one of the world’s biggest, richest megastars. For decades now, he has been building a world class collection of photography with his partner David Furnish. It’s been shown all over the world, even at the Tate in 2017, and now it’s the V&A’s turn.  The exhibition is absolutely rammed full of iconic images by some of the most important names in photography: Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Juergen Teller, William Egglestone and on and on. Like you’d expect from a megastar, it’s pretty dazzling. The show is grouped into big overarching themes: fashion, reportage, desire, etc. The fashion bit runs the gamut from experimental Harry Callahan cut-outs to stark Irving Penn minimalist luxury via debauched guy Bourdin naughtiness and a beautifully tasteless portrait of Sir Elton’s bejewelled hands by Mario Testino. Style, glamour, cheekbones, cocaine; that’s fashion for ya.  Things get a little grittier in the celebrity section. There are famous images of Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles,Frank Sinatra, and three incredible photos of Miles Davis’s hands by Irving Penn. But this is where the cracks start to appear. Images of tragic figures are everywhere; Marilyn Monroe forlorn and lost, Chet Baker broken by drug abuse, James Dean beautiful and young, but not for long. Celebrity is a curse, a dangerous burden that can crush you just as readily as

No object is just an object: everything is a symbol. And in Guyanese-British artist Hew Locke’s excellent exhibition of items from the British Museum’s endless archives and stores, every object is a symbol of power, dominance and exploitation. Locke (who recently filled Tate Britain’s Duveen Galleries with a kaleidoscopic carnival) spent two years digging through the stores, finding maps, photos, sculptures and artefacts that tell countless clashing stories of empire, countless narrative threads. There’s the beautiful Queen Mother Idia mask that Locke uses to symbolise African culture, a golden replica of a British machine gun used to slaughter opposing armies, sculptures of sacred beings carved by Amerindian natives of Jamaica. Locke’s own masked figures sit above all the display cabinets, watching, protecting, judging and celebrating the death of empire. But the show isn’t a straightforward narrative. It’s complex. There’s a huge Medieval English ewer jug that was prized by the Asante court but looted back to Britain in 1895, there’s a canon traded to the Benin army by the Portuguese and then stolen 350 years later by the British, there’s a vast portrait of Queen Victoria wearing the enormous koh-i-noor diamond, which was stolen from the Sikhs in 1849, who in turn stole it from the Durrani Empire, who stole it from the Afsharid dynasty, who stole it from the Mughals. Power is not linear, and it’s not eternal, but its symbols survive. There’s so much shocking, harrowing dea

Letizia Battaglia was a witness, she was there.  She saw the mafia tearing Italy apart in the 1970s, murdering its sons, raping its daughters, and she documented all of it with her camera. She started out as a late-budding journalist, an apprentice in her mid-30s for Palermo’s daily newspaper l’Ora. Camera in hand, she captured the bloody reality of life under the oppressive rule of the mafia. There are images in the opening room of parties, dances, kids, lovers. But they’re overpowered by the endless photos of death on display. Battaglia was first on the scene after judges were assassinated, politicians killed, henchmen murdered. There are bodies under sheets, abandoned in alleys, lying lifeless in cars; the blood staining the street is as normal as the rubbish that litters it. There’s no Godfather-esque glamourisation of mafia life here, just the mundane, basic, ordinary reality of everyday murder. Look at the photo of the little girl standing in sunlight, a huge terrifying man lurking in the darkness near her: that’s what this is about, life in the constant shadow of crime and violence. Life in the constant shadow of crime and violence It’s a violence that Battaglia was made personally aware of. A framed letter from the mafia threatens her life, because she’s ‘broken our balls too much’.  Eventually, Battaglia had enough of holding the mafia to account, of trying to expose injustice. Her final mafia picture is a solemn, quiet portrait of a widow mourning the murder of her