Things to do in London today

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...

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. 

Poly Styrene, Chrissy Hynde, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Debbie Harry; this autumn, as part of the city-wide Up Yours! Festival, the Museum of Youth Culture will celebrate the women behind the punk movement with a landmark exhibition. God Save The Queens is dedicated to the legacy of Poly Styrene, the visionary frontwoman of X-Ray Spex. It will bring together rare and previously unseen artwork, photography, fashion and personal archival material, with highlights including the Poly Styrene Archive, original artworks by radical feminist photographer Linder, previously unseen artwork from X-Ray Spex saxophonist Lora Logic, and archival fashion pieces from the inconic pink-haired designed Dame Zandra Rhodes. 

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.  

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.

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...

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...

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’. 

K-pop, K-beauty, the films of Bong Joon Ho; for the past few years, South Korea has been having a main character moment. The Korean Wave (or hallyu) has already been the subject of a major V&A exhibition in recent years, and is no doubt the inspiration for the British Museum’s new show all about the peninsula. Spanning 2,000 years, from the Bronze Age to the 2010s, Korea is the first major exhibition on Korea’s art and history at the British Museum in over 40 years. Mainly focusing on art and crafts, Korea documents the development of ideas from 300BC up to today. It begins with the golden age of Buddhism during the Goryeo Dynasty (918 – 1392 AD) and takes us right up to the present day, via the Neo-Confucian ideals of the Joseon period (1392 – 1910), and the Korean War in the 1950s. Of course, there are many stunning objects to be seen here, including more than a few treasures not usually seen outside of South Korea. Much of the display comes from the collection of Lee Kun-Hee, the late chairman of Samsung (also the exhibition’s corporate partner). Other bits are loaned from the National Museum of Korea and the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Korea.  The olden days stuff is classic British Museum fodder, with many a beautiful ceramic, chonky piece of jewellery and stunning silk painting on display. An enormous and intricate bronze temple bell from 900 AD bulges with carvings of dragons and plants. Orb-like moon jars are mesmeric in their simplicity, their...

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...

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...

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.

Ask any millennial how they feel about High School Musical, the world-conquering made-for-Disney Channel teen movie, celebrating its twentieth anniversary this year, and their reaction will likely be equal parts misty-eyed and horrified. Nonetheless, there’s clearly big business in nostalgia, as is made blatantly clear with the brand new High School Musical stage production running at the Troubadour Wembley Park Theatre this autumn. From the set recreation photo opps outside the venue to the stunt casting of a former teen heartthrob (McFly’s Harry Judd) and original supporting cast member (KayCee Stroh) in the adult roles, High School Musical (the musical) is being aimed squarely at millennials who as kids went there, did that, got the t-shirt – and the mug and the stickerbook and the CD and the novelisation of the script, in my case. Cynicism is a natural response, particularly when it comes to a musical best described as ‘Grease, but with Sandy learning to embrace her what makes her special rather than grabbing the nearest packet of cigarettes and skin-tight lycra trousers in an attempt to be accepted’. But as cheesy exercises in nostalgia bait go, the Manchester Hope Mill production of High School Musical is about as impressive as they come. It’s a mammoth undertaking, with an astonishing ensemble, slick choreography by Aaron Renfree, and impressive leads. You can’t watch and not be wowed. For that, the first credit must go to Andrew Exeter. After all, it's his vibrant...

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...

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.

Last summer I was at an arts festival in Poland and so was Tilda Swinton, performing a show of her own devising called Embodying Pasolini. Performance art rather than theatre, it was definitely interesting, and very much in keeping with a post-fame live career that has seen her eschew conventional stage acting: in the ‘90s she famously slept in a glass box for a week at the Serpentine gallery, a signature piece she revived a couple of decades later in New York. Which is very cool and very Tilda Swinton but also kind of a shame because Swinton by all accounts tore up the stage in her twenties before settling on film as her medium. You don’t begrudge Derek Jarman for luring her away to the world of arthouse celluloid. But it would be nice if she still did normal plays! What’s shocking about Man to Man, the wholesale rival of the Swinton-starring 1987 version of German playwright Manfred Karge’s monologue, is that it is a normal play. Maybe not a conventional one. But as the curtain lifts to reveal Swinton leering away at us in whiteface, house coat, Y-fronts and a shock of punky blonde hair – a sort of incongruously elegant hybrid of Johnny Rotten and Rab C Nesbitt – there’s something reassuringly actorly about the sarf London growl she adopts, so far from her own fluting tones. Obviously we’re all here to see Tilda Swinton the icon. But this isn’t one of her arch performance projects, it’s a proper play, in which she loses herself in a proper character. It’s a show that...

We all love a plot twist but New York theatremaker Andy Sandberg’s play Affluenza feels like a cautionary story about what happens when you twist too hard. Well actually maybe ‘plot twist’ isn’t right: it’s more that writer-director Sandberg is obsessed with the idea of bamboozling us, with each new scene in his play determinedly defying expectations and eliciting a bigger WTF than the last. This isn’t inherently a good thing. Especially if your expectation was that you were going to see Stranger Things star Noah Schnapp in the lead role of Dylan, an American teenager who kills two people in a drink driving incident and whose parents agree to the outlandish defence that he was simply too cocooned by privileged to understand the gravity of his actions. And to be fair Schnapp does play Dylan, who is based on real-life Texan teen Ethan Couch. But it’s a supporting role – in the first scene he wanders briefly through his parents’ posh living room while they talk to the very expensive New York lawyer they’ve flown out. Then there’s one set in his bedroom. And that’s kind of it for this version of Dylan. It’s odd: you have to think that having a not-too–big role may have been what tempted Schnapp into making his stage debut. But he’s perfectly good here and could clearly have handled more. Affluenza then abruptly leaps ahead to after the trial, where Dylan successfully escaped with a slap on the wrist. It certainly subverts our expectation of a courtroom drama with a juicy role...

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,...

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’. 

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...

2026 is, according to the Chinese zodiac, the Year of the Fire Horse. In 19th-century London, however, there were real-life fire horses galloping through the city, hauling fire engines and firefighters to burning buildings. Peckham Road Fire Station opened in 1867 to accommodate them, and is the earliest surviving purpose-built fire station in London. Since 2014, though, it has been South London Gallery’s second site (following a 73-year stint as a sausage factory), and for the next few months, it and the gallery’s main building across the road are home to a series of twisted architectural works by Polish artist Monika Sosnowska. The building’s past feels relevant to the exhibition: Sosnowska has made a career probing how architecture shapes us, outlives its purpose and bears witness to a changing city. The Weight of Matter, her first solo show at a London institution in more than 20 years, brings together 14 years of her work across the SLG’s two sites. Her fascination with cities in flux stems from her own experience. Coming of age as Poland’s communist regime collapsed in 1989, Sosnowska watched Warsaw transform as one political and economic order gave way to another. That upheaval became raw material for her sculpture. Steel, concrete, rebar, staircases, handrails and gates – the functional stuff of modernist architecture – are bent, buckled and twisted into strange new forms. In the old engine room, a contorted heap of black steel sprawls across the floor At the Fire...

Gagosian’s Grosvenor Hill gallery will be filled with apples, hats, pipes and clouds this autumn as it hosts a free exhibition on Belgian surrealist René Magritte. A first major London exhibition of Magritte’s subverside artwork in more than 30 years, it will feature works on paper, sculptures and photography from Magritte’s four-decade-long career, many of which have been loaned by museums and private collectors. These include ‘La Lampe Philosophique (The Philosopher’s Lamp)’, made shortly before the International Surrealist Exhibition that took place in London in 1936, and last displayed in a landmark Magritte exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) 20 years ago. Gagosian’s exhibtiion will also explore Magritte’s legacy via works created specifically for the exhibition by several contemporary artists, including painters Harold Ancart, Allison Katz and Dana Schutz. 

Right, this one is good. But it’s not easy. Then again, I don’t think any of Jenkin van Zyl’s films – or performances, or sculptures, for that matter – are meant to be. The worlds he creates aren’t easy to make sense of, and they’re not places you’d want to live in. They’re grotesque, chaotic, and filled with technologies, rituals and systems that seem to have taken on lives of their own.  His latest creation, Enclosure, has taken over a wing of Somerset House, and comprises of a film and narrative installation that spills out from the screen and into the surrounding rooms, filling them with the signage, photographs and general detritus of a fictional universe. In this world, people known as ‘Donors’ can have replicas of themselves made, called ‘Cherubs’, grown from a single tooth. Stay with me. These doubles were once the basis of a strange kind of tourism where visitors could temporarily inhabit somebody else’s life (‘a little holiday inside someone extraordinary’), as one of the facility’s workers (dressed in a pink milkmaid outfit) puts it. The installation's narrative focuses on Mercy, a former starlet who lent her likeness to the programme, and appears to have been something of a Cherub sensation. ‘Never before has a Cherub attracted such attention’ reads one peeling poster bearing five stars. But by the time Mercy returns to the facility, the good times are over. The place is decaying, the programme has become obsolete, and Mercy is there to terminate her contract –...

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...

Painters have been being dazzled by the glorious natural light and sparkling azure sea of the French Riviera for centuries. This autumn, you’ll be able to feel like you’re taking in the sea air on the Côte d’Azur from London, as the Royal Academy brings together artworks depicting the French southern coast from greats including Monet, Braque, Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Renoir and Klein. Spanning the Impressionists, Post-Impressionists and Modernists, Painting the French Riviera will not only transport you to the SAD-beating coastline, but explore how the riviera was inextricably linked to the rise of modern art.