Things to do in London today

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

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

Spending the first month of the year on the wagon? It’s a long old slog, but Lucky Saint is trying to make Dry Jan that little bit easier for anyone who wants to avoid alcohol this month without avoiding the pub. The booze-free bear brand has teamed up with pubs across London to give away hundreds of thousands of freshly-poured non-alcoholic pints. There are literally hundreds of great London boozers taking part too; find your nearest participating boozer, and sign up for your free drink here. You’ve got until mid-February to claim it, in case you decide to stick with the whole booze-free thing a little longer. Cheers!

Opening in time for Spooky Season and running through to May 2026, ‘Dark Secrets’ is a massive new exhibition of esoteric artefacts in Waterloo’s appropriately dingy Vaults – and a cracking day out for anyone into the occult, macabre or bizarre. A sprawling labyrinth of 27 rooms, ‘Dark Secrets’ is fundamentally an exhibition of stuff: more than 1,000 individual artefacts, many of them (apparently) displayed for the first time outside of private collections. Ritual masks, cursed dolls, leather-bound Renaissance books on witchcraft, a fragment of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema temple… if your idea of fun is gawping at weird and creepy shit (and mine certainly is), there’s a lot of it here – and it’s a refreshing change from the wave of immersive ‘exhibitions’ which often don’t amount to much more than a blank room with some projectors in. There is a vaguely chronological structure, running from Celtic druids through to the influence of the esoteric on Hollywood and comics. Horror-movie fans, look out for the original screenplay of Suspiria signed by Dario Argento. Along the way there are rooms dedicated to folkloric creatures, shamanism, voodoo, zombies, satanism, spiritualism, witch trials, Freemasonry, curses, miracles, divination, astrology, tarot… it’s like an occult bookshop brought to life. My favourite item in the show was an (ostensibly genuine) Victorian vampire-hunting kit. But I was also fascinated by a room about the collision of technology and science with the...

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

This King’s Cross Lightroom now has surely the weirdest repertoire of any venue in London, possibly the world. With an oeuvre based around massive megabit projection-based immersive films, its shows so far have been a David Hockney exhibition, a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the moon landings, a Vogue documentary and a visualiser for Coldplay’s upcoming album. It’s such a random collection of concepts that it’s hard to say there was or is anything ‘missing’ from the extremely esoteric selection of bases covered. But certainly, as the school summer holidays roll around it’s very welcome to see it add an overtly child-friendly show to its roster. Bar a short Coldplay break, Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs will play daily at Lightroom from now until at least the end of October half-term. It is, as you would imagine, a dinosaur documentary. And indeed, if the name rings a specific bell it’s because it’s culled from the David Attenborough-narrated Apple TV series of the same name. It’s quite the remix, though: Attenborough is out, and Damian Lewis is in, delivering a slightly melodramatic voiceover that lacks Sir David’s colossal gravitas but is, nonetheless, absolutely fine. Presumably Attenborough is absent because he’s very busy and very old, because while the film reuses several of the more spectacular setpieces from the TV series, it’s sufficiently different that repurposing the old narration would be a stretch. Any child with any degree of fondness for the...

The Natural History Museum is capable of turning in some pretty giddy exhibitions: notably, the recent-ish Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature revolved around a series of fictional magical animals invented by JK Rowling. Fair warning, though: the venerable museum’s first ever space-based exhibition is pretty sober stuff, that steadfastly refuses to sensationalise its subject. If you want to know what an alien invasion might look like or how realistic Star Wars is then there isn’t a lot for you in Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth? But if you’re interested in the actual question ‘is there life out there and how would we detect it?’ then this is the exhibition for you, made with the usual sophistication and care that defines the NHM’s temporary exhibits (which are always considerably less faded and more contemporary than its permanent collections). The entire exhibition is dimly lit, with soothing background music playing everywhere – the vibe is serene spaciousness, graceful emptiness and cosmic stillness. We begin on Earth, with the first galleries examining the extraterrestrial origins of life here. Nobody can exactly say how life on Earth first came to be, but there’s little doubt that its building blocks – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and water – were brought to us by asteroids, of which there are several bits here, some of which you can even touch. The carefully curated exhibition instils an appropriate amount of awe Correctly contextualised, it’s hard not...

This review is from 2023. Power Up prices have gone up slightly and the games are changed occasionally. There's been a gaping chasm, an unfillable abyss, in London's recreational heart ever since the Trocadero finally closed its doors in 2011. It has left the city crying out for an arcade experience, somewhere to go and lose yourself in gaming. And now, Power Up is here to answer all of your RPG prayers. Admittedly, it doesn't have a rocket-shaped escalator or countless dark corners for snogging, but what it does have is bank after bank of classic videogames.They've made an attempt at education with a wall of consoles from throughout history, from the Amiga to the Xbox, but you can ignore all that if you want and just concentrate on turning your eyes square. Everything here is grouped by theme. There's a Mario section and a Sonic section, a rhythm action game bit and a VR gaming bit, there's 16-player Halo and solo Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. There are PC games and handheld consoles, Gamecubes and Megadrives. Want to save Lemmings? Race Micromachines? Fight the Empire? It's all here.If it seems a bit familiar, it should be: Power Up isn't new. The Science Museum did a version of this for Easter half-term every year for a while, but this new version of Power Up is permanent and costs just £10 to access for unlimited, all-day gaming. But even better than that, you can get an annual pass for £15. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than having to invest in a new Playstation, plus you...

If you’ve ever seen people hunched over the banks of the River Thames at low tide, chances are they’re part of the city’s community of mudlarkers who comb the river foreshore, which is only accessible for a few hours a day when the tide draws out, hunting for ancient objects which have washed up after being lost in the waters for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years.  See over 350 mudlarked objects, from intimate personal items to historical relics in this exhibition which explores what the artefacts say about London and reflects on how the moon creates the tides that make mudlarking possible. Blending archaeology with contemporary art and digital experiences, expect fresh perspectives on London – past and present.

Like many a boomer child, Tom Hanks was smitten with the Apollo moon landings; but Tom Hanks being Tom Hanks, he never became unsmitten. The most beloved man in Hollywood has been nurturing a lunar side hustle for some time now: as well as starring in the film ‘Apollo 13’, he’s been involved in lower-key works, producing the HBO miniseries ‘From the Earth to the Moon’ and co-writing the IMAX film ‘Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D’. Staged in Kings Cross’s new, projection-based performance space Lightroom, ‘The Moonwalkers’ is essentially a documentary with bells on, a collaboration between Hanks and the venue, with a script co-written by the actor and Christopher Riley. It is, naturally, narrated by Hanks. Although it makes a point of looking forward to next year’s Artemis mission – the first manned flight to the moon since 1972 – ‘The Moonwalkers’ is a homage to both the Apollo landings and the wonder the Apollo landings instilled in the world.  Starting with JFK’s rousing ‘we choose to go to the Moon, not because it is easy, but because it is hard’ speech, it’s upbeat and America-centric, but well-judged. The main action and most spectacular visuals are projected on the room’s huge front wall, but the side walls cram in smaller details: the female mathematicians – many of them Black – who made the project possible are duly credited, which they certainly weren’t when I was young (or at the time of the landings,for that matter). There’s no contextualising...

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

This review is from 2022. My Neighbour Totoro is now running at the Gillian Lynne Theatre in the West End with a mostly new cast. Studio Ghibli’s 1988 cartoon masterpiece My Neighbour Totoro is a stunningly beautiful, devastatingly charming film, in which not a huge amount happens per se.  It follows two young sisters who move to the countryside with their dad and basically get up to a lot of extremely normal things… while also fleetingly encountering a succession of astounding otherworldly creatures, most notably Totoro, a gigantic furry woodland spirit, and the Cat Bus, a cat that is also a bus (or a bus that is also a cat, whatever). Its most iconic scene involves young heroines Mei and Satsuki waiting at a bus stop, and Totoro shuffling up behind them, chuckling at their umbrella (a new concept to him) and then hopping on his unearthly public transport. So if you’re going to adapt it for the stage you’re going to have to absolutely nail the puppets you use to portray Totoro and co.  The RSC absolutely understood the brief here, although you’ll have to take my word for it, as for this first ever stage adaption – by Tom Morton-Smith, overseen by legendary Ghibli composer Joe Hisaishi – the company hasn’t allowed a single publicity photo of a single puppet (bar some chickens) to be released.  Nonetheless, the puppets – designed by Basil Twist, assembled by Jim Henson's Creature Workshop – are fucking spectacular. They have to be fucking spectacular because that’s the...

This review is from 2024. What a long, strange trip it’s been. Indie-folk musician Anaïs Mitchell’s musical retelling of the Orpheus story began life in the mid-’00s as a lo-fi song cycle, which she gigged around New England before scraping the money together to record it as a critically acclaimed 2010 concept album that featured the likes of Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon and Ani DiFranco on guest vocals as the various mythological heroes and villains. Going through the next 14 years blow-by-blow would be time-consuming, but in short thanks to what I can only describe as THEATRE MAGIC, Hadestown is now a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It played the National Theatre in 2018, on its way to becoming the most unusual Broadway smash of the modern era. And it’s finally come back to us. Now in a normcore West End theatre, its otherness feels considerably more pronounced than it did at the NT. The howling voodoo brass that accompanies opener ‘Road to Hell’ is like nothing else in Theatreland. Mitchell”s original songs are still there but have mutated and outgrown the original folk palette thanks to the efforts of arrangers Michael Chorney and Todd Sickafoose. Rachel Hauck’s set – which barely changes – is a New Orleans-style saloon bar, with the cast all dressed like sexy Dustbowl pilgrims. It’s virtually sung through. It is essentially a staged concert, but it’s done with such pulsing musical...

This review is from Christmas 2023. Bluey’s Big Play returns for Christmas 2025. Where even superior stage adaptations of kids’ cartoons tend not to have much input from the original show creatives, this live adventure for fanatically beloved Australian hound Bluey is as authentic as it comes. ‘Bluey’s Big Play’ is written by the show’s creator Joe Brumm and the voices of its puppets are all-new pre-recordings of the screen cast.  It also feels like the involvement of Brumm has allowed the creative team to do things a little differently - it’s not that Rosemary Myers’s production isn’t crowd-pleasing, it’s just a little less reverential of the source material than these things tend to be.  So you don’t just get a bam-bam-bam compilation of cartoon episodes recreated on stage: there’s a very gentle but nonetheless original plot. It also opens with a couple of cheeky flourishes. The first is the long, wordless intro, in which the puppeteers – the show’s only human performers – ease us in with a segment in which a group of ibises (I believe Bluey and family refer to them as ‘bin chickens’ in the show) wordlessly prance around on Bluey’s street. It’s a pretty, meditative start that chimes with the source show’s weirder moments. That leads into the arrival of Bluey and the Heeler family, as they decide to have a game of musical statues – amusingly, it’s a sort of origin story for the cartoon’s intro sequence, which takes pleasure in wrong-footing the audience by jumbling up the...

A Catholic upbringing has left me both terrible at lying and capable of looking guilty about more or less anything. As such I was morbidly convinced that I would get the tap on the shoulder designating me a traitor in this live recreation (you could call it immersive theatre if you wanted) of the smash BBC game show. This proved to be entirely correct and long story short I lasted four rounds until I was rumbled (though it was a close thing and involved me being inexplicably betrayed by my fellow traitor). And speaking as somebody who has barely watched the show: I had a blast. If you can swallow the cost (a little under £50 in the evening, but cheaper by day) and go in prepared to be eliminated early then The Traitors Live Experience is extremely good fun. As much as anything, this adaptation from Immersive Everywhere is extremely well organised. Clearly you can’t make a note-perfect recreation of a show that involves 25 contestants staying at a remote Scottish castle for three weeks. But what they’ve done captures a sense of it very nicely. In this much shorter format, a large number of participants book in for a given time slot and are then divided into groups of around 12. Each is spirited away to their own round table, which comes complete with its own Claudia Winkleman-substitute host. Ours was a chipper young man who did a great job of geeing things along with help from a pre-recorded Winkleman (wisely she’s only used sparingly). It’s such a rock-solid conceit that...

It’s hard to know if the creative team behind this wildly misguided immersive theatre adaptation of Douglas Adams’s satirical sci-fi classic loves the source material too much or not at all.  On the one hand, its incorporation of elements of the less well-known book So Long and Thanks for all the Fish suggest a deeper familiarity with the novel series and a desire to not simply do a straight retelling of the OG Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which has been famously already done via radio, novel, video game, TV series, film and various cult theatre shows (albeit none of this very recently). On the other hand, it seems to have been made by people who don’t get Adams’ humour, characters or why people like the first book, and uses the romance plot from So Long… to create a far more saccharine story than Adams himself did. The writer and co-creator is one Arvind Ethan David, a former Adams protege. So I assume he’s a fan. But this play hardly makes a case for his mentor’s brilliance. It begins (mostly) harmlessly enough. The first scene is set in the pub which – in the Adams telling – hapless Englishman Arthur Dent is dragged to by his eccentric friend Ford Prefect, on a very specific mission to drink six pints of bitter ahead of ‘hitchhiking’ aboard a spaceship belonging to the Vogons, the incredibly tedious alien race about to blow Earth up to build a galactic bypass. This all gets a bit immersive theatre’d up. There are novelty cocktails. There is audience interaction. We...

This is the tenth anniversary of the Palladium panto, which is remarkable in a way as it kind of feels like London’s biggest festive show has been around forever. In part that’s because there is, to be blunt, relatively little annual variation: a core cast of middle aged men who’ve been there since the beginning do amusing turns byt way of back up to Julian Clary, who effortlessly walks off with the show by playing a series of flimsily disguised variants on himself (this year he plays a character called King Julian), with every utterance is a virtuosically smutty innuendo that blessedly sails over the heads of primary schoolers. There’s usually a big guest headline star from the world of light entertainment too: this year it’s Catherine Tate, who’ll be playing Carabosse the Wicked Fairy. Palladium panto lifers Paul Zerdin and Nigel Havers are back, as are more recent additions to the crew Rob Madge, Jon Culshaw and Amonik Melaco. Compared to the likes of Hackney or the Lyric Hammersmith, the Palladium Panto is much closer to a series of variety turns than a work of theatre with a plot. But that’s all to the good at the Palladium, and ten blockbuster years on they’re perfectly entitled to subscribe to the old adage of if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.

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

'My mummy says I'm a miracle,' lisps a pampered mini-me at a purgatorial kiddies' birthday party at the outset of this delicious, treacly-dark family show. The obnoxious ma and pa of its titular, gifted, pint-sized heroine are not, of course, quite so doting. But 'Matilda' must be making its creators, playwright Dennis Kelly and comedian-songsmith Tim Minchin, a very pair of proud parents. Opening to rave reviews in Stratford-upon Avon before transferring to the West End in 2011 and snatching up Olivier Awards with all the alacrity of a sticky-fingered child in a sweetshop, Matthew Warchus's RSC production remains a treat. With hindsight, Kelly and Minchin's musical, born of the 1988 novel by that master of the splendidly grotesque Roald Dahl, is a little too long and, dramatically, a tad wayward. But like the curly-haired little girl in the famous nursery rhyme, when it is good, it is very, very good. And it's even better when it's horrid. The past few months have seen some cast changes, including, alas, the departure of Bertie Carvel's tremendous Miss Trunchbull, headmistress of the dread Crunchem Hall School, former Olympic hammer-thrower and a gorgon of monumental nastiness, complete with scarily Thatcher-esque tics of purse-lipped gentility and faux concern. David Leonard doesn't quite match the squirm-inducing, hair-raising detail of Carvel in the role, but his more butch, granite-faced version is fantastically horrible nonetheless. And if Paul Kaye as Matilda's...

Show writer Kate Trefry explains all you need to know about ‘The First Shadow’. ‘Stranger Things: The First Shadow’ is a sprawling maximalist monolith, a gargantuan entertainment that goes beyond being a mere ‘play’. It’s too unwieldy and too indulgent to be a theatrical classic. But nonetheless, this prequel to the Netflix retro horror smash is the very antithesis of a cynical screen-to-stage adaptation.  As overwhelming in scale as as the show’s monstrous Mindflayer, it’s a seethingly ambitious three-hour extravaganza of groundbreaking special effects, gratuitous easter eggs and a wild, irreverent theatricality that feels totally in love with the source material while being appreciably distinct from it.  It’s clearly made by a fan, that being big-name director Stephen Daldry, who used his Netflix connections (he’s the man responsible for ‘The Crown’) to leverage an official collab with the Duffer Brothers, creators of the retro horror smash.  It starts as it means to go on, with pretty much the most technically audacious opening ten minutes of a show I’ve ever seen, as we watch a US naval vessel deploy an experimental cloaking device in 1943, to catastrophic effect. Yes, the sets wobble a bit, and yes, writer Kate Trefry’s dialogue is basically just some sailors bellowing cliches. But we’re talking about watching a giant vessel getting pulled into a horrifying parallel dimension on stage. It is awesome; and when it cut into a thunderous playback of Kyle Dixon and Michael...

Once again you can expect to see remarkable feats of astrophotography at the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition. It’s a chance to see magical views of both our own night sky and of galaxies far, far away. The winning spacey visions come from dozens of professional and amateur snappers in various categories including ‘Planets, Comets and Asteroids’, ‘Stars and Nebulae’, ‘Galaxies’ and ‘Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year’ for under-16s. Soar down to Greenwich to see the winners from 2025's competition on display. 

London’s cultural institutions are having a love affair with the New Romantics this year. First there was Outlaws, the Fashion and Textile Museum’s exhibition on the subversive fashion trends of 1980s London. Then the Tate Modern announced a major retrospective on pioneering fashion maverick Leigh Bowery. Now it’s the Design Museum’s turn to direct its attention towards the most flamboyant subculture of its era, via this exhibition on the Blitz club, the iconic (and we really don’t use that word lightly) Covent Garden nightclub where New Romanticism was born in 1979. Forty years after it closed, the trailblazing club’s atmosphere will be recreated through a ‘sensory extravaganza’ incorporating music, film, art, graphic design and some very ostentatious outfits. This will include several items that have never been on public display before, while some of the scene’s key figures have been involved in the development of the exhibition. Time to liberally apply the kohl eyeliner, fish out your frilliest shirt and whack on some Spandau Ballet: the 80s are back, baby!

Hot on the heels of September’s merry-go-round of Fashion Weeks, the National Portrait Gallery’s latest opening is another moment to reflect on what fashion and beauty mean to us today. A second outing in five years for the trailblazing 20th century photographer, Cecil Beaton’s Fashionable World unfolds like a billowing ballgown; opulent and eye-catching, but it can’t help tripping over its long hem. The glittering charm, however, forgives its clumsiness.  Beaton’s previous outing at NPG in 2020 was cut short after only five days because of the pandemic. Rather than reviving Cecil Beaton’s Bright Young Things, this revamped exhibition presents him as more than just a photographer. Younger audiences are likely to find this show more relatable, through its emphasis on his contributions to costume and set design, given their ascendant roles in contemporary fashion. From curious beginnings to his rise through the cultural upper-class, his war photography and costume designs for My Fair Lady, we get a good look at how places and periods influenced Beaton’s style.  If anything, this show is about how big Beaton’s prop and costume chest is. Elaborately grandiose outfits screaming over intricate backgrounds made his early shots look like stills from the kind of plays Aristophanes would’ve put on during his day. Flirting with the avant-garde in Paris, Beaton’s staging and costumes turn weird and uncanny. Even during the war there’s a bold expressionism to his framing that only...

Video games are the medium for Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. The young artist uses them to ‘imaginatively archive and empower Black Trans stories’ - this isn’t just point-and-shoot, slack-jawed gaming for the sake of it, this is one of contemporary society’s most important cultural forms being used to give voice to marginalised identities. 

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

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

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

Pictorialism îs known as the first international art photography movement and this exhibition will take curious minds inside the scene, exploring how it developed around the world between the 1880s and 1960s.

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

Kerry James Marshall is an artist with a singular vision. He has become arguably the most important living American painter over the past few decades, with an ultra-distinctive body of work that celebrates the Black figure in an otherwise very ‘Western’ painting tradition. This big, ambitious show will be a joyful celebration of his lush, colourful approach to painting.