Chris Waywell

Boxing Day isn’t just a day for lounging around in your comfiest trousers, catching up on festive TV specials and nursing a mild hangover with the help of a mountain of leftovers.  But with London largely free of its usual crowds and loads of fun stuff still on, the city is yours for the taking if you do manage to get out and about on December 26. From bracing winter walks, to trips into town to admire the Christmas lights while you shop the Boxing Day sales, to ice skating or a night out at the panto, here are some great ideas for how to spend your day off.  RECOMMENDED: Find more festive fun with our full guide to Christmas in London.

    London’s skyline might be packed with gleaming, towering buildings these days, but they’re not the only structures that are worth gazing upon in the city. There are plenty of other architectural delights ready to be your new construction crush, from humble, historical buildings to more modern designs. We asked a group of experts to tell us about the London architecture that means the most to them, and some of their picks might surprise you. Our top 50 list features everything from the Jewel Tower – one of the last remaining parts of Westminster’s medieval palace – to an NCP car park. What all of these selections have in common, though, is they all tell the stories of the capital’s history. Peruse the list below and then get out into the city and feast your eyes on some beautiful buildings. With thanks to: Sadiq Khan, Monica Ali, Camille Walala, Anna Eavis, Lucy Inglis, Olivia Laing, Zoe Timmers, Allan Hinton, Tamsie Thomson, Jane Duncan, Architects for Social Housing and Professor Alan Penn

Like many other great things in London, classic cockney pie and mash was created among working-class and immigrant communities – many of them Italian. From the nineteenth century to the 1990s, London had a pie ’n’ mash shop on almost every high street. Now, these tiled beauties are an endangered species. Often small family-run businesses, some have been open for a century or more continuously, and the survivors are hubs for local communities. But they have struggled as London’s menu has diversified into the street food of six continents. If you’re into Instagramming your smashed avocado, take note: along with Sunday roasts, fish ’n’ chips and full-english fry-ups, this city was built on pies, mash, eels and liquor. Why not tuck into the OG food of London? RECOMMENDED: London's best greasy spoon cafes.

The information on this page was correct at the time of publication, but please check with venues before you head out Don’t just spend Christmas Eve doing last-minute shopping, prepping veg or sitting glumly in the pub. Make the most of every minute of this year’s festive season and have a Christmas Eve to remember, by taking in some of London’s most Christmassy things to do before everything shuts down for Christmas Day. From twinkling lights to the city’s loveliest Christmas trees to make you feel all warm and anticipatory, take a look at our top picks for things to do on December 24 2024.  RECOMMENDED: 🎅Read our full guide to Christmas in London.🎄Check out the best hotels in London for unforgettable Christmas stays.

Tis the season where your bank balance is about to get tested and your cards are going to be working overtime. Christmas, with all its stockings to be filled and loved ones to be spoiled, means shopping and you’ll find tons of shops across London ready to help you satisfy the needs of the most important people in your life. You could cross off your entire list in one mad dash through a department store, or by avoiding the crowds and filling your online basket to the brim. But there’s something more fulfilling about weaving a path across the city and supporting businesses big and small, all while festive light displays twinkle overhead, pop-ups spring to life on every corner and the capital thrives with events. It can be daunting to know where to start when it comes to Crimbo, though, which can make you leave things to the last minute. To help, we’ve put together a list of brilliant Christmas shops where you can find gifts of all shapes, sizes and price tags. Ready, set, shop! RECOMMENDED: Read our complete guide to Christmas in London.

  Party songs come in all shapes and sizes, but to be a party song, there are some rules: they have to be bangers, and whatever era or genre they’re from, they have to make you want to dance.  So of course, party songs is a wide genre, spanning funk and soul, 90s RnB and taking us all the way through to 2024’s latest chart-toppers. But every single one of the tunes you’ll find on this list will get your party attendees on their feet, guaranteed. Ready to party? You’re in the right place. Here are the best party songs ever made. RECOMMENDED:🎤 The best karaoke songs🍻 The best drinking songs🎶 The best ’80s songs🕺 The best pop songs

You can’t talk about the best songs of all time without talking about the Beatles. In fact, they’ll likely come up again and again and again. We know them for screaming girls, shaggy hair and psychedelia, but we mostly know them for making bangers. Lots of them.  So, choosing the best from the fab four is no easy feat. But not all Beatles tunes are created equal, and it’s worth cutting out the duds to experience them at their very best. We’ve polled the biggest Beatlemaniacs on our team to bring you this ultimate list, from the gruffer Hamburg days to their Ravi Shankar era. If your favourite isn’t on there, fight us. Here are our top Beatles songs ever recorded.  RECOMMENDED:❤️ The best love songs🎸 The best rock songs🎶 The best cover songs🎤 The best karaoke songs

If you’re as nosy as we are, you probably spend weeks looking forward to September’s annual Open House festival, which gives curious Londoners the chance to pull out their best Loyd Grossman impression and go through the keyholes (and doors) of some of the capital’s biggest, most renowned and most secretive addresses for free. As always, a whole load of top-grade real estate across nearly every London borough is open for snooping during the festival, which continues this week. Here is everything you need to know about Open House London, 2024.  What is Open House London? A huge festival dedicated to making the capital’s architectural spaces accessible to all. It allows entry to private homes, government buildings and historic sites that are normally closed to the public and just waiting to be explored. Some of the buildings offer free tours, others are simply open to walk-in visitors. It’s the largest event of its kind in the world and features walks, talks and tours as well as the chance to nose around intriguing London places you’d never usually get to enter. When is Open House London? The 2024 edition started on Saturday, and runs until this coming Saturday September 22. Where is Open House London?  Hundreds of buildings across all of London’s boroughs, plus the City of London, will be taking part. It’s a vast sprawl, so you’ll need to dedicate some time to planning what you’d like to see. If you want to visit multiple locations, check the Open House website in advance fo

London is a stunner whatever the season, but especially in autumn when the city’s streets are lined with burnt oranges and russet reds. It’s such a beautiful sight, in fact, you won’t even mind that the summer heat is becoming a distant memory – that just means more early evening sunsets to marvel at and more excuses to hole up in a cosy pub. What better way to make the most of this crisp time of year than by getting out and exploring London’s crunchy, leaf-strewn parks? Pack a picnic (and some warm clothes), collect conkers and soak in the surroundings of these lush London parks for a pretty autumn walk – or the starting point for a perfect autumnal day out. RECOMMENDED: London’s major parks.

There are a lot of museums in London. Of course, there are world-famous names like the British Museum and Natural History Museum. There are local gems like the brilliant Horniman Museum in south London. But then… Then there are many, many tiny niche or sometimes downright plain peculiar museums in every corner of the city, with collections of everything from fans (the ‘Bridgerton’ kind not, like, desk fans) to anatomical specimens looming out of glass jars.   So get stuck into our guide to the best weird museums in London and prepare to get some freak in your cultural collection.

Shops are for squares. If you want to pick up something really unique, make a beeline for one of London’s plethora of markets. You can go to Borough Market for food and Columbia Road for flowers; but where do you go when you’re looking for something you didn’t even realise you wanted? To the humble flea market, of course! There’s no greater joy than rummaging through piles of dusty treasures at the very best junk and antiques markets in London. Whether you’re looking for antique furniture, shiny silverware, or vintage accessories – or you just enjoy having a good old rifle through other people’s cast-off tat – here’s our pick of London’s best flea markets and secondhand fairs to spend your weekends wandering around. Time to get your barter on (respectfully).  RECOMMENDED: The best markets in London.

In the capital, there are heaps of charities supporting vulnerable Londoners, and although they need extra hands all year round to support the brilliant work they do, they’re always looking for more volunteers over the winter months. This year, with the cost-of-living crisis biting hard, the most many people need support more than ever, so if you’d like to do some good and volunteer this Christmas, get in touch with one of these organisations doing great things. Recommended: best charity shops in London

Armies are expensive and so are museums devoted to them. Chelsea’s National Army Museum (next to the Royal Hospital) has just reopened after a three-year, £24 million redesign. A huge atrium has been carved out of the middle of the building, and the whole place is much lighter and less gloomy than before. It’s not just a structural redevelopment, though. The new museum reflects the fact that the history and perception of the British Army is always evolving, shifting and being re-understood. As a graph on display reveals, there are fewer people serving in the regular army today than at any time in the last 200 years, yet its media and public profile has maybe never been higher or more discussed. To reflect this, the museum has five new galleries representing different aspects of the boys in green (is that a thing? Maybe not): Soldier, Army, Battle, Society and Insight, plus a brand new Play Base for the under-eights to do a bit of junior square-bashing or whatever. There are now 2,500 objects on display, two-thirds for the first time.  Younger audience will thrill to the hugely popular Field Base, an immersive play session for kids – some might call it a military soft play – that booking is well advised for.

This review of ‘A Sherlock Carol’ is from November 2022. ‘A Sherlock Carol’ returns for 2024. Why the hell are there so many productions of ‘A Christmas Carol’ in London? There’s a moment in this misbegotten attempt to cut and shut Sherlock Holmes and ‘A Christmas Carol’ that has stayed with me, through the journey home and the long marches of the night. ‘What’s the matter?’ asks the sister – played by a white actor – of her brother, – played by a Black actor – ‘you look pale.’ Titters from (some of) the audience. I don’t know what I’m not getting here, but this doesn’t feel like some super-sophisticated piece of meta-woke prejudice-baiting. It just feels like old-fashioned 1970s-TV ‘comedy’. This is an extreme example of the tone-deafness of off-Broadway import ‘A Sherlock Carol’, but there’s no shortage of others. Briefly, Holmes – troubled by the spectre of his nemesis Moriarty – is called upon to investigate the death of the wealthy Londoner Ebenezer Scrooge. In exorcising his own demons, he solves the case. It’s not that bad an idea. You could – squinting – see Conan Doyle as a popular-fiction heir to Dickens, with characters and phrases that have entered our collective culture. But you get the feeling that writer/director Mark Shanahan really likes Sherlock Holmes and maybe isn’t that into Dickens. Most of ‘A Sherlock Carol’ is just a Holmes story made from parts of other ones. The Dickens-y bits are generic festiveness and some ghosts, and there aren’t really enough o

This review is from 2022. ‘A Christmas Carol-ish’ transfers to the West End in 2024, with Martha Howe-Douglas replacing Sarah Hadland. Among a welter of sometimes hamfisted, sometimes magical, adaptations of Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ in London this year (currently 11 and counting), the one at Soho Theatre is a real breath of fresh wintry air. Cos it’s not really an adaptation of ‘A Christmas Carol’. On the pretext of the Dickens Estate not granting him the rights to the story, self-styled ‘Yorkshire Pudding’ Mr Swallow (comedian Nick Mohammed as seen in ‘Ted Lasso’) is forced to replace Scrooge with Santa, Jacob Marley with an elf and everyone else, including Rudolph Hess the reindeer, with paid-by-the line sidekick Jonathan. There are constant interruptions from P&O Ferries singer Rochelle (Sarah Hadland), who’s waiting for a call from Lloyd Webber, some mountaineering, and the birth of Jesus interrupted by a song about a woman in a relationship with a 25-stone turkey. If this all sounds a bit ‘adult panto’, fret ye not. There are no references to chemsex or Matt Hancock. You can take the bigger kids along, no problem. It’s more a deconstruction of the seasonal ritual of the stage version of ‘A Christmas Carol’. Mohammed goes full Count Arthur Strong with his Scrooge – ‘But fateful schpiiiiirrrrriiiitttt’. When the ghost of Elf Marley warns him ‘You will be haunted by three spirits’, Scrooge/Santa asks, ‘Can I just check: does that include you?’ Tiny Tim is dispensed wit

Note: This is a review of Stewart Lee: ‘Basic Lee’ from 2022 As a reviewer of Stewart Lee’s new show, I was repeatedly told how to review it, and got called a ‘cunt’ for my pains (not personally). So here’s my review. First half: four stars, plenty of jokes. Second half: three stars, not enough jokes. Benefit of the doubt: four stars. There you go. ‘Basic Lee’ is ostensibly about the craft of stand-up comedy, what Lee calls this ‘ritualised ancient folly’. To be honest, his comedy has always been about this, so it’s business as usual only a bit more so. He deconstructs the scansion of the joke. ‘It goes: uh uh uh uh uh, uh uh-uh uh.’ He explains what he needs from his audience in terms of preparation: ‘If you don’t know anything, don’t come and see me.’ And he lets us supply our own punchline to a very good gag about JK Rowling based on what we’ve learned. As Lee himself says, this is a difficult time to be a stand-up: there’s too much material. He still manages to get in stuff about having an erotic response to the Queen’s funeral and Prince Andrew ‘using the Paddington Bears as bait’, plus a load of brilliance about the current Tory cabinet that he reads off cards because ‘there’s no point learning it’. He’s still the classic English vorticist curmudgeon: a boot-putting-in on what he relentlessly calls ‘The Fleabag’ is very very good. If Lee has a problem these days, it’s not that there’s too much happening in the world, it’s that he knows that his devoted audience can anti

This review is from 2021. ‘A Christmas Carol: A Ghost Story’ returns in 2023 with a new cast headed by Keith Allen as Scrooge and Peter Forbes as Marley. There are currently (at least) four stage versions of Dickens’s ‘A Christmas Carol’ being performed in London (not including screenings of the superlative Muppet one). The two biggest are the now-landmark production at the Old Vic, this year featuring Stephen Mangan. And then there’s this adaptation by Mark Gatiss (you know, ‘Sherlock’ etc), which premiered at Nottingham Playhouse, before heading south. And it’s good. Alexandra Palace’s ruin-lust theatre is the perfect raddled backdrop – its faded Victorian glories and pockmarked plaster chime atmospherically with the set of perilously towering wooden filing cabinets, a kind of Monument Valley to Ebenezer Scrooge’s dry record-keeping.  Paraphrasing the book’s original name (‘A Christmas Carol. In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas’), Gatiss sets out his stall explicitly: this is a production that harps on the ghostly nature of the story as much as the ‘God bless us, every one’ crimbo cheer. There are genuine chills as Marley’s ghost (Gatiss himself) materialises in the corner of Scrooge’s bedchamber, before the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come do their thang. ‘His Dark Materials’-style ghouls flit among the audience, and the Spirit of CYTC is a really horrifying shrouded figure, grimly pointing Scrooge to his own corpse, burial and gravestone.   Nichol

‘Overly reliant on knob gags’ is not a criticism that fans of avant-garde comedian Kim Noble might expect to be levelled at one of his shows. But during ‘Lullaby for Scavengers’ we get to see Noble’s special bits on the big screen at the back of the stage more often than anyone might want: tied to a string, the other end of which is tied to a chicken carcass; attached to a hoover; having a live maggot inserted into the urethral opening. After a while, you start to miss it when it’s not popping up. Noble lives to shock: visually, ethically, legally. But the best parts of the hour-and-something of ‘Lullaby for Scavengers’ are when he unclenches and lets the questions raised by all the carefully induced ick have some breathing space. There’s a fantastically orchestrated segment where he gets a job as an office cleaner and secretly films himself. His attempts to engage with the staff are met with barely veiled hostility. They don’t know that Noble is sleeping under their desks at night and wandering around the workplace naked after hours. I won’t spoil the dénouement, but it’s quite something. And, crucially, would we behave any differently to them? In another theme, he attempts to commune with London’s foxes (some of the scavengers of the title), camping out near their earth and daubing himself in a scent made from female fox shit to blend in (something that apparently is quite successful). And it is a remarkable piece of narrativisation to link an animated squirrel corpse opera

Site-specific theatre specialists Teatro Vivo bring their new take on Laclos’s classic eighteenth-century tale of courtly intrigue and weaponised shagging to the grimy-yet-cool streets of Deptford. In this new version, the action centres on reformed punk band The Maze and their attempts to play a secret comeback gig. Teatro Vivo have previously made SE8 the site for an intriguing take on the Odyssey, so this should be well worth checking out. 

For seven years in the 1980s, Chinese-American New York photographer Baldwin Lee cut an eccentric figure around the Southern states of the USA. Lugging an ancient wooden large-format land camera (the kind with a black cloth that you disappear under), Lee would set up his awkward tripod and take pictures. Pictures of families, of kids playing in the stifling summer heat, of young men posing with their cars, of girls in their best dresses. Of clapped-out wrecks, sagging shacks and ominous intimations of poverty, slavery and racism. The large format means that every detail is there to explore: a young man protectively puts a hand on a stack of four cassettes on the hood of a car; a kid provocatively presents a dollar bill to Lee’s lens, a battered Diana Ross gatefold LP teeters atop a totem pole of TVs and hi-fi, as a stern little girl stares us down. All the people are Black. There’s an obsessive feeling to these photographs. Maybe because of Lee’s choice of antiquated equipment, they sometimes feel like they’re from a much earlier era, like the work of the Farm Security Administration in the Great Depression (Lee studied under FSA luminary Walker Evans). Lee deliberately used antique uncoated lenses for their ‘creamy’ quality – these are crisp images, but not hard-edged, and imbued with huge humanity. There’s no icky feeling of ethnographic study about it, though, despite the fact that life if you were poor and Black in the Deep South things clearly hadn’t improved much from t

Ideas of Black identity dominate the annual Deutsche Börse Prize show this year. Three of the four finalists use photography and photographic imagery to interrogate Blackness: its meaning and historical function, its marginalisation and commodification. The fourth sticks a lot of scruffy to-do lists on the wall and a typed letter explaining why the subject of her major photographic portrait series doesn’t want it to be on display anymore. Let’s take that artist – Bieke Depoorter – first. I was really looking forward to seeing the Belgian photographer’s series ‘Agata’, in which she befriended an erotic dancer and documented their evolving relationship over three years. Sadly, Agata and Depoorter have apparently fallen out over payments (hence the letter), so we’re not getting to see it. Her video/installation piece about tracking down a random man called Michael she met on the streets of Portland OR is okay, but not really very vital-feeling.  Also a bit disappointing are Frida Orupabo’s big collage-sculptures, which feature archival (and anonymous) Black faces comped on to various bodies, including those of white women from antique naughty postcards and a bat. The results – jointed like Javanese puppets – obviously suggest manipulation of identity, though not much else. It's okay, but not really very vital-feeling Much better are two series from legendary Cameroonian photographer Samuel Fosso. One is a set of Malick Sidibé-esque self-portraits from the 1970s, in which he adop

A Swedish family settles down for Christmas dinner: Mumma, Puppa and their son William, 40. William’s head and upper body are swathed in layer upon layer of a muslin-like fabric, completely covering his head and muffling his voice. The fabric is woven with copper wires and designed to block out electromagnetic waves, because William suffers from electrosensitivity. Electrical radiation from everyday objects and signals from mobile phones cause him physical pain and nervous exhaustion, like he’s plugged into the invisible grid that’s all around us in the modern world. Problem is, electrosensitivity is not officially recognised as a health condition, leaving sufferers like William in a horrible limbo: while their symptoms are real, the cause of them is ascribed to mental illness or psychosomatic anxiety. Electric Malady is a sometimes touching, often frustrating documentary – and not just because of William’s situation. Like many patients with chronic conditions, William is both passive and selfish, his parents and sister both doting and out of ideas. But the questions it raises – about our understanding of what illness even is and how we collectively respond to people who don’t fit in with the normative triage of national health services – have resonance way beyond William’s particular case. Okay, so he gets to live in a sweet little wooden house in an idyllic Scandinavian forest, and you do wonder what might have become of William had he been, say, an immigrant in the shit en

‘Dudus’ is the nickname of Jamaican drug dealer Christopher Coke – a startling example of nominative determinism. Coke trafficked literally tons of marijuana and cocaine to the US before being handed down a 23-year sentence, after the mission to finally arrest him cost the lives of 70 people. During his extradition to the States, many Jamaicans took to the streets with placards supporting Dudus, whom they supposedly saw as more trustworthy than the authorities. This mixture of extremes, unpredictability and weird black comedy is at the heart of R.I.P. Germain’s intriguing ICA installation. After admiring some merch (more of which later), you scan a QR code and get a handy list of terms to help you ‘mine’ the exhibition. These include ‘client’, ‘display’, ‘Black culture’ and ‘Hatton Garden’. Then you approach a domestic front door mystifyingly adorned with a Christmas wreath. Inside is a room with some garment rails and cardboard boxes. Beyond it is another room with a video game set up, and beyond that is a weed farm. Upstairs in part two, a motionless man in a rubber mask sits on a stool inside a glass box watching more game footage, like a yardie Joseph Beuys. He wears the same ‘security’ hoodie you can buy downstairs. The only thing he’s apparently guarding is the massive chain he’s wearing. Then there’s a whole jewellery shop, with another ‘security’ guy in another hoodie, standing behind a vitrine packed with £100k chains, including a custom-made – and grotesque – white

The second part of this verbatim theatre work based on the transcripts of the Grenfell Inquiry starts with a trigger warning. The audience is told that some of the evidence is so disturbing that it will be flagged in advance so that people can leave the auditorium if they choose. When we get the warning, just before the interval, no one does. It’s a testament to the respect that the disaster is accorded by this work and by this community. These performances take place in venues within walking distance of the tragedy. I pass a twin to the tower on the way to the theatre. Grenfell’s shadow hangs over North Kensington, literally and figuratively. But is that enough to make compelling theatre? Yes and no. When I saw the first part, ‘Grenfell: Value Engineering’, nearly 18 months ago, I felt the bleak staging and washed-out performances perfectly suited the inevitably gruelling material. This was an emotive catastrophe staged in the driest possible way to make its point: 72 people died at Grenfell to make some costs spreadsheets look healthier. Those people were betrayed by sub-par materials, engineering and attitudes. ‘Grenfell: System Failure’ continues in this vein, examining the endless bureaucratic buck-passing that left so many overlooked, poor and immigrant people at risk of death from the very fabric of their homes. Bookended by testimony from a man who lost six members of his family in the fire, it delivers blow after blow on the ‘not my fault’ culture of twenty-first-cen

A giant octopus with a human torso and arms fills a swimming pool in a disused Belsize Park leisure centre. It’s not some momentary, spa-based nightmare hallucination, it’s a really singular artwork called ‘Transgenesis’, and it warrants a visit. ‘Transgenesis’ is the work of Agnes Questionmark, ‘a genderless half-human half-cephalopod creature, multicellular and symbiotic, a liquid entity that takes new forms and shapes, constantly destroying themself to give birth to new life.’ It’s the creation of an artist previously known as Giovanni Vetere. Agnes Questionmark is a physical manifestation of the idea of self-destruction and self-realisation, referring to the natural world and human intervention with transgenic species used in pharmaceutical research.  Photograph: The Orange Garden Theory aside, it’s also fucking bonkers. Not only is Agnes Questionmark a pretty tremendous and frightening presence, but it is ‘performing’ in the spa eight hours a day for 23 consecutive days: a total performance time of 184 hours. No utilisation of the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme for poor old Agnes Questionmark – it’s a proper full-time job. And you can go and see it in all its tentacular splendour.  View this post on Instagram A post shared by The Orange Garden 🍊 (@theorangegardenco) ‘Transgenesis’ is open noon to 8pm every day, with specially choreographed dance performances at the weekends. If you like the look of Matthew Barney’s new ‘Redoubt’ show at the Hayward

In news set to rock the London retail world to its already shaky foundations, the huge now-empty Topshop right on Oxford Circus has been bought by flatpack Swedish light-industrial estate icons IKEA. It’s reported that the boys in blue and yellow bid nearly £400m to acquire the premises (which include a former Nike Town and an ex-Vans store) from Philip Green’s kaput Arcadia Group.  Reaction in the Time Out office to the news ranged from Nikki’s ‘That’s really weird’ to Anne’s ‘I don’t know how I feel about that’ to Esther’s ‘I don’t think there should be meatballs near that many people’. I mean, it is pretty bizarre to think of the quintessentially ring-road experience that is the trip to IKEA suddenly being recreated in the middle of London’s most famous shopping street. Fair enough, there was an IKEA on nearby Tottenham Court Road, which closed in July this year, but it was just a showroom (or so-called ‘planning studio’) and it was on a street that already has several big-name homeware brands (Habitat, Heal’s). Oxford Street, home of dodgy perfume auctions, weird US sweetshops and about 400 McDonald’s is a very different kettle of herring. Now we’ve got some more details on what to expect when the Swedish furniture giant moves into W1C. The doors won’t open until autumn 2023, but when they do they’ll usher you into browse through around 5,000 products. It won’t all just be flatpack furniture that will make you the most hated person on the Tube should you try and catch the

Ever dreamed of gallivanting through London in the nip? You're in luck. In June, London is going to be graced by not one, not two, but nine naked bike rides. And for those of us itching to strip down to our birthday suits, World Naked Bike Ride (WNBR), which organises the event, has just released the routes.  When is the London Naked Bike Ride happening this year? The 2023 World Naked Bike Ride London is happening on Saturday, June 10. All official details are here. It's a chance for cyclists to raise awareness of bike safety, the environmental impact of cars, and, of course, the gloriously freeing joys of being nude.  Okay, fine. Where’s all the action starting? There will be starting points in nine different London locations. For the hardiest cyclists, the longest route at just over 20 miles kicks off in Croydon. The pants-free fun starts from 11am at 233 Shirley Church Road, and cyclists can arrive early to eat sandwiches, paint their bodies or simply bask in their naked glory.  The shortest ride is seven and a half miles, starting from Regent’s Park Outer Circle at 2.50pm. You can also join from Kew Bridge, Deptford, Tower Hill and Victoria Park, and there’s an accessible route for cyclists who are less able to complete the entire circuit. How can I get involved? Just turn up, strip off, and get your bike out: contrary to popular belief, there's no law against being naked in public in the UK, so you're not going to get arrested. This event is a protest as well as a fun da

Getting ready for the coronation? Knitting your bunting, pickling your jams, strong-arming your barely-recognised neighbours to have a Brexit-y street party? The crowning of King Charles III on May 6 is a national event that many people thought would never happen. But it is. And to mark the historic day, Madame Tussauds waxwork museum has opened a special royal-themed experience, a kind of ‘Avengers Assemble’ of the House of Windsor. ‘The Royal Palace Experience’ brings together all your royal faves: alongside the King (who gets a new outfit for the occasion) and the Queen Consort (Camilla), are wax likenesses of the late Queen Elizabeth II, the late Duke of Edinburgh, the Prince and Princess of Wales (Wills and Kate), the late Princess Diana, and, erm, the really very late Queen Elizabeth I. None of the family’s more recent black sheep has been allowed in to be part of the display, so no Harry and Meghan, or Andrew. The pictured corgis are also not included. There is a mock-up of the Throne Room at Buckingham Palace, with several wax celebrities in attendance, including – we’re promised – Dame Judi Dench, Dame Helen Mirren, Sir Mo Farah and Lord Barack Obama. You also get the chance to pose with a posh afternoon tea for some austere Queen Victoria we-are-not-amused vibes with a scone.  In a city that seems wedded to all manner of VR and immersive experiences, this IRL waxy gathering might just have some genuine old-school charm, as befits an institution that hasn’t progresse

Ramadan 2023 starts tonight (Wednesday March 22) with the first sighting of the crescent moon. The Islamic festival of fasting and prayer continues until the evening of Friday April 21. In London this year, though, there is a viable difference to the festival. For the first time, Ramadan will be celebrated with a light display in central London, in Piccadilly Circus, no less. ‘Ramadan Lights’ is the first street illumination to celebrate the holy month in the UK and Europe. It’ll be blazing away on Coventry Street (between Piccadilly Circus and Leicester Square, where the Trocadero is) until April 21. The installation, created in collaboration with the Heart of London Business Alliance, sees 30,000 lights forming 61 moons. To be more sustainable, the lights are more energy-efficient LED bulbs, while the carbon from the piece will be offset. Mayor of London Sadiq Khan – whose election to the post in 2016 saw him the first Muslim to become mayor of a major Western capital city – is doing the big switch-on tonight. He said: ‘I’m delighted that London is the first major European city to host a spectacular light display to mark Ramadan. “Ramadan Lights” [is] a true symbol of how our capital celebrates our diversity.’ We’re used to Christmas in London seeing swathers of lights everywhere from Oxford Street to Kew Gardens. And, arguably, as the spring evenings lengthen, light displays become less and less spectacular. But maybe this glimmer of positivity is just what we need in the

It’s that time of year again when the Sunday Times reveals its ‘Best Place to Live in the UK’ and ‘Best Place to Live in London’. Last year, you might remember, the gongs were respectively given to Ilkley in Yorkshire and Crystal Palace in south London. The year before, it was Stroud in the Cotswolds and Teddington, near London. The latter choice was a bit contentious, with people questioning TW11’s capital credentials. Sure, it’s on the Thames, but is it actually in London? Anyway, as that debate rages quietly away in the background, the 2023 winners have been announced. This year, the best overall place in the UK is Wadhurst in East Sussex, cited for its ‘rolling hills, glittering night skies and thriving high street’. Meanwhile, the London winner is… Crouch End. Yep, good ol’ Crouch End is the Best Place to Live in London. The Sunday Times mentions the area’s ‘creative edge and friendly neighbours’, giving ‘this lofty northern enclave social capital in the capital’. But is N8 a worthy winner? Pros It’s villagey. This was a big deal in Teddington’s win in 2021. Clearly the Sunday Times regards the ‘village’ as the acme of desirability when it comes to community structures. Still, if Wadhurst is supposedly the best place to live in the whole country, perhaps this shouldn’t be that surprising a criterion. There is no doubt that Crouch End has a well-heeled small-town vibe amid the sprawl of north London. It’s got lots of great independent shops, pubs, cafés and restaurants.

Londoners enjoy few things more than taking a snoop around someone else’s gaff. Witness the perennial popularity of Open House Weekend every autumn: the chance to browse (and judge) the interior design choices of hundreds of normally off-limits dwellings and other spaces, guilt- (and step-ladder-) free. Almost as popular is the annual Open Garden Squares Weekend in June. It offers the opportunity to get into the hundreds of private gardens dotted across the capital, specifically the railed-off and gated leafy glades in some of London’s fanciest residential squares, built at a time when open space was not a big priority for London’s property developers. It was one thing to have a house, but if you had a garden, you were properly god-tier. Included again this year is the garden of Number 10 Downing Street, aka Rishi’s pad. There are two tours on offer on June 10, both accommodating 24 punters (ie, you). Tickets are allocated by ballot, which is open until April 5. If your impetus for visiting is horticultural rather than just nosiness, highlights of the half-acre garden include some impressive rose beds commissioned by Mrs Thatcher, a big lawn and a sculpture by renowned artist Dame Barbara Hepworth. If you do enter the ballot and you are successful, the Downing Street garden tours are free. If you want to visit the others gardens in Open Garden Squares Weekend, you will need the weekend pass. Open Garden Squares Weekend, Jun 10-11. You can enter the ticket ballot for 10 Downin

‘Drunk as a lord’ might be a traditionally disparaging picture of the sybaritic tendencies of the noble peers of our realm. And there’s no doubt that the English aristocracy has done itself pretty well over the centuries when it comes to a spot of nosebag. Now, there’s a chance to sample a taste of that sweet blue-blood pudding. The Peers’ Dining Room at the House of Lords in Westminster is opening to the public again this year during parliament’s Easter recess. Normally, you have to have a seat in the House of Lords (or be a peer’s guest) to eat there. But at lunchtime on April 4 and 5, and lunch- and dinnertime on April 6, one of London’s most exclusive restaurants will welcome commoners. So, slots are few and far between, but booking opens tomorrow (March 23), so why not give it a whirl? Mind you, if you’re into snapping your dinner, cameras and phones are not permitted in the House of Lords. Cynics (like us) might suspect that a bunch of monied old duffers would be happy with any kind of reheated sub-school-dinner slop for din-dins, but actually, the dining room has acquitted itself rather well previously. It first opened for public dining sessions in 2015, and menu highlights since then have included Hereford beef tongue, Brixham brill, and a honey crème brûlée tart. Oof. Time for a little snooze. If only there was somewhere comfy to sit… House of Lords, Palace of Westminster, SW1A 0PW. Lunch Apr 4-5, lunch and dinner Apr 6. Book on its website. Booking opens Mar 23 at n

Despite it sometimes being challenging, crowded, hot and delayed, we Londoners love our tube. The London Underground was the world’s first subterranean transport network and it is genuinely the blood supply of our city. Even better (almost) is the tube map. The London tube map really is a landmark of graphic design, compacting a mind-boggling amount of information into a colourful, nursery wall-chart of an infographic. Image: LandSharkUK But, as the Underground network has expanded and absorbed other transport links – the DLR, Overground, Elizabeth line etc – it has got more and more sprawling, and the map has struggled to cope. Even lifelong Londoners can look at the modern tube map with blank incomprehension, struggling even to locate the stop they’re at, never mind figure out where they’re meant to be going. Now, though, one Reddit user has given the map a bit of a going-over. His take on Harry Beck’s legendary design preserves its unique beauty and practical usability, but calms it all down with more space, while making some bold infrastructural choices. Significantly, the new tube map splits the orange Overground into separate lines. The eastern part becomes the ‘Brunel line’, the western part the ‘Olympia line’ and there are the new ‘Lea Valley lines’, ‘Harlequin line’ (Euston to Watford Junction) and ‘Goblin line’ (Gospel Oak to Barking Riverside). The new map also radically makes the branches of the Northern line two completely separate entities, with the Bank branc

The FTSE may be on the up, but economic buoyancy isn’t helping London’s troubled pubs. The capital continues to haemorrhage landmark boozers, and the latest victim is a much-loved Lambeth local. The Clapham North announced on its Instagram account that it was closing on March 26 after 20 years. In a statement, it said: ‘Unfortunately our lease is expiring and no matter how much we fought, we couldn't get a new one.’ It added: ‘We are SO proud of the North and we know how much it means to the local folk of Clapham: a good old-fashioned, dependable local and the queen of the “not out-out but out” kind of nights!⁠’ Until 2003, the pub was called The Bedford Arms, and was a typical London local in the Northern line SW commuter interzone. It reopened as The Clapham North, the first in what later became the Livelyhood group of south London pubs, and was popular with Aussie ex-pats. It had a quiz, sports and ‘Roastman Pat’ in the kitchen, slinging out his famous yorkshire-pudding wraps. The leaseholder, brewers Young’s, is apparently planning to take over the running of the pub itself. It’s not clear whether it will continue to be called the Clapham North under its new owner.  The remainder of the Livelyhood-run pubs are unaffected. The Clapham North, 409 Clapham Rd, SW9 9BT. Open until Mar 26. Thirsty? Our definitive list of London’s 100 Best Pubs. Hungry? Here are the best London restaurants opening this month.

Just as Londoners resigned themselves to another year of continual public transport disruption, with a series of strikes affecting tubes, buses, rail and Overground services that are continuing into 2023, now the cost of their often-non-existent travel is set to go up significantly. How much will TfL tube and bus fares increase by? It’s been announced that fares across the TfL network – that’s buses, tubes and some trains – will rise by 5.9 percent this year. It’s the biggest rise in fares for a decade. It’s also worth remembering that there was a 5 percent increase in TfL fares this time last year. Bus fares will go up by another 10p (like last year), meaning a single journey will now cost £1.75. The daily and weekly price caps on pay-as-you-go tube fares will increase by up to 6.7 percent, depending on the number of fare zones travelled. The rise had been on the cards for a while, with Sadiq dues to make a final call on it. Will it vary in different zones? Yes. Depending on the zone, a one-way fare will rice from between 10p and 30p. A Zone 1 peak fare will go up by 30p, whereas off-peak will be 20p. Zone 1–2 will go up by 30p during peak hours and 20p during off-peak. Zones 1–3,4,5 and 6 will rise by 10p during peak and off-peak times.  When does the price increase come into effect? TfL fares will go up from March 2023.  Why are fares going up? It’s part of TfL’s long-term strategy to get the network back on a more stable financial footing following the ravages inflicted

Collabs can be a great thing. But they can also be a tricky thing. Case in point: in honour of National Pizza Day (which is a thing, apparently, on February 9), some London cooking lunatics have decided to create a fish ’n’ chip pizza. Sounds kind of ghastly, right? But hold hard until you hear the scope of the thing. First up, it’s not been conceived by just any old fast-food cowboys. The doughy undercarriage arrives courtesy of Homeslice, no less, while the superstructure is a product of the Mayfair Chippy, a posh batter palace and the type of place in which you might get laughed at if you asked for a pickled egg. Paying ‘homage’ to one of the nation’s other favourite dishes, the pizza is topped with salt-and-vinegar-cured cod, pea purée, string chips and capers. Horny-handed Northerners will rejoice to see that batter scraps also feature.  If all that wasn’t enough, Homeslice says that it will also throw in a free Mojito from cocktails-in-a-can brand Moth with every fish ’n’ chip pizza ordered. I mean, sure. Why not add a dash of Cuba to your Italian x British dinner? On a serious note (finally) the Mayfair Chippy and Homeslice will also donate £3 from each fish ’n’ chip pizza sold to food-poverty charity the Felix Project. Bravo! So, however conflicted you might feel about this concept, give it a try and do some good at the same time. If it’s any help, a poll of the Time Out office gave the idea a big thumbs up, with twice as many people thinking it sounded ‘Yum’ than ‘Yu