What's on in London
78 things on in London right now, each one on the Guide on merit.
Amar Kanwar
Exhibition in Serpentine North
The Delhi filmmaker takes Serpentine North with the world premiere of a seven-screen work, The Charcoal Man. Slow, political, immersive cinema in the park, free.
An Evening of Moore at Kew
Talk series in Kew
An evening talk series at Kew Gardens exploring Henry Moore's sculpture, with curator conversations, a glass of wine on arrival, and garden access at golden hour. Runs alongside the Henry Moore: Monumental Nature exhibition. The 11 November date features Tim Marlow in conversation with the Henry Moore Foundation's Head Curator.
Ana Mendieta
Art exhibition in Tate Modern
A landmark return for the earth-body pioneer: films, photographs and a forest brought indoors, at the scale her work has long deserved.
Angel's Bone, English National Opera
Opera in Covent Garden
Du Yun's Angel's Bone, which won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Music, gets its UK premiere in an 80-minute production directed by Kip Williams. The score mixes contemporary classical with electronica, performed by a 10-piece ensemble with tuba and lute, and features five main roles including Matthew McKinney and Miriam Wallentin as the angels. This is for opera audiences drawn to genre-bending work and bold staging.
Anish Kapoor
Exhibition in Hayward Gallery
A whole-building takeover with three monumental new works.
Art Now: Mohammed Z Rahman
Exhibition in Millbank
Rahman built two timber pavilions modelled on Bengali wedding canopies and hung paintings about love inside them. One painting grew from a story made up with a six year old niece.
Audrey Amiss: The Surviving Exhibitions
Outsider art exhibition in Wellcome Collection
Amiss drew and painted through repeated psychiatric hospitalisation, and used the work to argue for people the system had discarded. The Wellcome shows only what she meant to be seen. Free, and unforgettable.
Autumn Knight: I Cant Complain
Exhibition in St Jamess
A new commission about complaining, and the first substantial showing of Knight's work in the UK. The Lower Galleries carry a canopy of balloons and a sound piece built from recorded conversations about everyday grievances. Knight performs solo three times in October.
Barbican Conservatory cuttings giveaway
Plant giveaway in Barbican
The Barbican Conservatory is giving away plants from its collection before it closes for restoration in January 2027. The last public adoption event is on 2 December 2026. Tickets are free and limited to 40 a time slot, and there are no walk-ins.
Bharti Kher at the V&A
Exhibition in Victoria and Albert Museum
Bharti Kher's monumental bronze and installation commission takes over a V&A space, a free encounter with one of the most compelling sculptors working today. The specific show, not the museum.
Blood of my Blood
Theatre in Sloane Square
Joy Nesbitt's world premiere follows a pregnant Black woman who communes with her ancestors at a former plantation turned Airbnb, spanning 1862 to the present day. Directed by Tatenda Shamiso, the play runs at the Royal Court through 7 November 2026. Tickets start at £19 and the show is recommended for ages 14 and up.
Bridge Command
Immersive team adventure in Vauxhall
You and your crew take the bridge of a starship and actually run it, from tense diplomacy to full red-alert warfare. Part immersive theatre, part team sport, wholeheartedly committed. The second season adds an alien threat, so even repeat crews get thrown.
Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads
Whitechapel
The first major UK exhibition of Chilean poet, artist and activist Cecilia Vicuña spans painting, textile, installation, photography and film. Vicuña studied at the Slade in the early 1970s and went into self-exile in London after Chile's 1973 military coup. Her practice dissolves distinctions between visual art, poetry, performance and ritual.
Charan Singh: Your Tongue in My Mouth
Shoreditch
Charan Singh presents new portraits of Hijra, Kothi and trans people at Autograph, drawing on relationships formed through more than two decades of HIV/AIDS advocacy and community organising. The exhibition runs until 13 February 2027 and is free. Singh, who came to the UK in 2012 as a non-English speaker and retrained from AIDS worker to artist, now holds a PhD from the Royal College of Art.
Cindy Sherman and Lorna Simpson
Mayfair
Two solo exhibitions at Hauser & Wirth London, running side by side. Cindy Sherman debuts her Fabric Matrons series, photographic works exploring identity as a continual process of construction over a lifetime. Lorna Simpson returns to the UK for the first time in eight years with new paintings, a medium she turned to in 2014 after coming to prominence in the 1990s for conceptual photography. For anyone interested in contemporary photography and identity work.
Clare Woods RA: Garden Without Seasons
Exhibition in Pitzhanger Manor
29 new works set through Soane's restored Ealing villa.
Courtauld Commission 2026: Ella Walker
Art commission in Strand
Two site-specific paintings for the Courtauld's entrance hall and ticketing hall, free to see without a gallery ticket. Walker paints large canvases of female figures on stage-like grounds. She is the second Courtauld Commission, after Rachel Jones in 2025.
Darkling
Play in Shepherd's Bush
One woman, one night in Bhopal in 1984, and the corporation that walked away from it. Matthew Xia directs Titas Halder's new play, the first full length production in the Holloway Theatre under Taio Lawson.
Es Devlin: Other Worlds
Exhibition in Kensington
Es Devlin's first UK museum show spans three decades of kinetic stage sculptures, monumental installations, and environment designs for Olympic ceremonies, opera stages, and pop tours. The Design Museum retrospective features rare maquettes, sketches, annotated texts, and new large scale installations conceived for the exhibition. For anyone interested in how spatial design shapes performance and emotion.
Flock at The Roses of Elagabalus
Chef residency in Dalston
Flock is the kitchen currently in at The Roses of Elagabalus, an achingly cool Dalston queer clubhouse. Residencies here change hands, so the room is the constant and the cooking is the surprise. Check who is on before you go.
for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf
Play in Hackney Wick
Shange's choreopoem turns fifty and Diane Page has put a Jammz grime score under it. It is the first production the Yard has made in its new 220-seat building in Hackney Wick.
Forage London
Foraging walk in Parks across London
Seasonal guided wild-food walks with lifetime forager Ru Kenyon, hunting edible plants and mushrooms across the capital. Small groups, strictly seasonal.
Frida: The Making of an Icon
Major museum exhibition in Tate Modern
Goes past the monobrow-on-a-tote-bag Frida to the machinery of the myth: 30-odd Kahlo works, including rarely seen self-portraits, set against 130 pieces by the artists she made possible. Book early; this one will sell.
Frieze London 2026
Art fair in Regents Park
Frieze London and Frieze Masters run concurrently 14 to 18 October 2026, presenting almost 300 galleries from 48 countries and regions. New curated sections include The Code Universe, led by Carol Yinghua Lu, and Queering Modernism, led by Anke Kempkes. The free Frieze Sculpture trail in the English Gardens features 11 artists and runs 16 September to 1 November 2026, curated by Fatoş Üstek.
Frieze Sculpture 2026
Outdoor sculpture in Regent's Park
Eleven sculptures land in the English Gardens for seven weeks, free and unbooked, curated by Fatoş Üstek for the fourth year running. Free curator-led tours in September if you want someone to explain the weird ones.
Georg Baselitz: The Heroes 1965-66
Mayfair
Georg Baselitz painted his Hero series in 1965 and 1966, when he was 27 years old. This is the first UK exhibition devoted exclusively to these large, battered figures, with loans from Tate, Berlinische Galerie, Museum Frieder Burda and Museum Küppersmühle Duisburg. The show opened months after the artist's death. For those who follow postwar European painting.
Golden Boy
Theatre in Almeida Theatre
Josh O'Connor headlines a major revival of Odets' Golden Boy at the Almeida, the highest-demand straight play of the autumn. Stock is already thin.
Guanyin II: The Caretaker, Lawrence Lek
Installation in Hackney Wick
Lawrence Lek won the Frieze Artist Award for the first Guanyin. This one puts you inside a conservation studio you would never otherwise see, twenty centimetres tall, hunting for the missing pieces of the Orbit.
Hampton Pool Moonlight Swim
Outdoor pool in Hampton
A woodland pool lit from below for stargazing dips.
Henry Moore: Monumental Nature
Outdoor sculpture exhibition in Kew
The largest-ever outdoor Moore, bronze against the Temperate House.
Hidden Jazz Club
Jazz pop-up in Nomadic (Hoxton, Soho, Waterloo)
A nomadic, musician-run jazz night that pops up one evening only in secret, atmospheric venues, from a Grade II church to Hoxton Hall. No velvet ropes, world-class players.
House of Dreams Museum
Outsider-art house museum in East Dulwich
Stephen Wright spent two decades turning his East Dulwich home into a mosaic of buttons, shells, false teeth and grief. It opens only a handful of days a year, so move the moment dates drop.
Hyundai Commission: Tarek Atoui
Installation in Bankside
Tarek Atoui transforms the Turbine Hall into a sonic landscape where wind plays suspended bamboo pipes and shengs in chorus, mechanised mallets strike Korean drums, and textiles up to 30 metres long oscillate in response to air currents. Microphones sample the sounds of the instruments and the hall itself, feeding custom software that reworks and plays them back so the soundscape is always changing. For anyone who wants to experience sound through their whole body, not just their ears.
Ilford Boy
Theatre in Covent Garden
Danny Lee Wynter's semi-autobiographical comedy-drama follows mixed-race teenager Ted Martin growing up in 1990s East London in a household filled with chaos, laughter and tough love. His life changes when Patrick arrives, bringing a new sense of style, humour and a love of show tunes. Leo Whitfield-Harris makes his professional stage debut as Ted, alongside Ria Zmitrowicz and a full ensemble cast. Directed by Donmar artistic director Tim Sheader, this world premiere runs until 28 November.
Jesús Rafael Soto: Pénétrable BBL Jaune
Installation in Kensington Gardens
Four thousand yellow strands hung in Kensington Gardens, and the only way to see the work is to walk into it. Soto has never been shown outdoors in the UK before.
Julio Le Parc: Light. Colour. Action.
Exhibition in Bankside
A posthumous retrospective of the kinetic and Op Art pioneer, 60-plus works of pure optical fun.
Kimberly Akimbo
Musical in Swiss Cottage
David Lindsay-Abaire and Jeanine Tesori's musical makes its UK premiere at Hampstead Theatre, directed by Michael Longhurst. Maria Friedman plays a 15-year-old with a rare ageing condition in 1999 New Jersey, navigating dysfunctional parents and high school. The show won five Tony awards on Broadway. For fans of heartfelt, character-driven musicals with small-scale intimacy.
Kyotographie: Kawada Kikuji × Iwane Ai
Exhibition in Japan House
Two Japanese photographers circling Hiroshima and grief; hushed and immaculately hung.
Lady in Blue: Tschabalala Self
Public art in Trafalgar Square
A ten foot bronze everywoman, patinated in lapis lazuli blue, striding across Trafalgar Square. Tschabalala Self holds the plinth for the next eighteen months.
Light & Magic: The Birth of Art Photography
Exhibition in Bankside
Tate Modern's group exhibition traces Pictorialism, the first international art photography movement, through 200 rare vintage prints by more than 80 artists from the 1880s to the 1960s. The show spans continents from Shanghai to Sydney, New York to Cape Town, Brazil to Singapore. A functioning darkroom demonstrates the complex printing methods behind these images. For anyone interested in how photography became art.
Manasa Chitra: The Art of Mental Health from Bengaluru to Bethlem
Exhibition in Beckenham
Two sets of paintings made seventy years apart at the Bethlem Museum of the Mind, pairing 1950s occupational-therapy works from Bangalore Mental Hospital with new pictures by people living with mental illness in Bengaluru today. A quiet, moving free show on art and mental health.
Martin Guerre
Musical in Waterloo
A radically reworked version of the 1996 musical about a 16th century French peasant replaced by an imposter. Matthew Warchus directs this in-the-round staging at the Old Vic with new lyrics and folk-inflected orchestrations. For musical theatre fans curious about a second chance at a show that struggled in its original West End run.
Monika Sosnowska: Weight of Matter
Exhibition in Peckham
Steel and concrete sculpture across both South London Gallery buildings, some of it hung from the rafters at over half a tonne. In the Fire Station a collapsed black staircase answers the 1867 building's own white one. The paper maquettes she works from are shown in London for the first time.
Much Ado About Nothing
Bankside
Pippa Nixon and Ken Nwosu play Beatrice and Benedick, directed by Chelsea Walker. Angus MacRae's score is played live on cello and guitar. It runs two and a half hours with an interval, and standing is five pounds.
Musquiqui Chihying: A Life of Navigation
Exhibition in Southbank
A free multimedia exhibition at Hayward Gallery's HENI Project Space featuring four works by Taiwanese artist Musquiqui Chihying. The show explores urban stress and technology through humour, including a video of the artist jogging on a supermarket checkout conveyor belt and interviews with Nigerian gamers paid to play on behalf of overseas clients. The exhibition uses installation, video, photography and sculpture to examine consumerism, labour and digital systems.
Oh, Mary!
Theatre in Whitehall
Cole Escola's Tony-winning Mary Todd Lincoln comedy, the funniest thing in the West End right now.
Our Bodies Have Been Bridges
Shoreditch
Sixty-five photographs by three feminist artists from the Americas span three decades of work that uses the body to challenge fixed ideas of visibility. Laura Aguilar, Tarrah Krajnak and Koyoltzintli each claim presence through photography. Curated by Mark Sealy and Bindi Vora, the exhibition runs from October through February at Autograph.
Pia Camil: Bestia
Clerkenwell
Pia Camil has fitted shutters over her paintings at Elizabeth Xi Bauer's Exmouth Market space. They sit in different positions, and small woodcuts with idyllic motifs make sure a fragment of each painting always shows. Behind them are private moments of intimacy and desire.
Pints of Knowledge
Talks series in Rotating London pubs
A boozy take on TED, with experts giving 40-minute talks in good London pubs, from lucid dreaming to private equity, then an audience Q&A. Several already sell out.
Quality Wines & Friends Sunday Series
Wine bar residency in Farringdon
Farringdon's chef-collaboration Sundays, hosted by Nick Bramham: a different cook each month, for people who read the menu before booking.
Quality Wines and Friends: Alex Jackson
Farringdon
Alex Jackson, formerly of Sardine and now head chef at the Garden Museum Café, takes over the Quality Wines kitchen for one Sunday lunch. His cooking draws on French regional food, Provence and the French Mediterranean above all. It is part of Quality Wines and Friends, the monthly Sunday series in which Nick Bramham hosts a guest chef.
Rebecca Warren: There Will Be Another You
Bethnal Green
Rebecca Warren shows new sculptures across both Maureen Paley spaces in Bethnal Green. The title work is a life-size bronze nude with two right arms and no left, limbs melting or morphing with exposed sinews and wires. Another piece, The Totality, is a two-tiered diorama of neon shapes and fragments arranged like a dustbowl landscape. Warren was Turner Prize-nominated in 2006 and received an OBE in 2020.
Renoir and Love
Exhibition in Trafalgar Square
A major Renoir exhibition at the National Gallery focusing on the artist's most prolific years from the mid-1860s to the mid-1880s. More than 50 works include Bal au Moulin de la Galette, on display in the UK for the first time. Created in partnership with the Musée d'Orsay and Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, it is the biggest collection of Renoir's work in the UK since 2007.
Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam
Exhibition in Royal Academy
First survey in fifty years of the Victorian fairy-painter who killed his father and made his masterpieces confined in Bedlam and Broadmoor. Dark, precise, unforgettable.
Rising Voices: Contemporary Art from Asia, Australia and the Pacific
Contemporary art exhibition in V&A
Three decades of QAGOMA's Asia Pacific Triennial, condensed. Sculpture, weaving, body adornment, ceramics. The sort of range that makes the usual survey show look thin. First Nations perspectives lead it.
Rudy Loewe: Intimacies of Care
Exhibition in Euston
Loewe built this with grassroots groups including ADHD Babes and the Black Trans Foundation, on how racist discrimination shapes Black mental healthcare in the UK. The centrepiece is four cupped hands cast at scale, with plant specimens set into them. Audio from the workshops plays underneath.
Sabine Moritz: Lie Down in Green Pastures
Lambeth
Sabine Moritz's first UK museum show gathers paintings and sketches that explore memory, grief and the natural world. Many pieces draw on the artist's childhood in East Germany, including her family's move to a concrete housing estate after her father's death. The show includes floral still lifes and a large new abstract work made for the exhibition. Closes December 20, 2026.
Salman Toor: Someone Like You
Exhibition in Strand
Nineteen paintings, all made since 2019, in Toor's first solo exhibition in Europe. Born in Lahore and working in New York, he paints young men in apartments and bars, caught mid-gesture. A separate room shows his drawings.
Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art
Fashion exhibition in V&A
Surrealism meets couture at the V&A. Lobster dresses, shocking pink and Dali collaborations, in the first UK show devoted to Schiaparelli.
Serpentine Pavilion 2026
Garden pavilion in Kensington Gardens
A crinkle-crankle brick folly by Lanza Atelier on the Serpentine lawn, this year's pavilion. Free, and gone by autumn.
Shakespeare's Globe
Open-air theatre in Bankside
The reconstructed open-air Globe on Bankside: stand in the yard as a groundling for about a fiver, three hours on your feet, the most alive way to see Shakespeare. Summer season only.
Swaying in the Wind
Greenwich
Around 100 fans by contemporary French fan maker Frédérick Yvan Manuel Gay, shown to a British audience for the first time. Gay is one of very few fan makers working in France today. The exhibition also includes works by his students and pieces from a three-day masterclass organised by The Worshipful Company of Fan Makers in early 2026. Runs 6 October 2026 to 9 January 2027.
TABLE 17
Play in Kilburn
Eighty-five minutes, no interval, two exes and one restaurant table. Marisha Wallace is doing it, and Michael Rishawn won the Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle awards playing every waiter in the room.
Tate Britain Commission: Zineb Sedira
Installation in Millbank
Tate's Duveen Galleries are now a 1960s Parisian cafe with a working Scopitone jukebox and a four-act film about Algeria's revolutionary cinema. Free, and the most transporting room in Millbank.
The 90s: Art and Fashion
Exhibition in Tate Britain
Enninful curates a reappraisal of 90s British art and fashion: Teller, Day, McQueen, the YBAs. The nostalgia hit aimed straight at this crowd.
The Bayeux Tapestry
Exhibition in Bloomsbury
Seventy metres of 1070s embroidery, laid flat and unrolled in one line for the first time in its life, in the only room in Britain long enough to take it. It goes back to Normandy in July.
The Coming of Age
Exhibition in Wellcome Collection
Ageing as a social question, not a medical one; Darwin's walking stick beside Daphne Wright.
The End
Immersive escape adventure in Bankside
COLAB turn a Bankside bunker into the last room on earth: an escape-room-shaped immersive where you have to crack its secrets to make it out. Tense, atmospheric and made for a group that likes thinking under pressure.
The Everythingists, Es Devlin
Commission in Hackney Wick
Es Devlin answers a 1926 Goncharova Firebird backdrop with a plywood construction that relights itself every ninety seconds, a dancer moving through Botis Seva choreography, and Stravinsky underneath.
The Last Princesses of Punjab
Exhibition in Kensington Palace
Sophia Duleep Singh and the Punjabi princesses who became suffragettes and changemakers, told through letters, heirloom jewellery and embroidered garments at Kensington Palace.
The Music Is Black: A British Story
Exhibition in V&A East / Stratford
125 years of Black music-making in Britain, at the new V&A East rather than another central institution.
The Story
Theatre in National Theatre
Letitia Wright leads the UK premiere of Tracey Scott Wilson's newsroom thriller at the National, directed by Clint Dyer. Adult, topical and sharply cast.
Thelma & Louise
Theatre in Waterloo
Callie Khouri adapts her own Oscar-winning script with a debut score from Neko Case, Rachel Tucker leading.
Threads of Ascent: Tapestries by Clare Woods
Exhibition in Lambeth
Royal Academician Clare Woods shows three large-scale handwoven tapestries made in collaboration with weavers at Dovecot Studios in Edinburgh. The works were created over 12 months from intimate watercolours depicting climbing weeds, transforming close observation into monumental woven landscapes. For those interested in contemporary textile art and the craft of tapestry-making.
Warhol/Indiana: On the Origins of Pop
Kensington
William John Kennedy photographed Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana in 1963 and 1964, on the brink of their fame, and his negatives then sat unseen for decades. This small show at Dellasposa in Kensington has Warhol behind the Marilyn acetate his silkscreens came from, and Indiana holding his LOVE canvas. Viewing is by appointment, until 20 October.
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
Theatre in Soho
Gillian Anderson and Billy Crudup take Albee in the round under Marianne Elliott. The autumn's hottest ticket.
Wild Life Drawing
Life drawing class in Rotating London venues
Life drawing with a live rescue animal in the room, from owls to micropigs, led by illustrator Jennie Webber. Between a tenth and half of fees go to animal charities.
Winston Churchill: The Painter
Exhibition in The Wallace Collection
The first retrospective of his paintings in 60 years, at the Wallace Collection. Ticketed; members of the Wallace go free.
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