Get us in your inbox

Search
January TTD events
Image: Time Out

London events in January

Cheap stuff, secret stuff and heavy-hitting cultural stuff to fill your calendar with for January 2024 in London

Alex Sims
Written by
Alex Sims
Advertising

Hello, 2024! It is truly great to see you. January is the ideal time to discover London on a budget and without the crowds. Many of city's very best theatre and musicals, restaurants and bars – ranked definitively by Time Out's crew of expert local editors – offer discounted tickets and cheap meal deals.

Spend cold, clear days walking off your post-Christmas malaise in glorious parks and spectacular walking routes. Cosy up with drinks on a beautiful heated winter terrace, or in one of the 100 best pubs in the city. And catch up on magical lights, winter wonderlands and Christmas shows before they disappear. 

Find out more here about how Time Out’s independent editors review and rate events and venues.

Recommended: bookmark our regular weekend guide for even more things to do in the city.

Our January 2024 highlights

  • Theatre
  • Drama
  • Leicester Square

Last time Sarah Snook performed on the London stage was back in 2016, in the Old Vic’s revival of Ibsen’s ‘The Master Builder’. A lot has happened in the intervening seven years: the Australian actor has very much gone from ‘rising star’ to ‘star’, thanks to her unforgettable turn as Shiv Roy in HBO’s smash satire ‘Succession’. Now she’s returning to the West End, and frankly nothing says ‘I'm a big deal now’ like being able to stage a one-woman show in a 900-seat theatre in which you play all the roles. ‘The Portrait of Dorian Gray’ will see Snook play 26 different characters in Kip Williams’s adaptation of the dark Oscar Wilde parable.

Advertising
The best mocktails in London
  • Bars and pubs

In a city brimming with bars, breweries and prosecco-based pop-ups, it would seem that drinking in London without actually, erm, drinking is an impossibility. Leave your beer goggles at home for one night, however, and you’ll see the selection of non-alcoholic cocktails and booze-less blends available in the capital is pretty extensive. In some venues, the alcohol-free offerings are even more creative and tastebud-seducing than their liquor-rich counterparts. Don’t believe us? Have a sip on one of these teetotal tipples...

Make like a Scot and celebrate Burns Night
  • Things to do

Burns Night always falls on January 25 (which is a Thursday in 2024) and gives London an excuse to celebrate Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, with lots of food, whisky and partying. 

Advertising
  • Attractions
  • Parks and gardens

Yes, it's cold out. It's also quite wet. The leaves have fallen from the trees and turned the pavements into a slimy, slippery ice rink. But we're lucky to have some amazing, huge, parks in London, and walking around in them on a crisp winter's day is genuinely one of life’s great joys. Whether you're a Royal Parks stan or a fiend for Hampstead Heath, there are loads of parks to choose from. So, get out there. 

Advertising
  • Theatre
  • Comedy
  • Strand

And just like that, Sarah Jessica Parker will make her West End debut next year opposite husband Matthew Broderick in a revival of Neil Simon’s 1968 comedy ‘Plaza Suite’. Having played a hit season on Broadway last year, John Benjamin Hickey’s production will be headed to the Savoy Theatre early in 2024, for a limited season. The comedy is set in the titular hotel suite, and sees Parker and Broderick playing a series of occupying couples, each with very distinct problems of their own. 

While Broderick is best known these days as a heavyweight Broadway star - he made his West End debut in 2019 in ‘The Starry Messenger’ - Parker is, of course, best known for a certain TV show and a certain reboot of a certain TV show. But she’s actually got some serious Broadway chops, having made her debut there in 1976 in William Archibald’s ‘The Innocents’, directed by one Harold Pinter.

Clearly it’s a fairly light evening of entertainment that demonstrates the couple’s range without doing anything that flies drastically in the face of SJP’s fanbase. But enthusiastic Broadway reviews suggest it should be a properly entertaining night at the theatre regardless of your feelings on its stars.

Tickets will go on sale in September.

  • Theatre
  • Musicals
  • Waterloo

Surely the most famous concert(s) in history and with a ready-made soundtrack of ’80s stadium rock hits, a musical adaptation of Bob Geldof’s 1985 Live Aid concerts does seem like a screechingly logical idea as soon as you think about it. 

With a book by satirist and writer of the smash ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ musical John O’Farrell and direction by ‘& Juliet’ man Luke Sheppard, ‘Just for One Day’ sounds like an agreeable jukebox romp that aims to tell the story of the duel London and New York mega-concerts that raised $127m for famine relief back on July 13, 1985.

Supported by the Geldof, performed by the permission of the Band Aid Charitable Trust, and with the rights to perform songs by the likes of Bob Dylan, David Bowie, The Who, U2, Queen, The Police, Elton John, Paul McCartney, The Pretenders, The Cars, Status Quo, Paul Weller, Sade, The Boomtown Rats, Bryan Adams, Diana Ross, Ultravox and more, it feels like a solid crowd-pleaser.

It will, however, be interesting to see if there's any sense of reflection on the project's legacy - while Live Aid has come in for less stick as an endeavour than the Band Aid single 'Do They Know It's Christmas?', there have undeniably been very legitimate questions asked in the years since about the project’s white saviorism and how effectively the money was distributed. Sure, it sounds like a light-hearted musical romp. Bu it would be a shame if ‘Just for One Day’ ducked these questions entirely.

Julie Atherton, Ashley Campbell, Jackie Clune, Craige Els, James Hameed, Naomi Katiyo, Hope Kenna, Freddie Love, Emily Ooi and Rhys Wilkinson star.

Advertising
  • Theatre
  • Drama
  • Leicester Square

As a playwright, Jez Butterworth has become an almost legendary figure – with his transcendent 2009 play ‘Jerusalem’ he kind of left the mortal world behind, and is now a vaguely mysterious figure who emerges from seclusion every few years to drop a new play on the world. His run of ‘Jerusalem’, ‘The River’ and ‘The Ferryman’ is about as good as it gets, a trio of very different plays united by their exploration of where wild landscape meets human mysticism.

We don’t know a huge amount about his latest, ‘The Hills of California’, but it’s definitely not set in California. Rather the place is Blackpool and the time is the sweltering summer of ’76, as the Webb sisters return to the family guesthouse to see their dying mother one last time.

As with 2017’s enormo-smash ‘The Ferryman’, it’ll be directed by the great Sam Mendes and will be produced by Sonia Friedman, alongside Mendes’s own Neal Street Productions. There’s a typically heavyweight cast of Laura Donnelly, Leanne Best, Ophelia Lovibond and Helena Wilson.

We’re pretty sure it’ll be the first play of his career not to premiere at the Royal Court, though one suspects this probably reflects tight schedules and the imminent change of artistic directorship at the Court.

Whatever the case, a new Jez Butterworth play is very much An Event – time to get excited.

 

  • Art
  • Finchley Road

Find out what the UK's most promising fine art graduates have been up to in this annual showcase of up-and-coming talent from across the UK. 

Recommended
    You may also like
    You may also like
    Bestselling Time Out offers
      Advertising