Things to do in London this weekend

Time Out has announced its brand-new best restaurants in London list for 2024. After 12 months of hard eating and deliberate degustation, we’ve whittled down our 50 absolute favourite restos from across the capital, featuring old school classics, modern marvels, Michelin star spots and neighbourhood treasures. Why not book a table at one of our top ten eats this week, including Mambow in Clapton, Fitzrovia’s Akoko and Bouchon Racine in Farringdon. 

Camden’s iconic circular arts venue The Roundhouse hosts another varied selection of excellent music artists for its ‘In the Round’ festival. This ten-day fest uses the venue’s tubular shape to full effect, staging a unique line-up of bespoke shows, one-off collaborations and surprise gigs designed to immerse you in eclectic sounds and get you closer to your favourite artists. This weekend look out for gigs from Vashti Bunyan and Joe Armon-Jones. 

The fifth edition of the Queer East Film Festival arrives in kinos across London with a diverse programme of rarely-seen queer cinema from across Asia. A vast programme of features and shorts from 10 countries will be screened at venues across London. This weekend look out for the UK Premiere of the Japanese series ‘If It’s With You’ and a screening of Hu Wei’s ‘Long Time between Sunsets and Underground Waves’ at the Museum of the Home followed by a guided nature walk. 

Take your tastebuds on a journey to Latin America with Chayote. With a picturesque view of Tower Bridge and St Katherine Docks, this restaurant offers the essence of Mexico, Peru, and Spain with high-end ingredients in every dish to provide an uncompromised culinary experience! Enjoy tortillas made using only Mexican imported corn, topped with only certified prime cuts of meats for delicate textures paired with indigenous to South American chillies in the salsas, mole, and sauces. 

£23 for three courses of Mexican fusion and a margarita at Chayote only through Time Out offers. 

Henry VIII’s former gaff is already one of the most splendid-looking buildings in London, but fill it with 10,000 tulips and you’ve got something mighty special to look at. Hampton Court Palace’s Tulip Festival is one of the biggest planted displays of the colouful flowers in the UK and it’s a good excuse to celebrate the start of spring. See the buds pouring out of the Tudor wine fountain and in floating tulip vases. Plus, spot rare, historic and specialist varieties.

Caravaggio was the most dramatic of all Renaissance painters, both in his work (darkness! shadow! light!) and life (murder! revenge! syphilis!). In his final years he produced his most dramatic works. This small, free display focuses on what is possibly his last painting, ‘The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula’ on loan from Italy, and it’s full of death, violence, blood and darkness. Genuinely can’t wait. 

Filmmakers Axel Danielson and Maximilien Van Aertryck’s cine-essay tells the story from the camera, from its earliest days to our selfie-and-live-stream-obsessed present. Have we lost control of the thing we use to document ourselves? Or is the camera lens still a gateway to see ourselves in a new light and maybe even make a motza in the process? A montage of memes unafraid to send up the absurdity of it all, it’s no dry sociology lecture but a fascinating insight into our camera-ready culture.

Out Apr 19 

After completing a grand slam in front of a record-breaking 58,000-strong home crowd in to conclude last year’s unforgettable Women’s Six Nations tournament, England’s Red Roses are back at Twickenham for another crunch game this Saturday. Last year’s champions will be hoping to make it four wins on the bounce to set up a climactic final-round fixture against France, who remain the only other unbeaten team in this year’s competition. As well as getting to watch every scrum, tackle and try live in the flesh, spectators will be treated to some chart-topping hits from Sophie Ellis-Bextor at half time. And with tickets starting at just £20 for adults and £5 for juniors, this a fantastic day out that the whole family can enjoy. 

Head to Token Studio, where you’ll be treated to a relaxing, fun 90-minute session that will involve throwing a potter’s wheel, making finger-sized miniature pottery, learning hand-building techniques. Or if you prefer to focus on design, opt for the pottery painting class, where you can pick a ready-made piece to be your canvas, be it a mug, plate or bowl. The best bit? You can bring your own beer! 

Book your BYOB Pottery Experience at Token Studio for £32 only through Time Out offers. 

This enjoyably feral offering from all-female, historian-led theatre company Dirty Hare is a very unconventional dramatisation of a very specific historical incident: the strange, lurid tale of Anne Gunter. In 1604, Alice’s dad Brian Gunter, killed the two sons of local woman Elizabeth Gregory, igniting a feud between the families. Later, Anne grew sick – which Brian seized upon as evidence of witchcraft on behalf of Elizabeth. There probably is a conventional historical drama in all this, but that’s definitely not what Dirty Hare have crafted. It’s a gleeful slap in the face of a show – history served up messily, with the bits still twitching.

The nation’s most beloved Tory (ie she's not really a Tory, though her videos have fooled many) returns to London with her entourage of political pisstake characters. She’s never quite been cool, but her ramshackle brand of government skewering has undoubtedly touched a nerve in the dying days of the Conservative government. 

For two decades Ceramic Art London has been showcasing – and selling – the most exciting pottery from the UK and overseas. This year the work of 119 ceramicists will be on show, as well as examples from the current crop of Royal College of Arts students. A programme of talks on ceramics techniques and aesthetics also accompanies the event.

Ahead of Earth Day on April 22, non-profit organisation Camden Clear Air Initiative has organised the first-ever Earthfest. Expect a weekend of speakers, workshops and immersive exhibitions all discussing the pressing issue of the climate, but in a way that won’t leave you with an existential crisis. A fashion zone will feature sustainable brands and upcycled masterpieces, and there will be talks by experts at the Future of Greentech summit. All events are free this weekend. 

This celebration of Eid-al-Fitr, which marks the end of fasting for Ramadan, will take over Trafalgar Square for a family-friendly day of activities and events. Live music and performances will fill the main stage and street food stalls will offer fayre from India, Venezuela, Somalia and more. You’ll also find stalls dedicated to face painting and Mehndi, plus a ‘Creative Art Zone’ with calligraphy, storytelling and drama workshops. 

For the first time in its 92-year history, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre has opened its doors in spring. And it’s absolutely worth it: the deliciously bonkers, endlessly inventive, and extremely funny ‘Bear Snores On’ is one of the best kids’ shows to hit London in an age. It’s adapted from the picture book of the same name by Karma Wilson and Jane Chapman. This fairly free adaptation from co-writers and directors Cush Jumbo (yup, that Cush Jumbo) and Katy Sechiari, is filled with lots of lovely flourishes, like the Coldplay-style flashing wristbands the audience wears and magnificently committed performances from the whole cast. 

Albert Oehlen, the heftily post-modern contemporary German artist’s approach to painting has always been to strip it back and lay it bare. What's left, whether good or bad, is painting at its basest, most obvious. These new works are heavily gridded, the picture planes clearly, visibly divided. He’s making the hidden processes of painting visible, exposing painting’s guts. He’s saying this is how the sausage gets made: it’s not magic, it’s not sublime, it’s just grids and lines and colour, it’s basic. Art is simple. It’s not about big themes like capitalism or colonialism or whatever, it’s not trying to say anything. It’s just painting, and even when it’s bad it’s still pretty good.

This 2019 drama about a Harvard professor who gets cancelled after he platforms a racist is never the play you think it’s going to be, and it’s all the better for it. Some LA critics were a little snooty about Paul Grellong’s play when it premiered there with Bryan Cranston starring. They’re wrong, it’s terrific. It has a genuinely exciting plot and a full-spectrum moral awareness of the murky motives and pitiless passions of identity politics; either of these qualities are a rare delight in new writing, and both together are an absolute treat. Brisk, well-made and punchy, it’s a reminder of why a good off-West End drama is such an enjoyable night out. 

From the same minds who brought you Ducksoup in Soho and Little Duck The Picklery in Dalston comes a new venture with its sights set on France. Camille is unassuming at first, with classic French dishes using local British produce (you’re in Borough Market, after all), lots of wine and a packed chalkboard of daily specials. But once you’re a course or two in, windows steamy with condensation and a few glasses deep you might as well be on a backstreet of Montmartre as opposed to Southwark. 

Embark on an inspiring journey around the world through art at the Sony World Photography Awards exhibition 2024. The highly anticipated annual showcase returns to Somerset House this April, bringing extraordinary images – from luscious landscapes to impressive architecture, striking street shots to moving documentary projects – to an iconic location. 

Get exclusive £12 tickets to the Sony World Photography Awards Exhibition, only through Time Out offers. 

In Leo Costelloe’s small exhibition, the young Irish-Australian artist is taking a critical deep dive into the tropes of weddings: the superstitions, the pressures, the meanings, the aesthetics. Costelloe sees the ‘wedding’ as a deeply contrived system of societal pressure, designed to form a specific feminine identity and perpetuate specific feminine norms. You could argue that marriage as an institution isn’t something desperately in need of critical discourse in 2024. But Costelloe is exploring how one person’s perfect day is another’s intentional, oppressive and nefarious shaping of gender norms. 

The very flames of hell are licking the walls and ancient wooden beams of this church in Islington (the new home of Castor Gallery), and it’s all because of Fabian Ramirez. This is the Mexican painter’s act of revenge, this is how he gets back at the colonisers for using Christianity as a weapon of conquest and oppression. The works are vast, flame-singed paintings on wood and a central altarpiece with indigenous gods tumbling in flames. This is about righting historical wrongs. In Mexico, indigenous communities have taken to Christianity all while maintaining their native spiritual practices. Ramirez’s work is a violent testament to endurance in the face of oppression, to how culture survives, even when it has been set aflame.

This celebration of Eid-al-Fitr, which marks the end of fasting for Ramadan, will take over Trafalgar Square for a family-friendly day of activities and events. Live music and performances will fill the main stage and street food stalls will offer fayre from India, Venezuela, Somalia and more. You’ll also find stalls dedicated to face painting and Mehndi, plus a ‘Creative Art Zone’ with calligraphy, storytelling and drama workshops. 

Never ending baskets of delicious dim sum. Need we say more? That means tucking into as many dumplings, rolls and buns as you can scoff down, all expertly put together by a Chinatown restaurant celebrating more than ten years of business. Taiwanese pork buns? Check. Pork and prawn soup dumplings? You betcha. ‘Supreme’ crab meat xiao long bao? Of course! And just to make sure you’re all set, Leong’s Legend is further furnishing your palate with a chilled glass of prosecco. Lovely bubbly.

Get 51% off bottomless dim sum at Leong's Legend only through Time Out Offers

Photographer Nick Waplington’s ‘Living Room’ documented the community of the Broxtowe house estate in Nottingham in the ‘90s. The book was a sensation, and this amazing little exhibition brings together previously unseen photos from the same period. It’s the same families, houses and streets, but seen anew. There are scenes of outdoor life: dad fixing the motor in the sun; a trip to the shops to pick up a pack of cigs; everyone out grabbing an ice cream in the sun or play fighting in the streets. But it’s in the titular living room that the real drama plays out. It’s ultra-basic, super-mundane, but it’s overflowing with life and joy. Everyone is laughing, playing, wrestling. It’s as beautiful, powerful, genuine and moving now as it would have been three decades ago.

Tyrell Williams’s debut ‘Red Pitch’ – transferring to the West End from the Bush with a million ‘best play’ awards in its wake – is so good that it might make you like football. It’ll certainly make you like the three boys who spend their days kicking ball on their south London estate’s concrete pitch, dreaming of playing for a big team, and gassing about the big things in a 16-year-old’s life. It’s a brilliant bit of writing about gentrification, friendship, masculinity and aspiration, without ever being heavy-handed.

Malin + Goetz is rolling into Shoreditch with a banging pop-up party to mark the company’s 20th anniversary. Expect interactive billboards, a ‘rum yard’, serving up free drinks from East London Liquor, free personalised totes and a generall party-friendly vibe. Whether you're a skincare fanatic or just up for a potter around, swing by the corner of Commercial Street and Quaker Street in Shoreditch all day Saturday and Sunday. 

Giant salamanders, some of the world’s largest frogs and a king cobra are just some of the awe-inspiring animals that visitors will be able to spot at London Zoo’s new reptile house. The experience called ‘Secret Life of Reptiles and Amphibians’ will be home to some of the planet's most fascinating and secretive species and will shine a spotlight on London Zoo’s (ZSL) global conservation efforts. 

In Matthias Groebel’s printed ‘paintings’ – made in Whitechapel in the mid-2000s – London is bleak, derelict, graffiti’d. But it’s slowly being torn down and rebuilt, too. Each image comes in double, a stereoscopic vision of mundane street scenes, captured on a camcorder and then printed disjointedly on canvas with a custom painting machine. They’re part-photo, part-painting, caught between the broken present and a violent future. The paintings are awesome, nostalgic and weird and fractured, all ghostly and miasmatic, a window into this city’s past that will leave you awkwardly, foggily nostalgic for London before the ball pits and £8 pints.

In a Wakefield hospital in 1980, while Sebastian Coe was running the 1500m wearing the number 254, Jason Wilsher-Mills’s parents were told he had only a few years to live. A bout of chicken pox led to his immune system attacking itself. But, he survived. Years in hospital in recovery awakened a deep creativity in him. This show is the culmination of all that struggle and creativity. There’s a hint of Grayson Perry to this show, mashed with pop culture and grizzly medical terror. Its aim is to make his illness, his trauma, unthreatening, unscary, a way of converting pain and fear into fun and colour.

Take the minds of 100 incredible bartenders (according to the Diageo World Class GB cocktail competition 2024), pour in 20 destinations from across the UK, chuck in some ice, give it a good ol’ shake and bam – you’ve got yourself a World Class Cocktail Festival. Magnificent mixologists from across the country are stirring and shaking throughout March and April to bring cocktail-sippers a seemingly endless menu of limited edition bevvies. More than 30 bars in the capital are taking part, including The Connaught, American Bar at The Savoy and F1® Arcade, and lucky Londoners will even have the chance to try out a cocktail masterclass for free. Cheers!

The British, in case you hadn’t noticed, tend to get a little sentimental about the NHS. So it’s understandable that playwright Tim Price and director Rufus Norris are wary of dewy-eyed hagiography when approaching ‘Nye’, a new biographical drama about Aneurin Bevan, the firebrand Labour health minister who founded the service with the title role played by the great Michael Sheen. Norris’s production has a determinedly trippy quality intended to counter the cliches and it’s largely presented as the stream-of-consciousness of an older Bevan, who is a patient in one of his own hospitals. Sheen is a delight as the fiery but unassuming Bevan. It’s otherworldly with plenty of cool stuff.

Thought the silent movie renaissance began and ended with The Artist? Wordless wonder Pablo Berger is here to make you think again. The Spanish director has dug into Charlie Chaplin’s box of tricks to forge a gorgeous animation about friendship and connection – entirely without dialogue. Based on Sara Varon’s children’s graphic novel, it’s set in the anthropomorphised, graffiti-strewn ’80s New York, with visual gags that embrace everything from Tati-esque slapstick to bonkers surrealism, with a weird animal urbanites that gives it a kaleidoscopic backdrop. With this and his 2012 black-and-white silent Blancanieves, Berger seems to be on a one-man mission to revive silent making. Godspeed to that quest if he continues to make movies as delightfully quirky, funny and moving as this.

With its huge whale skeleton, stuffed dodo, earthquake simulator and roughly 80 million other specimens, the Natural History Museum is really only missing one thing: adorable finger food. Don’t worry though, that’s been resolved. From this week the museum will be serving up a themed afternoon tea made up of quaint little servings of sandwiches, scones, tarts and sponges created by chefs from Benugo, and all celebrating British farmers and growers. The spread includes an Earth pot filled with raspberry and chocolate, a dinosaur-footprint macaron and an ammonite cookie, among other bits.

The story goes that modernism ripped everything up and started again; and nowhere did more of that mid-century aesthetic shredding than Brazil. Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa et al forged a brand new path towards minimalism. But Raven Row’s incredible new show is challenging that oversimplified narrative, showing how figuration, traditional aesthetics and ritual symbolism were an integral part of experimental Brazilian art from 1950-1980. The whole thing’s great. It’s a gorgeous, in-depth, museum-quality exploration of creativity at its most fertile, modernism at its most exciting and abstraction at its most beautiful. 

Kanishka has launched a brand-new brunch menu focussing on PanIndian food, with a menu embracing the flavours of India’s various regions, from Punjab to Kerala, Kolkata to Delhi and everywhere in between. Kanishka’s skilled kitchen team, led by chef Atul Kochhar, have curated a symphony of new dishes, including Khari paneer tikka, Palak paneer and Chicken tikka pie. And the best bit? You’ll be greeted with a seasonal welcome Kanishka punch cocktail and two hours of bottomless wine or beer. 

Get brunch at Atul Kochhar's Kanishka for £35, only through Time Out Offers.

We’re only a few months into 2024, but Josephine’s owner and founder Claude Bosi is already having quite the year. Brooklands, the storied chef’s very pricey and peculiarly Concorde-themed restaurant at the equally pricey Peninsula hotel – was just awarded two Michelin stars, despite only opening at the end of 2023. Named after his late grandmother, this low-key bistro is his second new opening in six months, and is so pitch-perfect and on brand that it could be a ‘wine-sodden French bistro’ movie set. From a creamy Sole Grenobloise to an onglet à l’échalote swimming in rich shallot sauce, flavours are as full-bodied as a ruddy-faced Serge Gainsbourg after a Syrah binge. And you can even, if you wish, order frogs’ legs in garlic butter. 

‘Standing at the Sky’s Edge’ is a musical about three generations of incomers in Sheffield’s iconic – and infamous – brutalist housing estate, Park Hill. It’s a stunning achievement, which takes the popular but very different elements of retro pop music, agitprop and soap opera, melts them in the crucible of 50 years of social trauma and forges something potent, gorgeous and unlike any big-ticket musical we’ve seen before. It has deeply local foundations, based on local songwriter Richard Hawley's music and it was made in Sheffield, at the Crucible Theatre, with meticulous care and attention. It has all the feels – joy, lust, fear, sadness, despair, are crafted into an emotional edifice which stands nearly as tall as the place that inspired it.

Elevate your Saturday lunch plans with a trip to this Indo-Chinese Brasserie. Based in the heart of Westminster, Shanghai Noir invites you to join them and immerse yourself in a realm of gastronomic delight, where every moment is infused with the essence of indulgence and refinement. Indulge in sumptuous Chinese cuisine, including Desi Chow Mein spring rolls, Manchurian Cauliflower Fritters with Jasmine rice, and a delicious mango pudding to top it all off.

Enjoy three courses and a lychee Bellini for £25 only through Time Out offers.

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. Now, ‘Hadestown’ is a full-blown musical directed by the visionary Rachel Chavkin, its success as a show vastly outstripping that of the record. It’s a musical of beautiful texture and tone and it doesn’t hurt that Mitchell has penned some flat-out brilliant songs. It’s a gloriously improbable triumph.

Escape reality through maximum immersion and experience 42 masterpieces from 29 of the world’s most iconic artists, each reimagined through cutting-edge technology. Marble Arch’s high-tech Frameless gallery houses four unique exhibition spaces with hypnotic visuals reimaging work from the likes of Bosch, Dalí and more, all with an atmospheric score. Now get 90 minutes of eye-popping gallery time for just £20 through Time Out offers.

£20 tickets to Frameless immersive art experience only through Time Out offers 

British Franco-Algerian artist Zineb Sedira has transformed the Whitechapel Gallery (just as she did the French Pavilion at the last Venice Biennale) into a series of sets based on classic films; there’s the dancehall bar from ‘Le Bal’, a home from ‘The Battle of Algiers’, the coffin from ‘The Stranger’. All films made in the wake of Algerian independence in 1962, all made between Algeria and Europe, all passionate documents of liberation, the radical potential of social upheaval and the power of militant cinema. Sedira endlessly blurs lines. Are you, as a viewer of the work, an actor? The director? The audience, sat on rickety cinema seats? Sedira’s love letter to militant cinema is a celebration of the death of colonialism, she’s allowing you to taste a hint of what it might mean to shrug off the shackles of oppression.