The Time Out London blog team

We've made it, guys! January is basically over, and that means the greyest, grimmest bit of the year is receding from view. Gone are the bleak days where only the Traitors was worth getting excited about. In a few short weeks, we’ll be enjoying lighter evenings, the first spring flowers, and al fresco pints when warmer weather rolls in. But first, it’s time to give the year’s darkest month a good send off. And fortunately, that doesn’t have to mean putting pressure on your beleaguered bank balance. This weekend, there’s a warming array of free things to do that’ll provide the perfect way to dispel any lingering January gloom. Sip a free hot chocolate, marvel at open-air light installations, or see movies without shelling out for tickets – and give February’s longer days the warm welcome they deserve.  The best free things on in London this weekend, January 30-February 1 2026 1. Feast your eyes on the bright colours of Winter Lights There was a time when Canary Wharf was the exclusive preserve of the finance types beavering away in its glass-walled towerblocks. But it’s made considerable efforts to broaden its appeal in recent years, and its annual Winter Lights festival must be one of the most successful. Every January, hordes of thrill-seekers and amateur photographers flock to Canary Wharf to see an eccentric array of light-based spectacles once the sun sets. This year’s highlights include Sol, which is a collection of glowing planet-like orbs on Crossrail Place...

When Harry Potter and the Cursed Child opened at the Palace Theatre a decade ago, it was event theatre, writ large. Opening just five years after the epic last Potter film and only nine years after the even weightier final book, Jack Thorne’s eighth chapter of JK Rowling’s blockbuster kiddie wizard series compounded its sense of being a massive event by being performed in two parts, totalling about five hours of theatre. Over the years, however, most international productions of The Cursed Child have switched to a relatively streamlined single part show, and indeed London is the only production left to have offered the OG two-part experience.  Well, ten years on and it’s time to bid a fond ‘avada kedavra’ to the two-part version, as it’s been announced that it’ll end its run on September 20, shut for a bit, and then reopen as a more streamlined single play – running just two hours and 55 minutes – from October 6. Photograph: Manuel Harlan There will clearly be Potter obsessives upset about this, and Rowling haters who will see it as a sign of declining franchise popularity. The truth is, however, that a two-part play is enormously logistically complicated for both company and public. The fact The Cursed Child did a decade in this form – surely the longest such run in history – and will continue at the same, very large theatre is surely testament to its prodigious popularity. Moreover, and not to put too fine a point on it, but there’s no real reason why the...

The past few months have been a real roller coaster for pubs in the UK.  In November Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced in her Budget that business rates would rise for all businesses in Britain in April 2026. This was obviously bad news for pubs, many of which were already struggling. Following widespread backlash from pubs, today (January 28) Reeves declared that all pubs and music venues would receive a 15 percent discount on their rates business bills from April 2026 until 2029. However, many pubs are still in trouble thanks to a range of factors, including the rise of the National Living Wage, climbing energy costs, increasing alcohol duty and falling consumer spending.  That’s why Ben Guerrin created ismypubfucked.com, a map showing the risk of closure for every pub in the UK. Guerrin’s site also includes a leaderboard of the ‘most fucked’ pubs in Britain which can be filtered by postcode, ranking 45,936 drinking spots on a scale of ‘fine’ to ‘absolutely fucked’. The website uses official data from the Valuation Office Agency (VOA), the government body responsible for business rates in England and Wales. It compares the current rates with the proposed new rates for 2026 to calculate how big the risk of closure will be when the rates change in April of this year.  Image: ismypubfucked.com According to the map, some of the most at-risk pubs in London include the Spit and Sawdust in Southwark, the Duke of Wellington in the City of London, the Nobody Inn in Newington...