The Time Out London blog team

South Kensington tube station is the gateway to three of London’s most important cultural institutions. It’s the closest station to the Science Museum, the V&A and the Natural History Museum (recently revealed as the UK’s most visited attraction in 2025), meaning that more than 30 million people cross through its barriers each year. However, there’s one major issue. The Grade II-listed station is the tube network’s busiest station that doesn’t have step-free access – a nightmare for wheelchair users, people with buggies and those with mobility needs. TfL reckons that more than 500,000 journeys a year haven’t been made to or from South Kensington because of its accessibility issues. But that’ll soon change.  South Ken’s makeover received planning permission back at the end of 2023. More than two years later, TfL says that the work is finally ‘gathering pace’ and construction will start at the end of the year.  Image: TfL The project is a join venture between property developer Native Land and TfL’s property company Places for London. It’ll involve a new, much-needed step-free station entrance on Thurloe Street and a new dedicated eastbound platform for the Circle and District line, with lifts from those platforms to the Piccadilly line.  The station’s shopping arcade and adjoining Thurloe Street retail units will also get a spruce up to provide 53 new homes, 35 percent of which will be affordable. Plus, a new four-storey building at the front of the hub, named the...

If your desire to exercise is flagging, it could be your willpower that’s at fault – or it could be the crumbling, overcrowded state of your local leisure centre. North Londoners who haven’t dug out their leggings lately have had a very good excuse, because Tottenham Green and Park Road leisure centres have been in a pretty poor state of repair. But it looks like there’ll be less excuse to let your gym membership lapse in months to come, as they’re both getting a serious revamp. Haringey Council took back control of both sites from external contractors in 2024, and now it’s investing £900k in improving their facilities. Both gyms will have the number of equipment stations available increased by 40 percent. As well as new equipment, the interior will be redecorated, and there’ll be new spaces designed for disabled people and wheelchair users.  Haringey’s cabinet member for culture and leisure, Cllr Emily Arkell, explains that the council ‘inherited a backlog of maintenance issues and repair works when we brought this provision back in-house in October 2024’. A quick look at online reviews for both leisure centres will back that up, with users complaining about broken lockers, poor cleanliness and malfunctioning equipment. So thank goodness help is on the way. Arkell said: ‘I’m delighted to see that our residents will soon be able to benefit from these gym improvements and upgrades and it's especially pleasing that we're making our equipment more accessible and inclusive.’...

Late last year, immersive titans Secret Cinema sent out a teaser email to its entire mailing list saying its new show would be announced the following day, while Deadline dropped a story saying that it was going to be an immersive staging of Barbie. There was no announcement the following day and there has been no sign of a Barbie show, and while I have heard rumours an all new Secret Cinema event at a new site will be announced soon-ish, then long story short this summer it’ll be bringing back last year’s hit staging of Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical. And why not? Returning to Battersea Park, the show that launched a thousand Instagram snaps was a hit for the company and saw Secret Cinema blessedly return to a format wherein the audience actually had to watch the movie (a point that had increasingly become an afterthought in recent Secret Cinema events).  Also, those fancy sets recreating Rydell High and its neighbouring fairground were presumably just gathering dust somewhere and deserve a second airing via a fun show that supplements the recorded John Travolta, Olivia Newton John et al with live dancers and singers. Obviously the baller move would have been to stage Grease 2 instead, but arguably that would have been a recipe for total financial disaster. Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical is at Battersea Park, Jul 22-Sep 13. The best new London theatre shows to book for in 2026. The best immersive shows in London. Get the latest and greatest from the Big Smoke –...