The Time Out London blog team

If you’re in Peckham on a Saturday night and struck with a sudden urge to shake a leg, there’s no shortage of venues for a great night on the razzle. And joining that line up of top venues – The Carpet Shop, Jumbi and The Greyhound being just the tip of the iceberg – is the newly renovated Peckham Palais. After standing vacant for nearly 15 years, it was announced last year that the legendary venue would be getting some much-needed TLC thanks to the Night Group, the same minds behind east London’s Night Tales, NT’s Loft and Netil360. The result is a new multi-room club and cultural venue on Rye Lane. Entering the building, you’ll notice a lobby and box office on the ground floor, where peeling plaster and chipped paint hint at the venue’s storied past.  Photograph: Fare Inc The first floor is now home to The Ballroom, a cocktail bar and events space with room for 250 people to sip cocktails and listen to vinyl. The room gives strong ’70s vibes, with raspberry-pink walls, leather and PVC booth-style seating and oak details all adding to the old school aesthetic. All sounds very classy and civilised, right? Well, if you’re looking to let loose a little more, descend into the basement and find a 470-capacity nightclub. The space’s designers, Night Group and architects Nikjoo, have paid particular attention to the sound in the subterranean space, decking it out with a bespoke five-way Funktion-One sound system and giving it ‘precision acoustic treatment’. The building...

If the tantalising arrival of spring has you itching to get out and explore London wildlife, here’s some exciting news. The capital just got another designated nature reserve. This month Ealing Council named Warren Farm in Southall a Local Nature Reserve. The meadow, which was once a sports ground, has been mostly empty for 15 years. Gradually, the park has been rewilded into a grassland habitat for wildflowers, birds, butterflies and bees.  Warren Farm is most notable for its skylarks – in fact, almost a quarter of London’s entire skylark breeding population calls the space home. Other local critters include hairstreak butterflies, barn owls, little owls, and kestrels.  Photograph: Richard Carter Photography London’s newest nature reserve is part of a wider project called Brent River Park: a 50-year-old string of green-spaces connected by the River Brent, which runs from Barnet into the Thames via Southall. Warren Farm will also form part of West London Regional Park, a series of connected leafy spots between Ealing and Hounslow.  At 24.8 hectares, Warren Farm Nature Reserve is only slightly bigger than St James Park (about the size of three football fields). Alongside the Local Nature Reserve declaration, the council is building a cricket and football field on Imperial College London land to replace the sports grounds.  Leader of Ealing Council Cllr Peter Mason said that nature reserve designation will provide ‘a much-needed green lung for this part of the borough.’...

This April London’s postmodernism geeks will get to feast their eyes on another of the city’s treasures. The Cosmic House in Kensington, a private home turned museum which rarely lets people peek inside its walls, is opening to the public. Since becoming a museum in 2021, The Cosmic House has been open for visitors between April and December. Because it is on a residential street, the museum has restrictions on when it can open and how many visitors it can have, which is why getting a chance to look inside is no easy feat. This year it will open its doors again on April 22. Image: Sue Barr.The Sundial Room faces south over the garden the room with radial seating around a sundial. Only a five minute walk from Holland Park station, the house is one of only two Grade I-listed post-modernist buildings in the UK. The west London structure was built between 1978 and 1983 by writer Maggie and architect Charles Jencks in collaboration with Sir Terry Farrell, who also designed the iconic MI6 building. Its white stucco walls regularly hosted debates between architectural legends such as Zaha Hadid, Norman Foster and Richard Rogers.  The Jencks were fascinated by stuff like the human body and the cosmos, themes they worked into their design for the Cosmic House. The home is filled with oddities, including house-shaped bookshelves, a luminous sundial arcade and a ‘Dome of Water’ – a jacuzzi designed by Piers Gough, the architect behind China Wharf and The Circle in Bermondsey. ...