The Time Out London blog team

Avast! And indeed, ahoy! It’s not been the plainest sailing on the good ship Secret Theatre over the last few months. In the middle of November it was announced to the immersive entertainment legends’ entire mailing list that a new show would be announced the next day, with industry reports suggesting Barbie would be the next blockbuster to receive their trademark treatment.  That simply didn’t happen. Skip forward a few months, and the company made two separate, seemingly uncoordinated announcements on the same day: one that last summer’s Grease: The Immersive Movie Musical would be returning to Battersea Park this summer (presumably in lieu of Barbie) and the other to say that Secret Cinema would be opening a new permanent London theatre.  What would go into this theatre? It was unclear then but we know now and there is at last a sense that the company has finally found its bearings again. Image: Studio DJL & Dale Croft To cut to the chase, February next year will see Secret Cinema’s new Greenwich theatre play host to Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: The Immersive Adventure. A show based on the Johnny Depp-starring Gore Verbinski blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl had been mooted in 2020 and cancelled for the usual 2020 reasons; the obvious difference is the name suggests (though doesn’t confirm) that as with Grease you’re liable to be watching the enormously successful 2003 smash on screens throughout the evening with lots of...

Nowhere else in the world will you find an arts and cultural scene as rich, varied and beloved as London. And we’ve got the stats to prove it.  Every year for the past decade, Time Out has set out to find out which cities reign supreme when it comes to culture. This year, we collected the opinions of 24,000 locals from over 150 cities – they all told us how they rate the quality and affordability of the culture scene in their hometown. We then combined their responses with the insight of Time Out’s expert panel of writers and editors, who voted for cities that are particularly exciting cultural destinations right now, to present to you Time Out’s Best Cities for Culture with Intrepid Travel.  Which city came out on top for 2026? Why, none other than the Big Smoke. A near-perfect 99 percent of Londoners agreed that culture in the capital is either ‘good’ or ‘amazing’, while our panel gave it a score of 95 out of 100.   Photograph: Old Town Tourist / Shutterstock.com London is blessed with a ridiculous number of elite galleries and museums that are entirely free to visit, and 60 percent of locals see art and culture in general here as affordable. Brand new cutting edge museums like The V&A East Museum, V&A East Storehouse and the Young V&A are all free to visit, as are a number of the cities much older cultural institutions, from the Natural History Museum and the British Museum to the National Gallery and Tate Britain.  Specific exhibitions that London still has to look...

Outdoor cinemas is back at the Barbican this summer. Hosted in the brutalist landmark’s Sculpture Court, Barbican’s summer season runs from Wednesday August 19 to Sunday August 30. On the year’s line-up is a kaleidoscopic array of films and filmmaking styles, ranging from Spike Lee concert docs to Denis Villeneuve science fiction, via the French New Wave and the best of Iranian cinema.  US indie cinema is spotlighted via Desperately Seeking Susan and The Florida Project, alongside a kaiju classic and a recent anime treat from Makoto Shinkai, Weathering With You. For Londoners, there’s a rare chance to catch 1996 coming-of-age classic Beautiful Thing, an LGBTQ+ drama filmed in Thamesmead and Greenwich, under the stars.Something for everyone, in other words, and plenty of opportunities to add some classics to your Letterboxd list. Tickets go on sale from the box office to Barbican members at 10am on Wednesday May 13, and to the general public at 10am on May 14. Standard tickets are priced £20, with concessions at £18, Barbican members £16.50, and under-18s only a tenner.  Here’s the line-up in full: Arrival (2016)Wed Aug 19, 8.30pm David Byrne’s American Utopia (2020)Sun Aug 30, 8.30pm  Offside (2006) Thu Aug 20, 8.30pm Atlantics (2019) Fri Aug 21, 8.30pm  Weathering With You (2019)Sat Aug 22, 8.30pmGhidorah, the Three-Headed Monster (1964) + recorded intro by Kaiju expert Steven Sloss  Sun Aug 23, 8.30pm  The Florida Project (2017)Tue Aug 25, 8.30pm  Pierrot le Fou...