London events in February 2025

Islington’s hallowed Sadler’s Wells might be London’s only dedicated major dance theatre, but that’s set to change in February, when its 550-seat sister venue Sadler’s Wells East opens in Stratford. A whole second Sadler’s is a serious cultural statement, more or less doubling the amount of interesting contemporary dance work appearing on London stages. Want to be one of its first audience members? Grab tickets to Our Mighty Groove (Feb 6-9) by choreographer Vicki Igbokwe-Ozoagu, which will see young dancers from east London take part in a club-influenced opening blowout. 

RECOMMENDED: Sadler’s Wells East has announced details of its opening season

Leigh Bowery was a convention-shunning icon of 1980s London nightlife, taking on many different roles in the city’s scene, from artist, performer and model, to club promoter, fashion designer and musician. His artistry also took many shapes, from reimagining clothes and makeup to experimenting with painting and sculpture. A new Tate Modern exhibition will celebrate his life and work, displaying some of his looks and collaborations with the likes of Charles Atlas, Lucian Freud, Nicola Rainbird and more.

London’s wobbliest Bridge is back for a fourth film outing. Despite all the usual romantic shenanigans, pratfalls and white wines, Renée Zellweger’s Bridget Jones is a singleton in name only these days, with two kids and much unprocessed grief for Colin Firth’s now-deceased QC, Mark Darcy (look out for a spectral Firth this time). Leo Woodall, last seen raising pulses in Netflix’s One Day, plays her young love interest, with Chiwetel Ejiofor perhaps the better long-term bet as her kids’ teacher. It’ll make you feel good, if it doesn’t make you feel old first.

Step into the grandeur of 17th and 18th-century France with Versailles: Science & Splendour, an enthralling exhibition now open at the Science Museum until April 2025. Discover how science played a pivotal role in shaping the magnificence of the Palace of Versailles, with stunning artefacts on display, many of which have never been seen in the UK before. Marvel at the intricate moon map by Jean-Dominique Cassini, a watch made for Marie Antoinette and learn about pioneering figures like Madame du Coudray, who transformed midwifery across France. Book now for just £5.40 and enjoy a journey into history, power, and innovation.

Get 50% off general admission to the Science Museum's 'Versailles: Science and Splendour’ exhibition, only with Time Out Offers.

LGBTQ+ history shouldn’t be contained to a single, short month every year. Thankfully, in London you can find some of the best gay bars and queer club nights in the world, along with special events that celebrate LGBTQ+ life, all year round. But things really hit their peak in February, when hundreds of talks, workshops and festivals appear for LGBTQ+ History Month. From film screenings and alt-cabaret to queer history lectures and family-friendly crafts, prepare to be enlightened, inspired and entertained by a rainbow of celebratory events taking place across the capital. Here’s our round-up of our favourites. 

London’s beautiful Brutalist masterpiece The Barbican Centre is welcoming in the new season with ‘Concrete Garden’, a cross-arts programme of workshops, talks, screenings and events all celebrating those happy Spring feelings of renewal, growth and wellness. The whole series is inspired by the Barbican’s new major exhibition focussing on the work of American artist Noah Davis whose figurative paintings elevate the everyday and Citra Sasmita’s Curve commission Into Eternal Land explore ancestral memory, ritual and migration – both exhibitions will run throughout the programme. 

Other events to look out for are a performance from jazz pianist Jason Moran inspired by Davis, a show from F* Choir, Noah Davis curator tours, talks uncovering the magic in everyday life and a series of takeovers in the Barbican’s leafy conservatory including talks, workshops, and performances.

Guess what: it’s somehow half-term again. It might seem like mere days since the end of the Christmas hols, but the kids are getting a whole week off, which means it’s only a matter of time before somebody complains that they’re bored and you’re racking your brains for something to do besides plonk them in front of the telly. Luckily, London has plenty of brilliant kid-friendly museums and galleries that really come into their own when school is out. And February half-term is a particularly good one, with plenty of family-friendly exhibitions just getting started, plus the return of the redoubtable Imagine Children’s Festival to the Southbank Centre. 

Step into an awe-inspiring exploration of humankind’s journey to the moon with The Moonwalkers, narrated by Tom Hanks. This immersive experience brings NASA’s historic Apollo missions to life while offering a rare glimpse into the future of lunar exploration through behind-the-scenes insights from the Artemis programme. Featuring stunning visuals by 59 Productions, exclusive astronaut interviews, and a mesmerizing score by Anne Nikitin, Lightroom’s cutting-edge technology will transport you beyond Earth. Book now for a journey that’s truly out of this world.

Get adult tickets for £19, down from £29.50 and child tickets for just £10, only with Time Out Offers.

Whether you’re flying solo, newly coupled up, or have been with your other half for decades, London is a great place to be on Valentine’s Day. There’s something for everyone on February 14 no matter what your relationship status: eccentrically themed speed-dating nights, ironic drag show, galentine’s parties or warm, fuzzy date spots for all those loved-up couples out there. We’ll be updating this page with our pick of the best as events are announced.

Following its excellent inaugural temporary exhibition Japan: Myth to Manga, 2025 sees Young V&A host temporary exhibition number two. In a way Making Egypt sounds like a not totally dissimilar idea to its predecessor, but with a totally different – and much older – civilization at its heart. Making Egypt will look at creativity in Ancient Egypt and its enduring influence on contemporary society, and will gather together over 200 items from the V&A archives, with the oldest around 5,500 years old, and many never having been displayed before. It will range from the fully painted inner sarcophagus of Princess Sopdet-em-haawt to examining the influence of Egyptian design on Minecraft and Moon Knight, and there will be kids’ activities including drawing with scale, deciphering hieroglyphics and designing your own amulet.

The opening stretch of Walter Salles’ steely but moving family drama set in 1970s Rio de Janeiro throws you for a loop. Framed in sun-bleached Super 8, kids play on Copacabana Beach, ice creams are eaten, and teenagers play in the sea. Only the odd helicopter overhead disturbs this dreamy vision of middle-class Brazilian life. But just as you’re settling in for Salles’ sensuous answer to a Paolo Sorrentino film, the veteran Brazilian filmmaker delivers a proper needle-scratch: those choppers are part of the country’s 1970 military junta, a dictatorship hell-bent on tracking down dissidents, including this real-life family’s patriarch Rubens (Selton Mello). Beach football is soon a distant memory as dad is taken away to give a ‘deposition’. From The Motorcycle Diaries to On the Road, Salles is a great celebrator of liberation, both personal and political. The two come together in stirring and poignant ways in this drama taking you right into the machinery of a repressive regime.

In UK cinemas Feb 7, 2025.

The Six Nations rugby tournament is back for 2025. From January 31, it will be taking over pubs, beer gardens and outdoor screens across London most weekends up until Saturday March 15. 

Last year, Ireland claimed back-to-back titles for the third time since 1949, and will be looking to be triumphant for a third consecutive year. Games take place at venues including Paris’ Stade de France, Rome’s Stadio Olimpico, Dublin’s Aviva Stadium, and London’s very own Twickenham Stadium as England, France, Italy, Scotland, and Wales try to burst the Irish team’s bubble.

You’ll find the matches on screens at London’s many rugby pubs and bars, but if you want to watch with the most atmos possible, get yourself to one of our favourite places to grab a seat and a pint and get stuck into all the action.

London’s most immersive open-world experience awaits! Phantom Peak isn’t just an attraction – it’s an entire town filled with mysteries to uncover, live actors to meet, and thrilling quests to complete. Think of it as a real-life video game, where every visit brings new stories, hidden secrets, and exciting surprises.

This season, JonaCon takes over Phantom Peak! Step into the most exciting convention of the year, celebrating all things JONACO with fresh challenges, interactive trails, and unforgettable moments. Explore for over four hours, sip on wild-west-style cocktails at the Thirsty Frontier Saloon, and lose yourself in a world where anything can happen.

Run for so long with quiet proficiency by multiverse-wrangler Kevin Feige, are the wheels starting to come off for the MCU? There’s no hiding the negative rumours emerging from its Captain America reboot, a key kick-off movie for another round of superhero blockbusters. There’s a lot riding on Anthony Mackie’s standalone debut as Cap, whose on-screen task will be complicated by Harrison Ford’s raging Red Hulk. Pray that we won’t need to have watched Disney+’s The Falcon and the Winter Soldier for it to make sense… because no one needs that kind of homework.

Nicholas Hytner’s visionary immersive production of Guys & Dolls was (and is!) a truly wonderful thing. But the enormous downside of staging a show both incredibly popular and entirely technically unsuited to a West End theatre is that it couldn’t transfer out of the Bridge, meaning one of London’s most prominent new theatres has only played host to a single production for the entirety of 2023 and 2024. That will change with the Bridge’s first show ‘back’, as its founder Hytner returns to his beloved Shakespeare with a new production of Richard II starring Bridgerton heartthrob Jonathan Bailey as the dithering monarch. We don’t know any more details so far; the only guarantee with Hytner is that it’ll be a modern dress production.

The instant you see a Martin Parr photograph, especially one in colour, you either love it or hate it. Are his renowned photographs of English holidaymakers condescending, exploitative and critical? Or witty, good-natured and humanistic? Lee Shulman’s enormously entertaining documentary naturally makes a persuasive case for the latter, following the perma-smiling Parr around New Brighton, Merseyside – the location for his seminal work, ‘The Last Resort’ – as his ‘candid camera’ continues to capture human nature, red in lipstick-stained tooth and nail-polished claw. His status as one of the great social documentarians has long since been understood, and this documentary provides a persuasive case for it, taking an amiable stroll through his Cartier-Bresson-inspired monochrome period, to his embrace of colour photography. Like its subject and his work, I Am Martin Parr does its job superbly and without fuss. It comes in at just under an hour long, and if it leaves you wanting more, so much the better, for there is a wonderful body of work to explore.

In UK cinemas Feb 21, 2025.

This delightful exhibition explains the wonders the animal world via robots made from household objects. Last seen here in 2017, the Robot Zoo return to the Horniman in a new incarnation, with a new set of robo-animals. Discover how chameleons change colour, what makes grasshoppers leap so high, how bats see at night and more in an exhibition that uses interactive games and challenges to reveal how real animal anatomy works. 

In his far too short career, Donald Rodney (1961-1998) created an incredibly varied body of work, using a huge breadth of mediums to confront the prejudices that course through British society. The works here tackle themes of racial identity, chronic illness and colonial history, and are a fascinating window into the issues that mattered in 1990s Britain, and still resonate today.

The former home of a certain Victorian author Clerkenwell townhouse-turned-museum 48 Doughty Street celebrates a century of being open to the public in 2025, and it’s staging an extra-special temporary exhibition to mark the occasion. Dickens in Doughty Street: 100 Years of the Charles Dickens Museum will bring to light the important role that the museum has played in cementing the legacy of one of the most famous British authors in history, and will feature many of the most prized artefacts in the museum’s collection, from its very first acquisitions to its most recent, including original manuscripts, personal correspondence and rare first editions of his most famous works. 

Oskar Reinhart knew a masterpiece when he saw one. The twentieth century art collector amassed a stunning trove of artworks, and now some of his finest picks are coming to the Courtauld. On display will be an amazingly grim Géricault painting, an incredibly saucy Courbet image of a lady in hammock, a staggering Goya still life and two stunning hospital-era Van Goghs. And then there are some Manets, Cezannes, Picassos and Renoirs to boot. Wowzers.

It’s been almost a year since Ling Ling’s left The Gun in Hackney, thus depriving London of its greatest Sunday roast . But from February 5, chef Jenny Phung launches a brand new longterm residency at Tottenham’s The Bluecoats pub. As well as that iconic roast, the Chinese-inspired menu will run weekly from Wednesday to Sunday and feature mapo king prawns with chicken and pomelo, and poached smoked tofu and lime leaf wontons, as well as a Spurs matchday menu that includes a Taiwanese chicken burger and the ‘McLing’ fillet o fish with nori tartare and cheese, in a potato bun. It’s enough to Tottenham’s dismal run of form almost bearable.

Over the past few years we’ve been awash with Wicca, wallowing in witchcraft and overwhelmed with the occult. To capitalise on the trend for all things pointy hatted and spiritual, Tate Britain is finally giving much-overlooked radical English artist Ithell Colqhoun a major show. Colqhoun was a practicing occultist who used myth, magic and surrealism to explore the idea of divine feminine power through painting, drawing and tarot.