Free exhibitions in London

Are you a fan of ‘The Wicker Man’ and ‘A Field in England’? Then you need to get yourself to ‘Ritual Britain’, an exceedingly creepy exhibition at The Crypt Gallery inside the dusty bowels of St Pancras New Church. The show is a collaboration between artist Ben Edge and the Museum of British Folklore.  Enter The Crypt to find paintings by Ben Edge which explore contemporary British folk customs, such as the annual Druid ceremony in central London. Edge’s documentary film about the process of researching these customs ‘Frontline Folklore’ is also on display alongside terrifying objects from the Museum of British Folklore collection. Comedian Stewart Lee loved it so much he’s visited twice already. And if Lee approves, so do we. 

Photographer Harry Jacobs was a local legend in south London, a documentarian for the Black community who captured weddings, christenings and family portraits, leaving behind an incredible archive of Brixton life in the 1960s and ’70s. To mark Windrush Day on June 22, you can take your portrait at this interactive exhibit using Jacobs’s iconic photo backdrop. Image Credit: Image from Lambeth Archives collection of Harry Jacobs photographs. The individual copyrights rest with the persons who commissioned each photograph. We have been unable to locate most holders to seek permission for use, but would be very pleased to hear from anyone who is a copyright holder, or can identify individuals in the photograph. Please contact Lambeth Archives if you know who these are.

I was never much of a Moomins fan as a kid. To me, they seemed tinged with melancholy. Those marshmallowy trolls were always getting lost in dark, entangled forests or trudging through rainstorms. But they were a true reflection of their creator, Tove Jansson, a Finnish artist who had absolute love and reverence for the natural world, even at its most unruly. Along with her partner, Tuulikki Pietilä, she spent her summers on a remote island, Klovharun, in the Finnish archipelago, living in a simple cottage with no electricity, creating art side-by-side. A new exhibition about Jansson attempts to draw parallels between this island life in Klovharun and the landscape of the Walthamstow Wetlands. It may seem like a reach, but somehow, it makes sense. A tiny exhibit of photographs of Jansson, taken by her brother, are mounted to the red brick walls of the Wetland’s Victorian engine house, along with some great video footage of Jansson walking through Klovharun mid-storm as her face is repeatedly smacked by the wind and rain. Like that ever-quotable Moomin wisdom, the exhibition pared down, simple, there’s nothing inessential here. It spills out into a family-friendly art trail of Moomin-character cut outs dotted through the Wetlands, but the best part is the one you can’t see: an audio download of Jansson’s lyrical essay, ‘The Island’, read by her niece and set to music by Scottish composer Erland Cooper. When you look out at the bird-swarmed islands on the Wetlands’ reservoir,