Free things to do in London this week

The first museum exhibition dedicated to artist Audrey Amiss brings together drawings, paintings and other exhibition materials to explore the life and work of Amiss who died in 2013. Committed to psychiatric hospitals several times throughout her life, Amiss used her art to advocate for people who were mistreated by the mental health system. The Surviving Exhibitions focuses on works that records suggest Amiss exhibited or intended to make public. 

There’s a painting that hangs in the Pre-Raphaelite room of Tate Britain that Freddy Mercury used to drag his Queen bandmates to see time and again. It’s a fantastical scene from Romeo and Juliet alive with fairies and mythical creatures, including the legendary fairy Queen Mab, who rushes through the night planting dreams in people’s heads. Mercury was so captivated by it that he wrote and named a song after it: ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’. The painting is the work of the often overlooked Victorian artist named Richard Dadd. The Royal Academy has reunited it with dozens of his other works in Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, the first major exhibition devoted to the artist in more than 50 years. Dadd spent nearly a decade completing ‘The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke’ while confined to Bethlem Hospital—better known as Bedlam—after killing his father in a severe psychotic episode. In 1864, he was transferred to the newly opened Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1886. The exhibition, however, doesn’t begin there. Instead, it returns to Dadd’s days as a student at the Royal Academy Schools, just across from where this exhibition hangs today. While there, he became a founding member of one of Britain’s OG artistic cliques (named the ‘Clique’). Formed by a group of fellow students, its members drew inspiration from Shakespeare and Byron, dressing one another as literary and historical figures to practise their painting. Several of these...

Since its inaugural edition in 1980, this long-standing portaiture competition has attracted more than 40,000 entries from over 100 countries and has been seen by more than six million people. The highly competitive award showcases the best of contemporary portrait painters, whose styles range from the abstract to the classic. Last year the top prize was awarded to British painter Moira Cameron for her non-naturalistic self-portrait, ‘A Life Lived’, which depicts the painter slumped in an armchair in vivid colours.   

Every year, London’s famous river gets a whole festival of art installations, performances, and talks devoted to her watery charms, many of which are free to check out. This year’s Totally Thames Festival has scores of events throughout September, all dotted along riverside locations from Richmond to Barking & Dagenham. This year, look out for The Waterfront Journals, (Sep 6), a promenade performance of New York City artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s monologues, Turning the Tide (Sep 17-20), a site-specific film installation by Turner Prize-nominated artist Catherine Yass projected onto the columns of the disused Blackfriars Railway Bridge and Where the River Holds Us (Sep 27-28), a site-responsive opera on Victoria Embankment. There’ll also be a dance performance from ex-Rambert dancers in the atmospheric Brunel Museum Tunnel Shaft (Sep 24) and recitals aboard Victorian steamship the SS Robin (Sep 26). Old favourites will also be making an appearance, including the Great River Race (Sep 12) from Tower Hamlets to Richmond – where 330 crews from across the world spending the morning speeding down the Thames on wooden rowboats, many of them in fancy dress costumes – and the St Katharine Docks Classic Boat Festival (Sep 12-13), where visitors can clamber aboard more than 50 historic vessels. You can also join a river exploration session as part of Mudlarking Weekend (Sep 5-6), take part in paddlesports sessions and a fishing competition as part of Tidefest (Sep 6)...

This community festival is back, taking over unusual local indoor and outdoor venues across south east London to screen feature films for kids and adults, artists' film and video and archive footage. This year’s highlights include a screening and film quiz at The Man of Kent (Sep 8), a spooky screening of The Blair Witch Project in Nunhead Cemetery (Sep 5), a short film night at Peckham Plex (Sep 5), and a finale screening of standout 2025 film Sinners at LEX2 Livesey Exchange (Sep 13). Look out also for showings of Blue Velvet, Paddington 2, Moonlight, Human Traffic, Burning an Illusion, and Labyrinth at weird and wonderful venues. 

2026 is, according to the Chinese zodiac, the Year of the Fire Horse. In 19th-century London, however, there were real-life fire horses galloping through the city, hauling fire engines and firefighters to burning buildings. Peckham Road Fire Station opened in 1867 to accommodate them, and is the earliest surviving purpose-built fire station in London. Since 2014, though, it has been South London Gallery’s second site (following a 73-year stint as a sausage factory), and for the next few months, it and the gallery’s main building across the road are home to a series of twisted architectural works by Polish artist Monika Sosnowska. The building’s past feels relevant to the exhibition: Sosnowska has made a career probing how architecture shapes us, outlives its purpose and bears witness to a changing city. The Weight of Matter, her first solo show at a London institution in more than 20 years, brings together 14 years of her work across the SLG’s two sites. Her fascination with cities in flux stems from her own experience. Coming of age as Poland’s communist regime collapsed in 1989, Sosnowska watched Warsaw transform as one political and economic order gave way to another. That upheaval became raw material for her sculpture. Steel, concrete, rebar, staircases, handrails and gates – the functional stuff of modernist architecture – are bent, buckled and twisted into strange new forms. In the old engine room, a contorted heap of black steel sprawls across the floor At the Fire...

Following its success over the last two years, CelebrASIA is once again taking over Battersea Power Station with a celebration of South East Asia that shines a light on the cuisines and creativity of the region. Held both inside and outside of the art deco power station, the whole area will get a colourful transformation in the form of lanterns, sculptures and immersive installations, transporting you straight to the continent without actually having to leave London.   As always, there will be comedy sets, cooking classes, craft workshops, film screenings, live music, an artisan market and national dress parades. But for the very first time, on top of all of that, the event will host expert panels exploring South East Asia’s influence on fashion, food, literature and culture across the globe. Those will kick off with a talk between Khairani Barokka (author of Annah, Infinite)and Ivy Ngeow (author of The American Boyfriend). Other panellists will include Helena Lee, features editor at Harper’s Bazaar, Audrey Khew from the British Fashion Council and John Chantarasak from AngloThai. Street food stalls will serve up bites from cult favourite London restos including Farang, Turo Turo, Mambow and Chick’n’Sours. Craft workshops will teach the arts of Batik painting, Sarawak beadwork, and other traditional crafts, and there will be traditional dance and music performances from Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and more throughout the weekend.   

Ever wanted to have a nosy around some of London’s coolest private buildings? Open House London gives guests free access to architectural wonders that are not normally open to the public – from schools and offices to places of worship. It’s an often rare chance to explore iconic or just interesting buildings that make up the capital’s storied history, while the programme usually includes tons of workshops, exhibitions and more, as well as the usual tours. This year, the full programme will be announced on July 15, with bookings opening on August 19. Get practising your clicking now – these tickets go faster than Glastonbury.  

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you’ll know all about Bold Bean Co – loved by fibre-seekers, protein-maxxers and Mob Kitchen recipe-followers everywhere. And now they’re doing a beany pop-up in the middle of Soho, where you can eat beans and leave with a fabulous bouquet – all entirely for free. The menu features lemon butter beans with pesto and ricotta, and tomato and harissa yoghurt chickpeas, both served with a healthy hunk of focaccia. There are 500 free lunches to claim each day of the three-day pop-up, with both dine-in spots and takeaway pots on offer, for those on the move. And if you bring an empty Bold Bean Co jar, you’ll get a cute little bouquet of flowers for free to take home, too. There will, more than likely, be long queues, so we’d suggest arriving early to avoid disappointment.

Once again, Regent’s Park will be taken over by sculptures this autumn to coincide with the Frieze art fair coming to London. While tickets to the fair can cost up to £250 and are usually reserved for the collectors, dealers and creators of the art world, Frieze Sculpture is totally free to visit and gives a chance to the proles to get a peak at some contemporary artworks in the open air. Fatoş Üstek will curate the exhibition for the fourth year in a row. This year, instead of viewing the sculptures in isolation, the display is curated as a web of interconnected objects, linked together with materials, stories and communities. Highlights will include Angel Otero’s threshold-like doorway descending beneath the grass, and Tarini Sethi’s intricate stainless-steel screens depicting utopian scenes.