Get us in your inbox

Search
Maltby Street Market, Bermondsey
Photograph: Tavi IonescuMaltby Street Market, Bermondsey

Free things to do in London this weekend

Make the most of your free time without breaking the bank, thanks to our round-up of free things to do at the weekend

Written by
Things To Do Editors
Advertising

Don't let your cash flow, or lack of it, get in the way of having a banging weekend. Read our guide to free things to do in London this weekend and you can make sure that your Friday, Saturday and Sunday go off with a bang, without eating up your bucks. After all, the best things in life are free. 

If that's whetted your appetite for events and cultural happenings in London, get planning further ahead by having a gander over our events calendar.

RECOMMENDED: Save even more dosh by taking a look at our guide to cheap London.

  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • price 0 of 4
  • Spitalfields

The story goes that modernism ripped everything up and started again; and nowhere did more of that mid-century aesthetic shredding than Brazil. Helio Oiticica, Lygia Pape, Lygia Clark, Ivan Serpa et al forged a brand new path towards minimalism, shrugging off the weight of figuration and gesturalism in favour of geometry, colour and simplicity. But Raven Row’s incredible new show is challenging that oversimplified narrative, showing how figuration, traditional aesthetics and ritual symbolism were an integral part of experimental Brazilian art from 1950-1980. It’s a nice idea, but the modernist paintings on display here are still the real draw. A deep black Lygia Clark circle, shattered squares by Judith Lauand, juddering reliefs by Lygia Pape, stacks of triangles by Ivan Serpa, tumbling blocks by Helio Oiticica; it’s so joyous, so wild despite its geometric rigidity, so full of the ecstasy of breaking with the past.  Mixed in among all that is a whole heap of flat perspective, faux-naive figuration. Heitor dos Prazeres paints women in striped dresses dancing in the street, Silvia de Leon Chalreo depicts workers toiling in a field, Madalena Santos Reinbolt weaves scenes of countryside festivities. This is all as joyous as the abstraction, but more rooted in the traditions and truth of life in rural Brazil. Full of the ecstasy of breaking with the past. So your job as you walk through the show is to try to follow the tangled threads that connect the ultra-simplistic rural figu

  • 5 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • price 0 of 4
  • Mayfair

What is working-class England if not grey, sullen, broken, monochrome, damp and sad? That’s the classic vision of this crumbling nation presented to us by photography, film and TV. But in the early 1990s, photographer Nick Waplington rocked the metaphorical boat by showing another side of England; one filled with colour, laughter, love and happiness. ‘Living Room’ documented the community of the Broxtowe house estate in Nottingham. The book was a sensation, and this amazing little exhibition brings together previously unseen photos from the same period. It’s the same families, houses and streets, but seen anew.  There are scenes of outdoor life: dad fixing the motor in the sun, oil staining the tarmac, his kid in blue sunnies hopping on her bike; a trip to the shops to pick up a pack of cigs; everyone out grabbing an ice cream in the sun or play fighting in the streets. It’s ultra-basic, super-mundane, but it’s overflowing with life and joy. But it’s in the titular living room that the real drama plays out. This room is the stage, the set where the community acts out its relationships; a cramped, filthy, beautiful world unto itself. Babies are fed, toddlers are cuddles, fags are smoked, teas are split, clothes are ironed. It’s ultra-basic, super-mundane, but it’s overflowing with life and joy. Everyone is laughing, playing, wrestling.  It’s also brimming with signifiers of late-1980s English working-class life; the clothing, the hair, the brands. Some of it shocks (the mum f

Advertising
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • price 0 of 4
  • Bethnal Green

There’s a warning in Sibylle Ruppert’s art: if the devil doesn't get you, technology will. And if they both miss, it’s your own perverse instincts and desires that’ll consume you.  The German artist (1942-2011) filled her drawings, paintings and collages with writhing bodies and gnashing teeth, evil spirits and throbbing phalluses, glistening leather and technological freaks. The implication is that all of this chaotic sci fi horror porn was a way for Ruppert to deal with the legacy of the war and a litany of personal traumas.  In the first work here, a tiny etching, a cock emerges from some dripping abstract blob-form, only to be licked by a faceless flesh ball. A little drawing nearby shows a body with far too many buttocks, too many vulvas. In a huge charcoal, a bird-beaked demon pinches the penis of a supine hermaphrodite while skulls scream in the background. Pretty standard Saturday night, am I right. All this demonic torture climaxes in a four- panel painting where man is desperately battling beast. Forms writhe, penises mutate into pincers, genitals metamorphose into bug-eyed mecha-gods. The work’s classic renaissance themes are shot through with erotic terror and sci fic techno-dystopianism. All are jaw-droppingly painted.  Leather appears in other works, framing bare boobs and bums as creatures are crushed in vices and workers file past post-human cyborg spectres. All this erotic, traumatic horror is way too over the top, absolutely obscene, disconcertingly vile and

  • Things to do
  • Exhibitions
  • price 0 of 4
  • Lewisham

After celebrating its 75th anniversary last year, this multimedia exhibition at the Migration Museum in Lewisham delves into the history of the NHS, and to the thousands of dedicated non-British workers who have contributed to its delivery of healthcare. Through photography, artefacts, and a newly commissioned interactive music video installation, their stories are lovingly told. Around 1 in 6 people within the organisation today are non-British, and many others are descendants of migrant healthcare workers. It’s a wonderful way to gain some insight into how working for such a precious but pressured organisation has impacted their lives.

Advertising
  • Art
  • price 0 of 4
  • Barbican

The Barbican’s Curve is a tricky gallery to show art in. So for their latest installation – a series of drawings by Moroccan artist Soufiane Ababri – they’ve just not really bothered using it. The actual curve of the Curve, the long arcing outer wall, has been largely ignored except for a thick line of red paint. Ababri’s colourful drawings are instead shown on the much easier to use flat inner walls. There’s a metal curtain at either end of the space, a loud pulsating ambient soundtrack, but otherwise the curve itself is present only in its omission. It’s a disappointing use of the space. And it’s unfair on Ababri, whose art was never going to work in this environment. His simple, diaristic drawings document moments of precarious queer life laced with tons of sensuality, defiance and joy. Nude brown bodies dance and play, rest and embrace. They party in nightclubs, writhe in beds, their limbs tangle, their tongues lick. They aren’t brilliant drawings, but they tell a moving story of sexual expression in the face of sexual repression. The splash of red on the curve’s wall and floor signifies the Arabic letter ‘Zayin’, the first letter of the word ‘zamel’, a homophobic slur in the Maghreb, hissed mockingly at gay men. This is art about how just existing as a queer man can be political, how dancing can be political, how nightclubs can be political, and how art can act as a way of reclaiming all those things.  The ideas are nice enough. But take away the architecture of the Curv

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • price 0 of 4
  • London

For an artist so ubiquitous, rich and successful, Jeff Koons sure isn’t popular. But I am an unapologetic Jeff Koons apologist. I know he’s the ultimate example of art avarice and market cynicism, but I also think that all the glitz and dollar signs hide an earnest heart; there’s a real artist behind the balloon dogs and price tags, I promise. Even in this show of not-great works on canvas from 2001-2013 there’s good within the ugliness. The ‘paintings’ are collaged hodgepodges of nicked imagery. Nude women’s bodies overlap with inflatable toy monkeys, piles of pancakes, horny fertility talismans, sandwiches, feet. God they’re ugly, a total mess.  I mean, obviously this is revoltingly cynical, hyper-capitalist trophy art for gross millionaires. But it’s also really base and vile and erotic and pleasurable and fun and ecstatic. This is just Jeff’s own joy and kinks on display: food and skin, toys and tits. It’s Dionysican, stupid, real and – whisper it – kind of good.

Advertising
  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • price 0 of 4
  • Bankside

The cost of trade isn’t just financial. The goods we consume have historically been paid for in blood too, in actual lives. And this human cost of the history of trade is at the heart of this year’s Turbine Hall installation. Ghanaian artist El Anatsui has draped the cavernous space in vast reams of fabric. The first is a huge red and gold sail, a symbol of the transatlantic trade of goods and people, and how ships ferried both across the ocean. Many of the slaves from West Africa were forcefully sent to work on sugar plantations to fuel the alcohol industry, creating spirits which would then be sent to Europe before making their way back to West Africa. Now look close: that gleaming golden sail is made of bottle caps. It’s a whole circular economy of trade, goods, lives, culture and history, billowing in the Turbine Hall. In the back of the space, a vast black sheet hangs from the ceiling to the floor, made of brandy and whisky bottle tops, flattened and knitted together. It could be a fence for containing, a wall for defending, it could be a crashing wave. Whatever it is, it ripples with the same symbolism as the sail: Africa, trade, exploitation, countless bodies.  The central work – human-like forms which coalesce into a globe if you stand in the right spot – is too easily dwarfed by the bigger pieces. And those big pieces are in turn dwarfed by the Turbine Hall. It’s just such an enormous, impossible space to deal with, in this doesn't deal with it as others have.  But i

  • 4 out of 5 stars
  • Art
  • price 0 of 4
  • Bow

There’s an old Jewish joke about a guy emigrating to America. A friend tells him he’ll never make it in the USA with a Jewish name, so he picks a good gentile moniker. But when he gets to the border, it slips his mind. He says ‘Ach! Shoyn fergesin!’ (Yiddish for ‘I've forgotten!’). The official replies ‘Sean Ferguson, welcome to the United States of America’. As artist and writer Joshua Leon shows in his Chisenhale exhibition, names are malleable things for Jews; signifiers that can be twisted and altered to allow you to better fit in, to integrate, to avoid the crushing pressure of antisemitic discrimination. Bob Dylan’s real name is Robert Zimmerman, Joey Ramone’s was Jeffrey Hyman, Kirk Douglas was Issur Danielovitch, and on and on. Leon’s grandfather was born Kurt Hutter, but in the programmes to accompany his musical performances (shown here behind yellowed glass) over the course of his career in the UK, he became Ken or Curtis, and when he left for Israel, he became David.This nominative malleability is at the heart of Leon’s sparse show. There are two letters silhouetted in the window, an O and an E. Are they the missing pieces of the C, H and N on the front of the gallery? Did the former owner of this old veneer factory, Morris Cohen, delete the vowels? Why? To hide his jewishness? To fit into an unwelcoming society? To fly under the radar as fascism gripped 1940s Europe? What has been erased? What story is going untold?  A speaker plays a single isolated violin from

Advertising
  • Kids
  • price 0 of 4
  • London

Chelsea isn't exactly one of London's cheaper neighbourhoods, but this Easter they're laying on a fun family entertainment that's totally free gratis. The charity Elephant Family is teaming up with Clarence Court eggs to fill SW10 with 12 ovoid sculptures, boasting designs by big name artsy types including handbag creator Anya Hindmarch and artist Philip Colbert. Download the official map here or just wander round town and see how many you can spot. 

  • Art
  • price 0 of 4
  • Finchley Road

Find out what the UK's most promising fine art graduates have been up to in this annual showcase of up-and-coming talent from across the UK. 

WTTDLondon

Recommended
    You may also like
    You may also like
    Bestselling Time Out offers
      Advertising