Things to do in London this week

In 2025, Halloween falls on Friday October 31, which is great news for anyone who wants a ghoulishly good time without the haunting prospect of work the next day. The fun doesn’t start there. There’s plenty of fright-filled fun to be had throughout October, whether you want to watch horror films on the big screen, join a lantern-lit ghost tour, learn about London’s graveyards, carve pumpkins, or let your synthetic wigs down over themed cocktails. So when you’re after something strange in your neighbourhood, who ya gonna call? Time Out London, and our list of the best Halloween events London. 

Of all of the UK’s winter traditions, there’s nothing like gathering in a park in the nippy nights of early November to watch a pile of flaming wood and fireworks piercing the sky. Bonfire Night – aka Guy Fawkes Night –might sound strange to those unfamiliar with it, but it’s a great British tradition and one of the highlights of the second half of the year. London puts on a plethora of Bonfire Night and fireworks displays with sparkly skies, yummy street food and so much more. See our list of the best celebrations taking place this week. 

When chef Spasia Dinkovski closed Mystic Burek we were gutted, so thank goodness then for her return. Doma has taken over a kebab shop space in Sydenham, just across the road from the original Mystic Burek location. Open only at weekends, during the day Doma will serve grab-and-go second-generation Macedonian cuisine (including legendary filo pies on the last Saturday of every month), while Saturday and Sunday evenings will be reserved for special dinners, for which you’ll have to buy tickets in advance. Expect everything from Balkan barbecue to fried doughnut-esque mekici served with jam and cheese, sausage baps, stuffed cabbage sarma, loads of burek and baklava buns. 

If you’ve seen a ballet at the Royal Opera House, there’s a high chance you will be familiar with the work of Wayne McGregor. The ROH’s resident choreographer since 2006, the dance polymath brought a sleeker, more minimal and modern style of ballet, rooted in contemporary, to the Covent Garden stage. He has worked with numerous companies, including his own Studio Wayne McGregor, and even choreographed ABBA Voyage. Now Somerset House is staging a huge exhibition dedicated to McGregor’s three-decade-long repertoire, which includes ballets inspired by Virginia Woolf, Margaret Attwood, and 1980s sci-fi. Through a series of multi-sensory choreographic installations, performances and experiments, Infinite Bodies will explore how technology is used in dance choreography, music, and lighting, with works that incorporate motion capture, machine learning, AI interactivity, and digital imaging, alongside hybrid realities and robotics. 

Nick Payne’s new Royal Court play The Unbelievers isn’t the instant classic his last one (2012’s Constellations) was. But its star gives a turn that is absolutely, magnificently, unfettered Nicola Walker. Her unique gift for proper, nuanced acting filtered via an unshakeable deadpan grumpiness is harnessed to perfection as she plays a grieving mother whose sorrow and grief at the unexplained disappearance of her son has curdled into something darker and more disturbing. The play is set in three timelines, albeit heavily jumbled up and somewhat blurred. There’s the immediate aftermath of Oscar’s disappearance, a year on, and seven years on where Miram’s grief has metastasised into something truly monstrous. It is a remarkable performance from Walker, affecting, upsetting and often savagely hilarious, it grabs you instantly and paints a haunting but disarmingly funny portrait of grief turning into something else. 

Each year, the London Literature Festival aims to bring together readers of all ages to ‘celebrate the power of the written and spoken word’, with a big-name celebrity curator leading the charge. And excitingly, the 2025 edition will have singer-songwriter Rebecca Lucy Taylor (aka Self Esteem) in the hot seat. She'll be joined by Dolly Alderton for an event to launch her debut book, A Complicated Woman, followed by a night of music and poetry alongside multi-disciplinary artists Tom Rasmussen, Marged, Travis Alabanza, Seraphina Simone and Pam Ayres. Elsewhere, there'll be appearances from massive literary and cultural figures including Sebastian Faulks, Jimi Famurewa, Zadie Smith, Adam Buxton, Malala Yousafzai, Claire-Louise Bennett, Reese Witherspoon, Harlan Coben, Sayaka Murata, Chris Kraus, Alexis Wright, Bora Chung and Simon Armitage. As ever, there'll be plenty of opportunities for kids to get involved too, with events with the children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce and a run of Mog the Forgetful Cat.

Doc’n Roll Film Festival shines a spotlight on some of the movers and shakers who’ve lit up the music world with intriguing and eclectic sounds. This year, the programme covers a wealth of genres and scenes, and takes over the capital’s cinema staples like the Barbican, BFI Southbank, Dalston's Rio and more. The fest kicks off with I Was a Teenage Sex Pistol, punk legend Glen Matlock’s cinematic memoir. The subversive mood continues with How Tanita Tikaram Became A Liar, an anti-documentary directed by filmmaker Natacha Horn, who is also this maverick music icon's wife. Rockers Don't Stop plunges us into the world of 1980s dance pioneers, Not Indian Enough is an exploration of King Khan's roots in indigenous Canada and the devastating impacts of colonialism, and Boy George & Culture Club is a new look back at a storied London scene. 

The summer holidays feel like they’re barely over, but suddenly it’s cold and dark and you have to amuse the kids for at least another week. In other words, welcome to October half term. Despair not, however: there’s always loads to for kids to do in London at this time of year, not least because they blessedly coincide with the run-up to Halloween. Here’s our roundup of all the best things to do with your children this October half-term. 

While the millennia-old union between planet Earth and humanity might not be the first coupling that springs to mind when you think of unhealthy relationships, there’s no denying it is pretty toxic. The Earth gives! Humanity takes! The Earth had boundaries, and humanity violated ‘em. Could the climate crisis, with its ruinous wildfires and unforgiving floods be a scorned Earth’s way of telling humanity to do one? It’s a theory! Or at least, it’s the premise of this pop musical romcom from Ellie Coote (book) and Jack Godfrey’s (music and lyrics). Earth and Humanity (aka Hu) are personified as a couple and under this guise, their entire, increasingly troubling partnership is explored. Over the course of one breathless hour of back-to-back songs, the big breakthroughs of our species are reframed as our rocking what could have been a peaceful, happy relationship. A toxic relationship is a clever lens through which to analyse humanity’s self-serving greed, and framing the climate emergency as a romcom musical is nothing short of inspired.

The radical work of Indian artist Mrinalini Mukherjee – known for her fantastical and overtly sexual sculptures made from woven fibres – is at the centre of the upcoming RA exhibition that spans a century of South Asian art. Telling the story of Indian Modernism, more than 100 works comprising sculpture, painting, drawing, textiles, ceramics and printmaking, from a constellation of avant-garde artists, many whom were Mukherjee’s mentors, friends and family, will be on display. 

The king of creature features, Guillermo del Toro resurrects Mary Shelley’s literary creation in all its full-on gaudy gothic glory. Oscar Isaac is Baron Victor Frankenstein, who is rescued from a monster on the ice by the crew of a ship of polar explorers. He is a man with a tale to tell of how he got there: but, like Dewey Cox in Walk Hard, he has to start at the very beginning: with a childhood of a bad daddy (Charles Dance) and grief that drives an ambition to conquer death itself. From anatomy theatres to graveyards, Victor proceeds, a floppy-haired Byronic hero aided not by Igor but Christoph Waltz’s Herr Harlander, an arms dealer who is willing to fund Victor’s scientific research for his own ends. As with The Shape of Water, del Toro makes no secret of where his sympathy lies and who the real monsters are, but there are surprises here. Not least of which is how moved you might feel in the end. 

Looking for a wholesome, creative night out that doesn’t involve a hangover (unless you BYOB)? Token Studio in Tower Bridge offers relaxed, hands-on ceramics classes where you can spin, shape and decorate your own pottery piece. Whether you fancy throwing a pot on the wheel (£32) or painting a pre-made mug or plate (£23), it’s the perfect mix of fun, mindful and surprisingly therapeutic. And to top it all off, you can sip while you sculpt as it’s BYOB and super chill.

Buy a Token Studio session from just £23, only through Time Out Offers. 

From top secret D-Day documents, to hidden treasure maps, Secret Maps at the British Library will explore the relationship between mapping and secrecy, showing how maps from the 14th century to the present day were used to conceal knowlegde, control populations and create power. Visitors will see charts used by governments, armies, businesses, organisations, communities and individuals, and explore how these mysterious cartographies were used to disseminate, and hide, information, and sometimes purposefully decieve people. From a destroyed Ordnance Survey map from the General Strike of 1926, to landscapes that have been erased from official histories, Secret Maps will provide a new insight into the power of spatial information. 

An award-winning slice of life set on Paris’s margins set over 48 helter-skelter hours, Souleymane’s Story is the latest in a series of social realist dramas to tackle Europe’s migrant crisis from the perspective of African migrants. The Dardennes’ Tori and Lokita (2022), Alice Diop’s Saint Omer (2023), and Matteo Garrone’s fantastically-tinged Io Capitano (2024) have shared the stories behind the sensationalist headlines – and here’s another one to bring deep humanity and insight to this political football. Here, French director Boris Lojkine follows twenty-something protagonist, Souleymane Sangaré (Abou Sangaré) from Guinea who has become a cog in Paris’s exploitative gig economy, cycling frantically to deliver food orders to apartments across the city and thrusting bags of takeaway into the hands of Parisians who barely notice him. It’s a tough, unsparing and often heartbreaking look at life for the migrants who make the online world tick, and a jolt for those of us who use it unthinkingly.

As usual, beloved central London repertory cinema The Prince Charles will be showing more frightening films than Dracula has had bloody dinners during month-long season of spooky cinema this October. The wildly eclectic programme features almost 100 titles this year, encompassing everything from horror classics to niche B movies, all-night marathons and, of course, its famous Sing-A-Long-A Rocky Horror Picture Show (Oct 31 and Nov 1). Highlights of the programme include the original 1977 Suspiria, the original 1922 Nosferatu performed with a live score and several all-night marathons, including all six Final Destination films (Oct 25).

Hidden somewhere between a theme park, an escape room and a real-life video game, Phantom Peak isn’t just your average day out. This open-world adventure based in Canada Water invites you to explore a fictional steampunk town at your own pace, chatting to quirky characters, uncovering mysteries and slowly piecing together your own story.

With 11 unique trails, a rotating calendar of seasonal storylines, and a cast of live actors guiding your experience, no two visits are ever the same.

Get discounted adult tickets exclusively through Time Out Offers

Get a dose of hip hop history at Somerset House this autumn, where the first major solo exhibition from British photographer Jennie Baptiste will be displayed. Having photographed everyone from NAS, to Jay Z, Estelle and Biggie Smalls, Baptiste’s work spanning the last three decades has been at the forefront of R&B, hip hop, fashion and youth culture, as she documented the influence of Black British communities on culture and art from the 1990s to today. 

Frieze Sculpture returns for another year, transforming Regent's Park, one of London's prettiest green spaces, into a massive outdoor gallery. Expect massive sculptures curated by Fatoş Üstek, on the theme of ‘In the Shadows’, which means they'll be engage with the idea of darkness from many perspectives, whether that's inner darkness or the interplay between light and obscurity. The exhibition will be complemented by a programme of performances and talks, all free to the public.

If you fancy switching things up a bit and find yourself near Borough, why not roll up your sleeves at Comptoir Bakery's London Bridge workshop space? Choose from sessions where you’ll learn to craft buttery croissants and pain au chocolat, the cult-favourite Brionuts, or delicate tartelettes. Expert bakers—trained under culinary legends—will guide you through every step, from mixing the dough to perfecting the fillings. You’ll also nab a slick £20 apron to keep and plenty of fresh pastries to take home. Starting at just £69 per person or £118 for two, with over 30% off, it’s a delicious way to spend a few hours.

Get discounted workshop sessions, only through Time Out Offers

Peter Doig is one of the greatest living painters, an artist whose approach to hazy, memory-drenched figuration has had an enormous impact on the visual landscape of today. For his show at the Serpentine, he’s going well beyond the canvas, filling the gallery with speaker systems to explore the impact of music on his work. Does DJ-set-meets-art-exhibition sound like your idea of hell? Mine too, but it’s Doig, so it just might work. Maybe.