Things to do in London today

London Month Of The Dead’s annual programme returns this spooky season to get you in the mood for Halloween with a programme of more than 60 fascinatingly macabre events investigating our city’s relationship with death. The line-up offers a plethora of ghostly tours that will take you around crypts, cemeteries, undertakers, execution sites and other eerie locations across the city, alongside talks  exploring everything from the study of human decomposition and the psychology of fear to the theme of murder in art and the criminal history of necrophilia. Highlights of this year’s programme also include a five hour immersive workshop where you can try your hand at some forensic anthropology, a screening of the original Nosferatu with live musical accompaniment, a magic show inside West Norwood Cemetery, an insect mounting workshop at the Kensal Green Cemetery and a circus-themed Halloween party at Soho’s Century Club. It doesn’t get more gothic than that! Check out the full programme here. 

It feels a bit like Oktoberfest all year round at Munich Cricket Club, but it really takes the Bavarian joy up a notch as the season approaches. From mid September til the end of October, the spirit of the fest will take over its Canary Wharf, Tower Hill and Victoria locations. Expect foaming steins, platters of sausage and a live oompah band to get the vibes flying. Dancing on tabletops is encouraged – just be careful not to slip on any saus. The festivities also include the ceremonial tapping of the Oktober barrel, straight from Munich, plus games, silliness and surprises. There's also a bottomless cheese fondue brunch for anyone looking to test their digestive system to its very limits. 

Do you spend your time in London seeking out the best dirty martini? Or judging every barman by their daquri-making skills? Then get yourself to London Cocktail Week where the city’s inventive and innovative cocktail makers will be shaking up exciting and unusual concoctions to sink back. Over 200 bars across the capital will take part, including Nipperkin, Seed Library and Swift. Pick up a wristband in advance, or at any participating bar, and sip your way around London, tasting tried-and-trusted classics and new recipes. The event is all not-for-profit, with funds being redirected back to the bars involved, helping support the people behind the drinks.

Bermondsey Bierkeller claims to offer 'London's most authentic Oktoberfest celebration,' and while that's not something we're necessarily qualified to adjudicate on, it does sound pretty damn Bavarian. This underground cellar is serving up a revolving programme of Munich-style fun from September 20 til the end of October. On Thursdays and Fridays, that means Oompah bands and DJs, while things get a bit more glitzy on Saturday nights, with fire-eaters, stilt-walking German wenches, jugglers and more. Or head over on Saturday afternoon for a bottomless Bavarian brunch with beer and bratwurst galore. 

Photography fans will want to train their lenses east this October. Annual month-long festival PhotoMonth is celebrating the printed image in venues from Mile End to Clerkenwell to Hackney to Deptford. An eclectic array of spaces will exhibit photography, including big institutions like Whitechapel Gallery, indie venues including Four Corners, and unusual locations such as shops, restaurants and cafes. The festival’s hub is at Art Pavilion in Mile End, which will display a group exhibition called ‘Longing’. There'll also be a new exhibition from Zed Nelson called ‘The Anthropocene Illusion’, which interrogates the troubled relationship between humans and the environment. There’ll also be around 50 pop-up exhibitions at locations across east London: download the fest’s interactive map to find them all. 

Soho beer palace Albert’s Schloss is going all out for Oktoberfest this year, serving Bavarian themed revelries to central London crowds. The Alpine-themed beer hall and ‘cook haus’ is offering three weeks of worth of festivities including a traditional keg tapping ceremony, a sausage eating contest, oompah brass band performances, a best Lederhosen competition, loads of games and all the usual daily performances from the resident Haus band. Entry is free, just turn up and get ready to fröhlich.

The seemingly unstoppable David Attenborough has achieved more since hitting retirement age than most of us - let’s be honest, all of us - will achieve in our entire lifetimes. This new immersive film is his second major project since turning 99 in May, following his more traditional documentary Ocean. Produced by Open Planet Studios, Our Story sees the Jerwood Gallery at the Natural History Museum transformed into a smaller version of the Lightroom in King’s Cross (a sort of projection-based theatre). While ‘immersive’ is a word exhausted by overuse, ‘immersive documentary’ is emerging as a fairly distinct genre with clear hallmarks. As with the Lightroom’s shows, Our Story is based around powerful digital projectors beaming the film onto the four walls of the space, wrapping around the surfaces so there are different images whichever direction you look. You are indeed immersed. It’s still a narrative documentary film, in which Sir David tells us the story of the planet from fiery, lifeless rock to the advent of mankind to a possible future. Attenborough narrates, and appears at the start and end. There’s a fair smattering of expectedly dazzling wildlife footage. But Our Story isn’t really a nature doc in the style of Attenborough’s most famous works, and rather than painstakingly captured original footage of animals, it uses pre-existing stuff plus heavy use of CGI to supplement its storytelling. Occasionally this feels like a minor letdown: though they’re not trying to...

One of London's longest-standing Oktoberfest celebrations unfolds each year in a Bavarian beer tent, which pitches up first in Finsbury Park, then on the green outside Hammersmith station. Inside you'll find trad revelry aplenty, with waiting staff sporting dirndl and lederhosen and amber suds brewed by Bavaria Fester Brewery that can be enjoyed at long sharing tables. Ticket prices vary massively, from student deals to VIP packages, so there's an option for every budget. You can wash all that delicious bratwurst, schnitzel and brezel down with a delicious beer. Bottoms up (if you can, those steins are heavier than you think!). 

This King’s Cross Lightroom now has surely the weirdest repertoire of any venue in London, possibly the world. With an oeuvre based around massive megabit projection-based immersive films, its shows so far have been a David Hockney exhibition, a Tom Hanks-narrated film about the moon landings, a Vogue documentary and a visualiser for Coldplay’s upcoming album. It’s such a random collection of concepts that it’s hard to say there was or is anything ‘missing’ from the extremely esoteric selection of bases covered. But certainly, as the school summer holidays roll around it’s very welcome to see it add an overtly child-friendly show to its roster. Bar a short Coldplay break, Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs will play daily at Lightroom from now until at least the end of October half-term. It is, as you would imagine, a dinosaur documentary. And indeed, if the name rings a specific bell it’s because it’s culled from the David Attenborough-narrated Apple TV series of the same name. It’s quite the remix, though: Attenborough is out, and Damian Lewis is in, delivering a slightly melodramatic voiceover that lacks Sir David’s colossal gravitas but is, nonetheless, absolutely fine. Presumably Attenborough is absent because he’s very busy and very old, because while the film reuses several of the more spectacular setpieces from the TV series, it’s sufficiently different that repurposing the old narration would be a stretch. Any child with any degree of fondness for the...

A world-first is on its way to the British Museum in ‘Ancient India: Living Traditions’. The new exhibition is the first ever to consider early Indian sacred art through a global, pluralistic lens. It takes visitors on a journey to the roots of three major world religions – Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism – through the emergence of the country’s sacred art, and looks at how ancient religious practice has shaped living traditions today, plus the daily lives of around 2 billion people across the globe. In the exhibition, you’ll find over 180 objects, including 2,000-year-old sculptures, paintings, drawings and manuscripts. The whole thing was pulled together in close collaboration with an advisory panel of practising Buddhists, Hindus and Jains, who helped shape the exhibition into what promises to be an intriguing triumph.

Is the era of the big celebrity Hamlet over? I mean, probably not: the play is 400 years old, and some seasonal variation is to be expected. Nonetheless, after a period where it felt like you couldn’t move for an Andrew Scott, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Sheen, Maxine Peake, Tom Hiddleston, Rory Kinnear, Paapa Essiedu, Michelle Terry etcetera etcetera playing the Dane, we’ve reached the midpoint of the ‘20s with very few sleb takes at all ( really only one – Cush Jumbo – in London). Does this matter? Not necessarily, but maybe there’s a truth that we overdid it a bit last decade, and now there’s a cultural hangover. The ones we have got in the ’20s have tended to be smaller and weirder: witness the Globe’s intriguingly low key Hamlet-as-a-psychopath take a couple of years back; recall that weirdy Radiohead/Hamlet mashup from the RSC.  I’d say the National Theatre’s first production of the play since 2010 – Rufus Norris was the first artistic director to simply not stage it – falls reasonably squarely into the ‘indie Hamlet’ box.  Hiran Abeysekera begins Robert Hastie’s production as a sardonic, melancholy prince who feels adrift in life after the sudden death of his dad and the even more sudden remarriage of his mum Gertrude to his uncle Claudius. He’s funny: some of Hamlet’s early wisecracks usually feel like forced ‘theatre humour’, but here, for instance, the line about the leftover funeral nibbles being reused at the wedding feels in keeping with a man who seems...

  At the National Theatre last Christmas, Max Webster’s vividly queer take on Oscar Wilde’s magnum opus felt quite a lot like The Ncuti Gatwa Show. Back on stage for the first time since he hit the big time, the Doctor Who actor’s stupendously arch take on dashing young protagonist Algernon Montcrieff had an ultra-knowing quality that defined the production. It’s very, very obvious that in Webster’s take, Algenon and his cousin-slash-BFF Jack are meant to be closeted gay men (it begins with a dragged up Algie writhing away at a grand piano, and doesn’t get noticiably straighter). But whereas Gatwa’s sardonically adult interpretation of Algernon seemed very aware of his own sexuality, that’s not necessarily the case in the West End cast. Gatwa’s replacement is fellow Russell T Davies alumnus Ollie Alexander, and he plays Algie with a waspish dandyishness that feels childish, not adult, a little boy roleplaying his whirlwind romance with Jessica Whitehurst’s bolshy Cicily. Likewise, Nathan Stewart-Jarrett‘s Jack is basically a gigantic overgrown puppy, wagging his tail in delight at the attentions of Kitty Hawthorn’s Gwendolyn, but with zero sexual intent.  All four ‘lovers’ go about their relationships with the breezy silliness of a group of primary schoolers playing mummies and daddies. Webster’s interpretation amps up Wilde’s wit by unburdening it of any need for us to believe in the romance. Indeed, the contrived plotting – Bunburying, the women only being into guys...

Alice Birch’s Romans: A Novel is a tiny bit like a British feminist version of The Lehman Trilogy, if the three Lehman brothers were replaced by the Roman siblings - three seemingly immortal, semi-allegorical, deeply damaged brothers whose brutal childhoods in the Victorian era have disastrous consequences for the next 150 years of humanity. The first new play in aeons from the author of modern classics Anatomy of a Suicide and Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, Birch’s Romans is a bleakly irrelevant epic drama with a touch of Pyncheon-esque humour that centres on Kyle Soller’s Jack – undoubtedly the protagonist – plus his brothers: the sadistic, hugely successful Marlow (Oliver Johnstone) and the gentle, fucked up, possibly a serial killer Edmund (Stuart Thompson). They exist between the Victorian age and the present day without ever seeming to get past middle age. ‘My father wanted only sons – he had to get through three dead daughters to get to us’ intones Jack at the beginning. Wrapped in a huge scarf the Andor star kicks matters off playing Jack as a sweet young boy: a little hooked on the gung ho propaganda of the British Empire, but fundamentally a charming little thing who loves his mum and can’t imagine a world without her. Alas, she dies in childbirth, just as he has a strange encounter with his uncle John, an unsettling, blood-soaked figure returned from an unspecified Victorian war.  Things go downhill: Jack and his brother Marlow are sent away to boarding school...

Arguably the entire point of the first play to be programmed at the National Theatre by its new boss Indhu Rubasingham comes around five minutes from the end – after the actual plt has wrapped up – when Ukweli Roach’s Dionysus adds the mantle of ‘god of theatre’ to his celestial portfolio and dedicates the NT’s Olivier theatre to us. And if the hour and 40 minutes that precede this moment are messy, I’d say they are entertainingly messy.  Bacchae is of course based on Euripides’s classic Greek tragedy nasty of the same name, and is the debut play from Nima Taleghani. He’s hitherto been better known as an actor, and while his biggest gig is Heartstopper, I knew him from Jamie Lloyd’s gorgeously rhythmic-but-serious Cyrano de Bergerac of a few years back. I’d wondered if his hip-hoppy take on Euripides might be similarly solemn. In fact it’s nothing of the sort: colourful, irreverent and frequently goofy, its sillier moments reminded me of those hip hop Shakespeare plays that sometimes pop up at the Edinburgh Fringe (The Bomb-itty of Errors and such). It begins with the redoubtable Clare Perkins introducing us to her all-female posse of dysfunctional Dionysus worshippers, aka the Bacchae. ‘Not even Zeus can steal my thunder, fam’ she declares. It’s fun to spend time with them, as they swear and argue and rage, but there’s the nagging sense that it’s not clear where their story is going. Frankly it also seems a bit unexpected that a male writer would be out to reclaim Bacchae...

Proving you’re never too old to make your London stage debut, the great Susan Sarandon will do so aged 78 as she shares the title role of this acclaimed drama by Tracy Letts with our own Andrea Riseborough. Both brilliant screen actors who have drifted away from the stage, it’s coup for Matthew Warchus to have bagged them for his UK premiere production of Letts’s intriguing sounding play that tells the life story of its title character in willfully jumbled, mosaic-like order. It’s the first production in Warchus’s final season in charge at the Old Vic and will see the theatre reconfigured into an in the round staging that wil remain in place for the whole season.

Read our review of The Lady from the Sea here. Ibsen’s 1888 play about a woman named Ellida at the heart of a love triangle between her safe husband Edward and a dangerous ex-lover referred to only as The Stranger gets staged relatively frequently: the last major London production was at the Donmar back in 2017. But it rarely gets the full West End celebrity Hedda Gabler/A Doll’s House/The Master Builder treatment – you’re probably looking at a late-’70s production at the Roundhouse starring Vanessa Redgrave for its last and really only really big outing in this country. Until now. In a year otherwise dominated by musicals and Shakespeare plays, the Bridge’s big autumn show is a new version of Ibsen’s play but Aussie auteur Simon Stone, that will mark the professional stage debut of Swedish screen star Alicia Vikander as Ellida, joined by big name Brit Andrew Lincoln as Edward (his first show in front of an audience in 16 years, although he did the Old Vic’s A Christmas Carol to a webcam and an empty theatre in 2020). It’s hard to know exactly what to expect: Stone’s adaptations are modern, radical and often rather blunt – his Yerma for the Young Vic was explosively good; his Phaedra for the National Theatre was a bit silly; much of his prolific output simply hasn’t been seen in this country. Whatever the case, he’s a good get for the Bridge and if this production could probaby go either way, then that’s part of the Stone magic. 

Joe Orton’s breakthrough play Entertaining Mr Sloane hasn’t been revived in London in almost 20 years, and on this showing you can kind of see why. His dark comedy about a middle aged brother and sister who both fall for a sexy lodger with a shady past caused outrage in its day. But in 2025 it’s unforgivably tame and unfunny.  Or at least it is in this production from incoming Young Vic artistic director Nadia Fall. Despite the hot-pink posters and the presence of Jordan ‘the guy out of Rizzle Kicks’ Stephens in the title role, Fall’s take feels both wilfully dated – very much a ’60s period piece – and pointedly unfunny, trading the menacing comedy associated with Orton (‘dark farce’ is the usual term) for drab naturalism.  Tamzin Outhwaite is the best thing here as horny-but-tragic Kath. Yes, she throws herself at Stephens’s Sloane in cartoonish fashion. But someone has to get the party started, frankly, and besides she does a great job of portraying how damaged and desolate Kath is – her every pass at Sloane feels like a twisted gesture of love directed at her dead son. In fact her performance comes as close as anything to justifying the naturalistic route of the production – a major criticism of Orton is that his works now play as misogynistic, and Outhwaite’s take does a pretty good job in thoughtfully engaging with the trope of the bored, middle-aged woman, while also still being funny. Elsewhere, though, and Daniel Cerqueira does such a convincing job of playing her...

Irish writer Conor McPherson also directs this West End revival of the play that sent his career into the stratosphere when it opened at the Royal Court Theatre in 1997. It’s lost none of its gently haunting, melancholic pull in the intervening years. The Weir is a classic example of a play where nothing really seems to happen, but then you realise you’ve seen pretty much all of life pass by. Here, Brendon Gleeson steps into the shoes of garage owner Jack, who we meet chewing over his day with publican Brendan (Owen McDonnell) in an Irish boozer in County Leitrim. They’re joined by Jim (Sean McGinley). Their conversation is as familiar as the ritual of their drink orders in designer Rae Smith’s well realised pub set, with its fading knick-knacks. But this fireside beer routine is interrupted when the man they’ve been making snide remarks about, Finbar (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), appears with a newcomer to the village, Valerie (Kate Phillips), who stuns pub owner Brendan by ordering a glass of white wine. Soon, though, she is drawn into their world of storytelling. The cast quickly establishes a believable, lived-in chemistry. An effortlessly charismatic Gleeson sinks as deeply into Jack as if he’s grown gruffly out of his bar stool – crotchety and drily funny. McGinley imbues ponderous Jim with an amusing lack of self-awareness tempered, at times, by an almost noble sincerity. Meanwhile, restlessly springy, with an ever-ready grin and eager to impress people, Vaughan-Lawlor is...

This review is from 2023. SplitLip’s delightful spoof WW2 musical has been heading inexorably for the West End for something like five years now. It’s a fringe theatre comet that’s gathered mass and momentum via seasons at the New Diorama, Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios, and has now made impact in Theatreland – wiping out a West End dinosaur to boot, as it displaces ‘The Woman in Black’ after over 30 years at the Fortune Theatre. And it’s really hard to be anything but delighted for the company, which consists of David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Robert. All bar Hagan perform in the show, with Claire Marie Hall and Jak Malone rounding out the cast. This is very much their triumph. And though it’s been redirected for the West End by Robert Hastie, ‘Operation Mincemeat’ is at heart the same show it always was. There are no added backing dancers or bombastic reorchestrations. It’s slicker and bigger in its way, but still feels endearingly shambolic where it counts. It’s a very larky account of the World War 2 Operation Mincemeat, a ploy from British intelligence to feed the German army disinformation via a briefcase of false war plans strapped to a corpse that they hoped to pass off as a downed British pilot (yes, there was a recent film with exactly the same name, about exactly the same thing, and yes they do make a joke about this). The story centres on Charles Cholmondeley (Cumming), the socially inept MI5 operative who dreams up the plan, and...

Since leaving the Young Vic in 2018, David Lan’s canvas may have changed but his principles certainly haven’t. Over 18 years in charge of the inflential Waterloo theatre he programmed bold work founded on unswerving morals, often foregrounding the lives of less fortunate people around the world. In 2021, in his first big project as a free agent, he oversaw the global tour of a huge puppet called Little Amal to highlight the plight of displaced children. And it’s a deep well of empathy that continues here with his first new play in almost 30 years.Set in the immediate fallout of the Second World War, with Germany ‘an open wound’, a worker for an agency called United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration stumbles across a mystery when she and her colleagues are trying to rehome displaced children. There are too many adopted kids in one small town.The reason is the unconscionable Lebensborn programme, Himmler’s invention, which sought to boost the Aryan race by kidnapping ‘perfect’ children from countries including Poland and Ukraine and giving them to Nazi families. Hundreds of thousands of them.Lan constructs a deeply researched, morally complex play based on interviews with journalist Gitta Serreny, who was part of the effort to reunite those children. It focuses on Juliet Stevenson’s idealistic UNRRA worker Ruth and a boy called Thomas who seeks her out many years later to demand answers about his past. Now a worn journalist, Ruth comes clean, summoning the...

To reach Life on the Land, the National Gallery’s exhibition on the nineteenth century French artist Jean-Francois Millet, you have to walk through rooms of the museum filled with centuries’ worth of grand portraits of society’s upper crust. On arrival, surrounded by dusky-toned renderings of outdoor labour, it might take a moment to adjust. Stoicism abounds here, its head bowed and its eyes averted. You won’t find any grandeur or pomp in this concise exhibition of 15 muted and unflashy works, but you’ll experience an intensity rarely achieved in the portraits of nobility in the adjacent rooms. Millet’s images of peasants at work are rhythmic and visceral, unsentimental but deeply sensitive in their depictions of the beauty and harshness of a life working the land. The former can be found in the scenes’ wide horizons and the figures that punctuate them. The latter is best distilled in a detail of The Winnower (c. 1847–8), whose subject’s clogs are stuffed with hay to keep his feet warm. The exhibition’s centrepiece, L’Angelus (1859), is here on loan from the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Like most of the work here, its ornate gilded frame feels incongruous with the painting itself, in which two shadowy figures stand statuesque in a twilit field, a basket of potatoes sitting on the ground between them. They could be staring at the ground, though their eyes, obscured by the enclosing darkness, might be closed. Just visible through lacy mist on the horizon is a church spire. The...

‘Wherever conflict erupts, sexual violence is present.’ So it’s surprising that until 2025, the UK has never had a major exhibition on sexual violence in conflict. This year the Imperial War Museum is hoping to shed light on the topic that remains widely under-discussed.  Through first-person testimonies, objects, artwork, propoganda posters and papers, Unsilenced will investigate the different ways in which sexual violence in conflict can manifest. It will span the untold stories of child evacuees, victims of trafficking, prisoners of war, and survivors from the First World War to present-day conflicts, and highlight the ongoing efforts of those fighting for justice and working to prevent conflict-related sexual violence. It’s expected to be a sobering, ground-breaking exhibition.  NB: This exhibition includes cases of rape, sexual humiliation, torture and child abuse in conflict. IWM advises that this exhibition is only suitable for those aged 16 or over.   

Young painter Rachel Jones has become one of the most powerful voices in contemporary abstraction, using her hyper-colourful visual language – filled with references to mouths and teeth – to explore ideas of identity. We’ve reviewed her many times, and even had her as one of ‘Future of London Art’ stars back in 2023. And now, she’s going to be the first ever contemporary artist to have a solo show in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s main exhibition space.

Turner Prize-nominated video artist Hilary Lloyd will present a major new commission at Studio Voltaire this autumn. Her new piece is centred all around the work of the playwright and TV writer Dennis Potter. Best known for his TV serials, Potter’s Brechtian techniques helped bring experimental and surreal television into the mainstream. Hilary Lloyd’s installation will combine audio and visual elements with archival materials and performative interludes. Central to the show is a series of short films featuring actors, producers and collaborators connected to Potter’s work and life, featuring Melvyn Bragg and Ken Trodd. Lloyd will explore themes central to Potter’s work including chronic illness, death, sex, abuse of power and class.  

The Cosmic House is one of those rare places deserving of the name ‘hidden gem’. A Victorian villa on a residential street near Holland Park station, it’s the former home of revered postmodernist landscape architect Charles Jencks, who renovated the building in the late 1970s with his wife Maggie and the architect Terry Farrell to earn its Grade I-listing. Remodelled into a liveable collage of cosmic references and playful mind-games, it can be interpreted as a mediation on our place in the universe via quantum physics, architecture and philosophy. But it’s also just an extraordinarily beautiful building; a masterpiece of light, shadow and symmetry.  Since 2021, the house has operated as a museum, and each year, the Jencks Foundation commissions an artist to respond to the surroundings. This time round, it’s a video work by Lithuanian-born musician Lina Lapelytė, composed of 12 screens dotted around the house to be hunted down like a game of hide and seek. Created in collaboration with five other artists, each screen shows a video of a musical performance taking place in the home, often right where you’re standing. In one film, singers assemble around the central spiral staircase: a dizzying kaleidoscopic shot of bodies circling a descending, twisting railing. On another screen, in the gallery basement, a performer sings a capella, sitting on the polished jade floor as light reflects in shards like a static disco ball. There is even a screen in the ‘Cosmic Loo’, complete...

Once again you can expect to see remarkable feats of astrophotography at the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition. It’s a chance to see magical views of both our own night sky and of galaxies far, far away. The winning spacey visions come from dozens of professional and amateur snappers in various categories including ‘Planets, Comets and Asteroids’, ‘Stars and Nebulae’, ‘Galaxies’ and ‘Young Astronomy Photographer of the Year’ for under-16s. Soar down to Greenwich to see the winners from 2025's competition on display. 

If you thought the National Gallery answered every question that could possibly be asked about what came after the impressionists in their huge blockbuster ‘After Impressionism’ show in 2023, you thought wrong. Because they’re coming back for another go with ‘Radical Harmony’, which will feature the work of the neo-impressionists, including pointilist masters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. It’s enough to drive you dotty.

If you thought the National Gallery answered every question that could possibly be asked about what came after the impressionists in their huge blockbuster ‘After Impressionism’ show in 2023, you thought wrong. Because they’re coming back for another go with ‘Radical Harmony’, which will feature the work of the neo-impressionists, including pointilist masters Georges Seurat and Paul Signac. It’s enough to drive you dotty.

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.

London’s cultural institutions are having a love affair with the New Romantics this year. First there was Outlaws, the Fashion and Textile Museum’s exhibition on the subversive fashion trends of 1980s London. Then the Tate Modern announced a major retrospective on pioneering fashion maverick Leigh Bowery. Now it’s the Design Museum’s turn to direct its attention towards the most flamboyant subculture of its era, via this exhibition on the Blitz club, the iconic (and we really don’t use that word lightly) Covent Garden nightclub where New Romanticism was born in 1979. Forty years after it closed, the trailblazing club’s atmosphere will be recreated through a ‘sensory extravaganza’ incorporating music, film, art, graphic design and some very ostentatious outfits. This will include several items that have never been on public display before, while some of the scene’s key figures have been involved in the development of the exhibition. Time to liberally apply the kohl eyeliner, fish out your frilliest shirt and whack on some Spandau Ballet: the 80s are back, baby!