Things to do in London today

Great news for all young Egyptologists: there’s a wonderfully educational temporary exhibition currently running in London devoted to all things Ancient Egypt, that offers genuine insight into this most iconic of cultures via its informative displays and genuine awe via the copious numbers of thousands of years old artefacts on display. But enough about the Young V&A’s excellent Making Egypt exhibition. I’m here to talk about Tutankhamun: The Immersive Exhibition, a globe-trotting VR-enhanced attraction nominally devoted to the eponymous boy king of the eighteenth dynasty. How to put this? I’m not sure you’re likely to learn a lot, and there is something slightly dispiriting about the early sections, which are basically a standard museum-style experience except all the objects on display are gaudy replicas. I never really felt like I found out that much about Tutankhamun or the culture he came from at all, though the exhibition is better on Howard Carter, the eccentric British archaeologist who located the tomb in 1922.  However, after a couple of rooms, it gives up pretending to be a straight-up exhibition. In rapid succession we’re hit by a balls trippy 30-minute immersive film vaguely themed around Egyptian myths of creation and death; an even weirder VR film in which we’re cast as Tutankhamun himself, newly woken up in the afterlife; a ‘holographic’ film about mummification; and a more immersive second VR in which we can potter around the big man’s tomb. It kept my...

From screeching tube carriages and blaring rickshaws to the lulling podcast we listen to on our commute and the music that soundtracks our walks, noise is constantly shaping our lives, and in bigger, deeper ways than we might at first realise. The Baribican’s Feel the Sound exhibition promises to be a multi-sensory journey into our personal relationship with sound and an exploration of how the world of listening goes way beyond pure audio. Eleven commissions and installations will take over the Barbican Centre from the entrance on Silk Street to the Lakeside Terrace, all exploding visitors to frequencies, sound, rhythmic patterns and vibrations that define everything around us. Even the Centre’s underground car parks will be part action as it’s transformed into a club space. There’ll also be the chance to sing with a digital quantum choir and experience music without sound. Plus, look out for collabs with Boiler Room celebrating underground club culture, Joyride which will mix ‘boy racer’ subculture with DIY music communities and Nexus Studios which will fuse neuroscience and design to capture visitors’ emotional responses to music. This is ‘an invitation to awaken the senses, embrace our sonic world and discover the sound in each of us’, says the Barbican. Sounds like a hit.   

Helping replace Canary Wharf’s corporate image with something fun and family-friendly, Canada Square Park will be screening movies and sporting events up on its big screens this summer. There’s a packed programme of free movies, taking in everything from ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ (June 15), to ‘Invictus’ (September 23). There are two Bollywood movies on the bill, too – sci-fi action thriller ‘Ra.One’ (July 15) and life-affirming vacation film ‘Zindagi Na Milegi Dobara’ (August 3). It’s very much a BYO set-up, so bring your own blankets and snacks – though there’s a Waitrose nearby for any last-minute picnic needs.

Roll up ageing ravers, curious young clubbers and anyone who just fancies hitting a dance floor and still being home in time for Emmerdale. This hour-long virtual reality experience promises to transport you back to the height of the Acid House era during 1989’s Summer of Love. Having premiered at the London Film Festival back in 2022, the hour-long experience takes over the The Pit at the Barbican for ten weeks this summer. The handiwork of filmmaker Darren Emerson and is soundtracked by some of the era’s biggest bangers, from Joey Beltram’s ‘Energy Flash’ to Orbital’s ‘Chime’. Sadly, there’s no discount for anyone old enough to remember Shoom. 

Founded during the Arab Spring in 2011, biennial festival Shubbak has become one of London’s largest celebrations of contemporary Arab and South West Asian & North African (SWANA) culture. Engaging with the hopes, ambitions and artistic excellence of this part of the world, the 2025 edition of Shubbak (which means ‘window’ in Arabic) features a plethora of performances, exhibitions and community-driven events scheduled over three weeks across a diverse array of venues, including the Southbank Centre, The Place, Battersea Arts Centre, The Garden Cinema and Mimosa House. This year’s festival launches at the Southbank Centre with The People’s Catwalk (May 23), a powerful and inclusive showcase of SWANA fashion modelled by models of all shapes and sizes. This is followed by the largest Palestinian theatre production staged in the UK for 25 years, as Palestine theatre collective Khashabi Ensemble performs striking visual theatre piece MILK (May 24-25).  The plight of Palestine features heavily across the rest of the programme too. Camden’s Theatro Technis plays host to a week-long programme of Palestinian theatre curated by PalArts (May 26-Jun 2), while P21 Gallery hosts an exhibition on The Art of the Palestinian Poster (May 23-Jun 14),  the New Cross Inn hosts the latest edition of fundraising gig series Punks For Palestine (May 26) and the Barbican stages Music For Palestine (June 6) featuring a trio of Palestinian acts.  These are just some of the 40+ events encompassing...

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.

The Natural History Museum is capable of turning in some pretty giddy exhibitions: notably, the recent-ish Fantastic Beasts: The Wonder of Nature revolved around a series of fictional magical animals invented by JK Rowling. Fair warning, though: the venerable museum’s first ever space-based exhibition is pretty sober stuff, that steadfastly refuses to sensationalise its subject. If you want to know what an alien invasion might look like or how realistic Star Wars is then there isn’t a lot for you in Space: Could Life Exist Beyond Earth? But if you’re interested in the actual question ‘is there life out there and how would we detect it?’ then this is the exhibition for you, made with the usual sophistication and care that defines the NHM’s temporary exhibits (which are always considerably less faded and more contemporary than its permanent collections). The entire exhibition is dimly lit, with soothing background music playing everywhere – the vibe is serene spaciousness, graceful emptiness and cosmic stillness. We begin on Earth, with the first galleries examining the extraterrestrial origins of life here. Nobody can exactly say how life on Earth first came to be, but there’s little doubt that its building blocks – carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen and water – were brought to us by asteroids, of which there are several bits here, some of which you can even touch. The carefully curated exhibition instils an appropriate amount of awe Correctly contextualised, it’s hard not...

This review is from 2022, when the show ran under the name Jurassic World: The Exhibition at ExCel London. It returns for 2025 in tweaked form at NEON in Battersea.  It is an irrefutable law of nature that every London summer requires some sort of dinosaur-based family extravaganza or other, from the puppet fun of ‘Dinosaur World Live’ at the Open Air Theatre to the distinctly wobbly animatronic dinosaurs of last year’s ‘Jurassic Encounter’. ‘Jurassic World: The Exhibition’ has a distinct edge over most of the competition insofar as it’s an official tie-in with the deathlessly popular Jurassic World/Park films. To be honest, though, this is a slightly double-edged sword: it’s cool that we get encounters with ‘Jurassic World’ signature beasties Indominus Rex and Blue the Velociraptor. But a few pre-recorded appearances from the films’ extensive casts – who’ve gamely contributed to various video game spin-offs – might have given it that little something extra. Or just a little more recognisable Jurassic Worldliness. The problem with being the ‘official’ live spin-off from a multibillion-dollar film franchise is that it raises expectations high for what is, ultimately, a solid mid-budget kids’ show with average effects, containing a lot of very generic hallmarks of the summer dinosaur extravaganza (notably the classic baby dinosaur hand-puppets).  It’s still pretty diverting. A starting sequence where we’re ushered on to a ‘ferry’ to visit Isla Nublar, the setting of the...

Fancy going to an immersive experience that will take you through the history of British music? Live Odyssey will open in the capital of British rock, Camden ofc, in May this year. The musical experience will take visitors through the ages, from the Beatles’ ’60s, to ’90s Britpop and beyond. Don’t forget to wear your Fred Perry polo, because the highlight of the exhibition promises to be a never-before-seen live hologram performance from The Libertines, using ‘state-of-the-art’ tech. 

This new, free exhibition at the British Library is aimed at young audiences aged two to nine and offers them and their families a chance to explore the institution’s gargantuan collection via imagination and play. The exhbition is divided into four themed areas: a library, outer space, the depths of the jungle, and to the bottom of the ocean floor. Works they’ll enounter include a Victorian record from the Library’s Sound Archive featuring animal sounds, a near-200-year-old photo of the Moon by Welsh astronomer Theresa Dillwyn Llewelyn, a colourful nineteenth century Thai manuscript depicting elephants frolicking and a mapby sixteenth century cartographer Abraham Ortelius that depicts an Iceland surrounded withsea monsters. In other words, it’s not just a collection of dusty tomes: any children with any curiousity about the world should be fascinated. It’s free but spaces are limited – online booking is advised. 

Nicholas Hytner’s exuberant 2019 take on A Midsummer Night’s Dream was simply too much fun to leave to the history books: what a joy it is to have it back. To bring you up to speed, it’s a show in the same lineage as the Bridge’s recent Guys and Dolls: designed by Bunnie Christie, half the audience sit in the round, while the other half stand on the floor where the fairy-filled action of Shakespeare’s comedy unfurls on mobile platforms that rise and fall around them (I stood, only cowards sit).  It is joyously queer: pretty much everyone in it gets a crack at snogging everybody else. And Hytner’s key textual intervention is swapping the bulk of fairy monarchs Oberon and Titania’s lines, meaning that it’s JJ Feild’s Oberon – not Susannah Fielding’s Titania – who has it off with Emmanuel Akwafo’s exuberant Bottom. Has much changed since last time? It doesn’t feel vastly different conceptually, though new leads Feild and Fielding put a different spin on what are very explicitly the lead roles. As is tradition they also play the characters of Theseus and Hippolyta in the bookending Athens-set sections, but there is the strong suggestion that they in fact play the same characters throughout.  Feild is harder edged and more menacing than his predecessor Oliver Chris in the Athens sections; when playing Oberon there’s a softness and vulnerability there. It’s a performance sympathetic to the production’s suggestion that the bulk of the play is Theseus’s dream, in which his cruel...

  General advice is to stay away from hornets’ nests, especially if you are the West End and you want people to have a nice time and pay lots of money for a ticket. Mark Rosenblatt’s debut play goes against general advice. In fact he finds the biggest hornets’ nests he can and prods at all of them, and sees what comes flying out. What does come out is pretty spectacular. Despite recently winning what seemed like every single award that had ever been invented, and turning round the faltering fortunes of the Royal Court Theatre, there was never a guarantee that his play about (‘about’ seems like a fairly inadequate word) Roald Dahl’s antisemitism – and the deep trenches of dispute about Israel – would work in the West End. At the Royal Court you expect that kind of politics. The West End is for musicals and celebrities.But it does work, just as brilliantly. First off there’s John Lithgow (also all the awards) stooping and scowling his way into Dahl, charming in his grandpa-ish grumping at the beginning. He’s a walking metaphor: a giant – of literature, of stature – and big. But friendly? If you knew nothing about him except the good stuff – Charlie, Matilda, Mr Fox – you’d be charmed by his strong will, his passion and compassion. It’s 1983, he’s got a bad back, his house is being noisily renovated, he’s recently got engaged, and has a new book coming out so no wonder he’s grumpy. When his publisher suggests he moves temporarily to a nearby cottage, his crabby reply is, ‘I...

This review is from London Road’s original 2011 run at the National Theatre. It will return in 2025 as part of the final season of work from outgoing NT boss Rufus Norris, who directed the show originally. Casting is TBA. With garlands of critical praise now wreathing Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s flower-drenched documentary musical, it’s a measure of how genuinely ground-breaking it is that ‘London Road’ remains a hard sell on paper. A journey through four years in the life of the street in Ipswich where Suffolk Strangler Steve Wright lived, the book and lyrics are derived from interviews conducted with the residents of London Road. (Verbatim is Blythe’s modus operandi – she wrote a residents’-eye view of a Hackney gunman in 2003.) Beginning with a Neighbourhood Watch meeting, ending with the second annual London Road in Bloom competition and directed with low-key sparseness by Rufus Norris, this is as far away from chorus lines and jazz hands as it gets. Three things make ‘London Road’ extraordinary. First are Cork’s verbatim songs. If you can make something with the chorus ‘Everyone is very, very nervous and unsure of everything, basically’ sound both beautiful but also true to the original sentiment – and Cork does – then that is raw humanity captured in music. Second is the outstanding ensemble: unlike previous Blythe productions, where actors parrot the recorded voices which they hear via headphones, here Cork’s manipulation of words means the cast have had to learn...

This musical masterpiece is fiddly in more ways than one. Written by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick, and Joseph Stein, 1964’s Fiddler on the Roof is a brilliant but disarmingly complicated work, for which every production must find a balance between the lighter stuff – shtetl nostalgia and the weapons-grade quipping of its milkman protagonist Teyve – and the fact that it’s a story about the end of rural Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement, that clearly foreshadows the Holocaust.  Recent British productions have tended to play up the grit of the story, which is based on the Yiddish short stories of bona fide shtetl dweller Sholem Aleichem. However, that can have its own pitfalls when the writing is undoubtedly more funny than sad. But director Jordan Fein’s superb take – a transfer from Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre – manages to find its own, brilliantly idiosyncratic balance. The tone here is, for the most part, drolly surreal, a dark clown show underpinning everything from the gags to the choreography (by Julia Cheng) to Fein’s penchant for a weird tableau. Jewish life in the village of Anatevka has a constant absurdity to it as Adam Dannheisser’s Teyve must attempt to placate his five daughters and their extremely modern ideas about love while also sucking up to the local Russian constable in the hope the pogroms will be gentler. Key to all this working is US actor Dannheisser as Teyve. Avoiding the obvious temptation to tackle the role as if he’s delivering a stand up...

The great Irish playwright Conor McPherson returns from his long absence with a bang this year. Next up at the Old Vic is a return for his hit Dylan’s musical Girl from the North Country; later this autumn he’s the adapting playwright for the stage version of The Hunger Games. But before that is what the real McPherson heads have been waiting for: The Brightening Air, his first original play since The Night Alive in 2013. It’s a slow, wistful start, the dial firmly tuned to ‘Chekhov’. The setting is a semi-dilapidated County Sligo farmhouse, at some point in the ‘80s. McPherson - who also directs - meticulously builds up a sprawling cast of characters centring on the trio of siblings who inherited the farm from their father. There’s intense, troubled Stephen (Brian Gleeson), who does most of the running of the place; there’s train-mad Billie (Rosie Sheehy), whose tar-thick accent and general lairiness briefly distracts you from the fact she’s obviously on the spectrum and incapable of independent living; and there’s Dermot (Chris O’Dowd), a deeply annoying, reasonably successful businessman. Dermot has long since moved out, but the occasion of their reunion is the arrival of their uncle Pierre (Seán McGinley), a blind, discredited priest who they regard with a mix of fondness and pity.  McPherson probably has a couple more characters than he strictly speaking needs here, but it’s still deft stuff, a slow-burn, bittersweet drama about a family finally disintegrating under...

Stephen Sondheim didn’t finish his final musical Here We Are, something we can easily determine by the fact there aren’t any songs in the second half.  He did however give his blessing for it to be performed – he wasn’t on his deathbed at the time, but having reached the age of 91 with at least six songs left to write for a show he’d been working on for over a decade, I guess he knew this was likely to be its final form. And so here we are. Sondheim’s last gasp is a relatively breezy mash-up of the plots of two seminal Luis Buñuel films, with music and lyrics by the great man and book by US author David Ives – that is to say the second half of Joe Mantello’s production is basically a David Ives play. It’s hard to know how to assess this thing fairly, but it’s reasonable to say that if you’ve snagged a ticket you’re aware of the various caveats about the show’s composition and are prepared to be quite indulgent, so let’s approach it from that general perspective.  The first half roughly corresponds to Buñuel’s 1972 film The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and follows a group of ghastly rich people as they try and score some brunch, failing ever more weirdly at each attempt. If there aren’t necessarily any all-timers, Sondheim’s lyrics are delightfully flippant and spiky. And modern: it feels surreal for the guy who wrote West Side Story to be making snide references to Teslas and the works of Damian Hirst. But that’s Sondheim: it was presumably harder for him to finish...

There has been a note of enigma to the promotion of this new West End drama by largely unknown US playwright Lila Raicek. The official line is that it’s a response to Ibsen’s The Master Builder but not a rewrite, but there has been a pointed refusal - in cast interviews and other publicity - to say any more about the specifics of the play. Having now seen My Master Builder I’m not sure I’m any the wiser as to what the big secret was. Perhaps it’s simply that a full plot summary felt like it was virtually begging interviewers to ask star Ewan McGregor about the end of his first marriage. Or if we’re going for the idea that there was a more poetic mystery, I guess the big revelation is that the play is somewhat autobiographical. It’s *My* Master Builder because Raicek has incorporated her own life into it, or at least one experience (that she owns up to, anyway). She was invited to a posh dinner party and realised upon arrival that she’d been cast as a pawn in a weird psychosexual drama between her hosts, a married couple. First world problems and all that, but it gave her a route into updating Ibsen’s odd late play about a tortured architect haunted by a past encounter.  Henry Solness (McGregor) is a starchitect who lives in the Hamptons with his publisher wife Elena (Kate Fleetwood). They are throwing a party for the completion of a local arts centre he’s designed, that is intimately connected to the sad early death of their son. It doesn’t take long to determine their...

For a script penned in 1893, Mrs Warren’s Profession still feels remarkably fresh. Absence has probably made the heart grow fonder when it comes to George Bernard Shaw’s problem play. From the very beginning, it’s had a fraught staging history. In Victorian England there was general social outcry over its subject matter, and you can understand why: its attitude towards sex work as a functioning product of the capitalist labour market feels bracingly current even today. Yet upon first glance, director Dominic Cooke’s production is as traditional as they come; Chloe Lamford’s costumes are all lace and ruffles, and ‘by Jove!’ is exclaimed ad nauseum. But something darker bubbles beneath the surface, hinted at by the ghostly chorus of white-clad women who circle the stage. The words ‘prostitute’ or ‘brothel madam’ are never uttered – doing so in polite society would, of course, be wrong – not even by the titular Mrs Warren (Imelda Staunton) whose profession it is. Yet Staunton, as one would expect, is able to create a character rich with contradiction in this vivid production. There’s nothing ahistorical in her performance, yet Mrs Warren’s monologues could be quoted verbatim by anti-criminalisation campaigners today without the batting of an eyelid. The version of England that greets us, however, is worlds away from Mrs Warren’s seedy life. In fact, it’s her daughter Vivie (Bessie Carter, Staunton’s real-life offspring) who greets us from the revolve stage, which Lamford...

Occupying the gap left by the mighty Frozen at the huge Theatre Royal Drury Lane, Hercules is a fascinating choice of Disney film for the megacorp to adapt as its new stage musical – although the 1997 film turned a profit, it was only a modest one and it remains one of the more obscure movies of its blockbuster ’90s. Still, the Disney name plus that of the Greek demigod himself is doubtless brand recognition enough to draw a crowd, and moreover word from the German debut of Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s adaptation – with songs by Alan Menken and David Zippel – is that it’s very good. Luke Brady will play the title role in a musiclal that presumably follows the film’s approximate story in explaining how Hercules came to be only half-divine and following his storied hero-ing career and romantic entanglement with the sarcastic Meg.

There’s a lot of big spectacle in the West End at the moment. Big musicals, big stars, big budgets. Which makes Ryan Calais Cameron’s fifties-set three hander about a potentially commie actor seem pretty conventional. We’ve got sharp suits, big pours of scotch, a haze of cigarette smoke. We’ve got a no-bullshit lawyer who speaks in cliches (‘now we’re cooking with gas’ etc) and a nervy wannabe writer trying to break the big time. All a bit familiar, a bit old-fashioned.  But to assume that’s all that this play’s going to be – a pastiche of a fast-patter period piece – is to underestimate Calais Cameron who, after all, smashed the West End with his beautiful play For Black Boys Who Have Considered Suicide When The Hue Gets Too Heavy. Because in walks Sidney Poitier, the guy who’d go on to become the first Black man to win an Oscar, and then the whole thing gets richer and tenser, with big speeches that borrow the cadences and blueprints of the golden age, becoming a play that feels both completely contemporary and like an instant classic.  The play is a transfer from the Kiln Theatre, directed by its artistic director Amit Sharma, and it works so well in the West End, maybe because it’s a really simple idea: Poitier is about to be cast in a big breakout role, but NBC’s lawyers want him to sign an oath that he’s not a communist, as well as denounce a friend. It’s three actors arguing in a nicely furnished office. That’s literally it.  First there’s the initial tension of...

Sculptor Giuseppe Penone – famously part of the Italian movement Arte Povera, a group Inspired by the politics of 1960s and who used everyday materials in their work – has been fascinated with the relationship between man and nature since the late 60s, when he began his interventions with the natural world. This Serpentine exhibition is the most comprehensive presentation of Penone’s work in the UK and will extend beyond the gallery with his famous tree sculptures extending into the Royal Parks.

In the 19th Century, Utagawa Hiroshige produced thousands of prints capturing the landscape, nature and daily life in Japan during the Edo period. He became one of Japan’s most famous and prolific artists, and continues to influence art today. Now there’s a rare chance to see many of his never-before-seen works on display at the British Museum, with several pieces believed to be the only surviving examples of their kind in the world. Hiroshige: artist of the open road will be the first exhibition of his work in London for a quarter of a century, giving an insight into Japan during a time of rapid change presaging the end of samurai rule. It will span Hiroshige’s 40-year career through prints, paintings, books and sketches.  

José María Velasco is making big moves, even over 100 years since his death. The beloved Mexican artist is getting his first UK exhibition this year, in what is also the first display dedicated to a historical Latin-American artist at the National Gallery. In it, you’ll find Velasco’s sweeping portrayals of the Valley of Mexico and detailed panoramic views that bottle a moment in time for a country then moving towards industrialisation, while capturing the natural beauty that surrounded him in exquisite detail.

Fashion icon, model, club promoter, musician; Leigh Bowery was a multi-hyphenate before multi-hyphenate became a thing. But above all else, he was a muse, as the Tate Modern’s extensive new exhibition tracing the Melbourne native’s life and legacy does an excellent job of portraying.  Starting with his arrival onto London’s New Romantic scene in 1980, we’re whisked through Bowery’s many different eras in loose chronological order, from his early days as a club promoter for the short-lived but influential Taboo, through to his later practice as a performance artist, clothes designer and life model for Lucian Freud.  Re-invention was what Bowery stood for, and the Tate does a great attempt of categorising his many selves, from the walls (the first section is plastered in the Star Trek wallpaper from his home, the next his favoured polka-dot motif, and so on), to the clothes, video clips and portraits on display, which grow ever more out-there as Bowery gained confidence in his craft and voice with each year he lived in London. In the final room, beautiful blown-up fashion photographs show him literally shape-shifting, wrapping and warping his flesh like a sculptor working the wheel.  Photos show him literally shape-shifting, wrapping and warping his flesh like a sculptor In the curator’s tour, we’re told that this exhibition could have been called ‘Leigh Bowery and Friends’ and perhaps that would have been more appropriate: the Bowery on show here wouldn’t exist without...

It’s hard to know if Italian Renaissance master Andrea Mantegna was issuing a doom-laden warning or just a doe-eyed love letter to history. Because written into the nine sprawling canvases of his ‘Triumphs of Caesar’ (six of which are on show here while their gallery in Hampton Court Palace is being renovated) is all the glory and power of Ancient Rome, but its eventual collapse too. It starts, like any good procession, with a load of geezers with trumpets, parping to herald the arrival of victorious Caesar. As they blare, a Black soldier in gorgeous, gilded armour looks back, leading you to the next panel where statues of gods are paraded on carts. Then come the spoils of war, with mounds of seized weapons and armour piled high, then come vases and sacrificial animals, riders on elephant-back, men struggling to carry the loot that symbolises their victory. The final panel, Caesar himself bringing up the rear, remains in Hampton Court, so there is no conclusion here, just a steady, unstoppable stream of glory and rejoicing.  The paintings are faded and damaged, and have been so badly lit that you can only see them properly from a distance and at an angle. But still, they remain breathtaking in their sweeping, chaotic beauty.  Partly, this massive work is a celebration of the glories of the classical world and its brilliance, seen from the other side of some very dark ages. But along with its rise, you can’t help but also think of Rome's demise, of what would eventually...

Leeds is another planet in this exhibition from veteran British photographer Peter Mitchell, a name nowhere near as well-known as contemporaries like Don McCullin or Martin Parr – but a truly worthwhile discovery if you’ve never heard of him. A Londoner who moved to Leeds in 1972 and never left, Mitchell’s photos in this small but transporting exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery take us on a tour of the backstreets and alleys of his adopted city, mainly during the 1970s, giving us proud shopkeepers and aproned artisans standing in front of crumbling premises, many of which look more Victorian or Edwardian than late-twentieth-century. Mitchell’s work – most of it in colour – has an unfussy, curious documentary appeal, all muted tones and small details like the lettering of shopfronts taking on a nostalgia four decades later. But there’s also playfulness. Someone once told Mitchell – now in his eighties – that his photos felt like they’d been taken by an alien visiting Earth. He turned that comment into a gag and interspersed actual NASA pictures of the surface of Mars among photos of timewarp shopfronts and ageing houses. He extends the joke by framing many of his works with faux-scientific ruled edges, turning all of Leeds into a lab rat. The captions, with their more modern references, including a reference to digital photos, were clearly written much later. They add another sense of time passing to the show.  He gives us utopia being shattered in front of our eyes...

Take a trip to the Tuscan city of Siena and its discipline-changing art scene in the 14th century. Artists like Duccio, Simone Martini, Ambrogio Lorenzetti and the Pietro brothers brought previously unseen levels of drama, emotion and movement to their work, creating fresh strokes that bore huge impact not just in their local art circles but around the world. Around 700 years later, the National Gallery is capturing the energy that fuelled the crew, displaying some of their finest – and most significant – work.

As anyone who has ever tried to secure a booking at the London Fields Lido on a warm summer day will know, us Londoners love a good dip. So it’s only natural that the capital’s Design Museum should stage an exhibition dedicated to our adoration of swimming.  With more than 200 objects, Splash! presents a whistle-stop tour for water babies taking us all the way from bizarre Victorian bathing carriages, to the present-day mermaidcore TikTok trend. From the politics of the pool (and who gets to learn to swim) to the evolution of swimwear and pool architecture, Splash! covers a lot of ground. The show is split into three sections – the pool, the lido and nature – and perhaps the most fun part, each section is designed to mimic different swimming spaces which feature in the exhibit, including the London Aquatics Centre and the art-deco Penzance Jubilee Pool.  In the first part, ‘the pool’, is quite the collection of stuff, focussing largely on Olympic swimming – a model for the London Aquatics Centre, a swimming cap belonging to Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini, a jumper knitted by Tom Daley, and a 1984 David Hockney poster for the Los Angeles Olympics are all show. It also wouldn’t be an exhibition about pool design without some pretty Wes Anderson-style photography. The highly controversial LZR racer swimsuit is another gem on display – the suit designed by Speedo and NASA was responsible for 94 percent of swimming gold medals at Beijing 2008, and was subsequently banned for...

The clothes we wear, the sheets we sleep on, the carpets beneath our feet. Textiles are everywhere; we can’t escape them. That’s what this show at the Fashion and Textile Museum sets out to explore: the long-running connection between us, the earth, and textiles, in just about every sense of the word.  As the exhibition points out from the get-go, we humans have relied on woven fabric to perform practical tasks for millennia, weaving reeds together to create vessels, protecting our delicate little heads from the hot sun with wicker hats and making nets to catch fish. They are the global artform. We use textiles to express our individuality through clothing, to tell stories and mark life milestones. We also use them, the exhibition argues, to communicate our deep, inherent love of animals, to show evidence of abstract thought and to interact with technology.  It sounds impressive on paper, but in practice, this exhibition lacks depth. There are certainly some beautiful, intricate, intriguing objects here: a ‘three-factorial’ weave inspired by betting odds, strings of shiny beetle wings, an applicé wearable art coat and a hand-painted Chinese wedding cloth showing a hare preparing the potion of eternal youth with a mortar and pestle. But it hops swiftly between multiple cultures and time periods, making vague points illustrated with what sometimes seems like a random assortment of objects, mainly from the last century (the most rare, and one of the oldest pieces in 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.