Things to do in London today

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...

Got a passion for pre-loved fashion? You’ll love this free festival popping up at both London branches of Westfield this month. The world-renowned shopping centre has teamed up with pre-loved fashion marketplace Depop, swap shop Loanhood, door-to-door clothing repair business Sojo and fancy skincare brand Kiehl’s to stage a series of free workshops, masterclasses and eco-conscious experiences designed to inspire visitors to embrace sustainable shopping habits.  Shoppers can learn how to turn their unwanted clobber into cold hard cash at the ‘Style to Sell Studio’, where thrift-loving celebrity stylist Bay Garnett will be on hand to offer her expert advice, with Depop and Loanhood also hosting daily sessions on everything from upcycling, scrunchie making and denim repair to turning your love for vintage fashion into a business. Visitors will also be able to shop for new threads at the pop-up Depop Marketplace featuring a curated edit of some of the platform’s top sellers. The first in-person event the re-selling platform has hosted in London in a good while, its featured sellers include Shop Henri, Brownbreadldn, Studio Rchdson, Blank Seams, Limia Vintage and Robs Racks. Alongside this, Kiehl’s will be offering free skincare consultations, and gifts in exchange for empty beauty containers, while the first 30 visitors each day can also enjoy up to £40 worth of free clothing alterations to help refresh and extend the life of their wardrobe, courtesy of Sojo. You’ll be looking...

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.   

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. 

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.

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...

Two temporary exhibitions in and there’s a formula developing at the Young V&A. Which is absolutely fine, because it’s a good formula. Like predecessor Japan: Myth to Manga, new opening Making Egypt combines clear, lucid historical and cultural storytelling with an intriguing collection of historic artefacts set alongside modern pop cultural items influenced by them. Making Egypt is, naturally, concerned with Ancient Egypt, and over its three rooms the title is interpreted in three quite different ways. Wildest is the first room, which goes all in on the colourful and often contradictory world of their gods – a short recorded audio drama has them bickering over who literally made the world. The second room is more concerned with Egyptian writing, hieroglyphics and style, while the third covers buildings and statues – if you don’t leave it as an expert on the making of faience (a sort of turquoise ceramic that was huge 5,000 years ago) then you haven’t been paying attention. The ravishing painted wooden sarcophagus of Princess Sopdet-em-haawt is the obvious showstopper The mixing of contemporary objects with the ancient stuff is perhaps less effective than in Myth to Manga. In part, that’s because there’s far less cultural continuity between Ancient and modern Egypt than mediaeval and contemporary Japan. But the fact much of the modern stuff on display – be that a clip of the Brendan Fraser popcorn classic The Mummy, or a Games Workshop ‘Necrosphinx’ – has an orientalist...

Avast ye! The National Maritime Museum devotes plenty of space to the great and good of seafaring – but this year, it’s pointing the telescope at the bad guys. This is the museum’s first major exhibition about pirates since the mid-’90s, and it’s a rollicking and sometimes surprising overview of the legends and lives of the most villainous cut-throats ever to sail the seven seas. The show kicks off with the pirate mythos: how the Caribbean buccaneers of the eighteenth century swashbuckled their way into the popular imagination. From the original Treasure Island to the Muppet remake, from The Pirates of Penzance to Captain Pugwash, and from Captain Hook to Jack Sparrow, it’s an entertaining reminder of how pirates have infiltrated everything from video games to New Romantic fashion to kids’ toys. From there, we’re plunged back into the golden age of piracy: the period of 40 years or so when this was a major industry. Colonial expansion meant a huge increase in the amount of valuable stuff floating across the oceans, and – inevitably – an explosion in the number of desperate men (and occasionally women) looking to loot it. We’re introduced to the rules and culture of life on board a pirate ship of the period, a bit of pirate lingo (from marooning to matelotage) and some of the famous figures of the time, many of them British, like William Kidd, Henry Morgan, Mary Read and Anne Bonny. Pirates have infiltrated everything from video games to New Romantic fashion Alongside the...

This review is from 2023. Power Up prices have gone up slightly and the games are changed occasionally. There's been a gaping chasm, an unfillable abyss, in London's recreational heart ever since the Trocadero finally closed its doors in 2011. It has left the city crying out for an arcade experience, somewhere to go and lose yourself in gaming. And now, Power Up is here to answer all of your RPG prayers. Admittedly, it doesn't have a rocket-shaped escalator or countless dark corners for snogging, but what it does have is bank after bank of classic videogames.They've made an attempt at education with a wall of consoles from throughout history, from the Amiga to the Xbox, but you can ignore all that if you want and just concentrate on turning your eyes square. Everything here is grouped by theme. There's a Mario section and a Sonic section, a rhythm action game bit and a VR gaming bit, there's 16-player Halo and solo Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. There are PC games and handheld consoles, Gamecubes and Megadrives. Want to save Lemmings? Race Micromachines? Fight the Empire? It's all here.If it seems a bit familiar, it should be: Power Up isn't new. The Science Museum did a version of this for Easter half-term every year for a while, but this new version of Power Up is permanent and costs just £10 to access for unlimited, all-day gaming. But even better than that, you can get an annual pass for £15. That's a hell of a lot cheaper than having to invest in a new Playstation, plus you...

  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...

A fascinating feminist hybrid of EastEnders, Samuel Beckett and Wolf Hall, Ava Pickett’s 1536 is set in some marshland on the outskirts of an Essex village in – you guessed it – 1536, the year Anne Boleyn was executed.  Not that this is a by-the-numbers Tudor drama: the story focuses on three young women – Jane (Liv Hill), Anna (Sienna Kelly) and Mariella (Tanya Reynolds) – who never come within a sniff of the royal family. They see the monarchy as an important but distant constellation: in the opening scene Hill’s innocent Jane struggles for Henry VIII’s name beyond ‘the king’. The engine of the play is Pickett’s superb dialogue and the sweary, lairy modern-language chats had by the women in the trampled bulrushes of Max Jones’s set.. Hill’s Jane is an adorable naif, Reynolds’s midwife Mariella is gawkily sarcastic. Each has their own complicated relationship with men in the village. But it’s Kelly’s Anna who is effectively the lead: beautiful and poor, she is deserted and scorned by the townsfolk, especially her wealthy lover Richard (Adam Hugill), who at the start of the play we discover is set to be married off to Jane. It begins as a funny, even goofy, drama. Three Tudor women, effing and blinding away in an Essex field, using language that would make Danny Dyer blush is inherently funny, as is the fact that each of the early scenes begins with Anna and Richard going at it hammer and tongs in the reeds. But things start to curdle: aside from various village tensions...

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...

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...

Playwright David Ireland has made a career out of saying the unsayable, which has in the past meant gags about rape, race and other such wearyingly ‘provocative’ transgressions. With The Fifth Step he’s taken it further yet: he’s written a play about how awesome God is. That’s a slightly glib summary. But in the programme Ireland explains how he found Jesus in 2020, and it does a lot to explain where the play’s coming from. The Fifth Step is about two men in Alcoholics Anonymous – which Ireland was a member of in the past – but the play is not really about the instition as a whole. Rather, it’s AA’s ambiguous spiritual dimension that holds the most interest to the playwright.  With a big scruffy beard and his natural Scottish accent front and centre, Jack Lowden looks and sounds a world away from his breakthrough role in Slow Horses. He plays young Glaswegian Luka, an inarticulate, twitchy mess of a man; an alcoholic who suffered a terribly abusive upbringing and is desperately lonely to boot. His very first words in the play are ‘I think I might be an incel’. He’s addressing Martin Freeman’s James, an AA old-timer who exudes a sort of seen-it-all serenity and is clearly angling for Luka to appoint him as his sponsor – something Luka duly does.  The men get on well enough so long as James remains in the driving seat. But then something odd happens: the programme really starts working for Luka. Or it starts working in unexpected ways. James – who is staunchly atheist –...

New shoots keep growing from Tim Crouch’s An Oak Tree, its legend quietly bubbling away for 20 years and its strange, unsettling magnificence never wavering. First performed in 2005, it was a solid rejection of stuffy plays where the actors say their memorised words each night in the same way. Instead, every performance has a different actor performing alongside experimental theatremaker Crouch, now almost 400 of them, including Hugh Bonneville, Mike Myers and Alanis Morrissette. They come on stage, follow Crouch’s instructions, take on the part of a grieving father and generally look very nervous while doing it. The actor has never seen or read the play before, and the audience doesn’t know which star guest they’ll get. For this twentieth anniversary production, the list of actors eager to submit themselves to this grief-laden improv show is impressive: David Tennant and Indira Varma are on the roster, while on press night it was Jessie Buckley pulled up from the front row.The performer is instructed very precisely by Crouch what to do and say. She is Andy, a middle aged man, grieving the recent loss of his daughter who was killed by a driver. The driver was a stage hypnotist – Crouch flits between being authoritative man in charge of the show, and hapless entertainer in silver waistcoat and stumbling patter – and Andy attends one of his rubbish performances to find answers. At every moment, Crouch lets Buckley know what to do, either through a headpiece, a script in her...

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...

Ever wished you could be someone else? How about trying out multiple personalities? That’s exactly what the ‘passengers’ of You Me Bum Bum Train get to do. The labour of love of its creators Kate Bond and Morgan Lloyd, who founded it in 2004, this immersive cult show has popped up in secret spots across London, taking participants one by one through a series of weird, wonderful, intense and exhilarating experiences. Each participant signs a non-disclosure agreement so that the mystery of what actually happens gets preserved and so everything is a total surprise. You are the star of each of the incredibly realistic scenes, with hundreds of volunteer actors (and the occasional celebrity) guiding you through – but how you react is entirely up to you. This is a safe space to unleash that main character energy and lean into different parts of your personality you had no idea were there, which can be a life changing experience. A shocked first timer I chatted to afterwards said that he would ‘never be the same again’; a 70-something veteran YMBBT rider exclaimed that these shows were the most memorable moments of his entire life.  In the early 2010s I went to more immersive theatrical events than I care to remember, including four YMBBTs. My immersive days are now long behind me but when it was announced that YMBBT was back after eight years, I knew I had to have another dose. Wearing my comfiest of clothes and ready for anything, I turned up at the secret West End location...

Following in the vein of 2016’s The Comedy About A Bank Robbery, Mischief Theatre – they of The Play That Goes Wrong – are now aiming their slick brand of ever-escalating theatrical farce at the spy genre in this West End premiere. When a top-secret file is stolen by a turncoat British agent, a deeply mismatched pair of KGB agents and a CIA operative and his over-enthusiastic mother collide in pursuit of it – along with an over-the-hill actor and a young couple – at the Piccadilly Hotel in London in swinging 1961. General chaos ensues. Writers and original Mischief Theatre members Henry Shields and Henry Lewis mine plenty of daft comedy from spy staples like bugged radios and improbable gadgets while paying homage to a decade in the UK rocked by the revelations of double agent Soviet Union spy rings. It’s low-hanging fruit, of course, but ramped up by Mischief Theatre’s trademark ability to spin seemingly minor mishaps into total comedy meltdowns. Director Matt Dicarlo handles these set-pieces and Shields and Lewis’s penchant for fast-moving wordplay deftly, allowing us half a knowing wink before whisking us on to the characters’ next blunder. He’s greatly aided by David Farley’s set design, a colourful cartoon of ‘60s London. A split-level cutaway of the Piccadilly Hotel is a neat visual shorthand for introducing us to the characters and snappily showing us the chaotic consequences of a bugged radio being moved between rooms. A talented cast know their mission, steering...

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...

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...

Ghanaian painter Amoako Boafo has had a meteoric rise in the art world over the past couple of years – thanks, in part, to his eyebrow-raising commission of three portraits which were sent into space on Jeff Bezos’s rocket ship in 2021. Tech bros aside, Boafo is interested in subverting Western views of Africa and the diaspora through his brightly coloured oil and paper transfer paintings, and is becoming recognised for his portraits and figurative works. In some pieces, the figures elegantly recline, in others, they sit contemplatively, always with their eyes transfixed on the viewer. Inspired by Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s novel, I Do Not Come to You by Chance, this exhibition at Gagosian will be Boafo’s first solo show in the UK.

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.

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...

At first encounter, Croatian-born Nora Turato’s solo exhibition pool7 at the ICA in London appears sparse, offering little of the spectacle we might expect from a contemporary installation. Entering the lower gallery, the environment feels stark, cold and clinical. Around 1,800 A4 sheets of white paper cover the walls in uniform tiles. The room feels like an empty swimming pool. On the sheets, in plain black Arial font, Turato has printed sporadic notes to self, fragments of overheard chatter and intimate overshares: ‘I’m looking to art to save me / can it’ she writes. ‘if u aint dirty / u aint here to party’, ‘girls just wanna have fun / no fun allowed it seems’.  There is nothing mundane about this unfiltered, spiralling mass of language, brought together by a mind constantly processing and reacting to the world.  In the room, I feel like I’m endlessly doom scrolling in slow-motion. pool7 is the seventh iteration of Turato’s ongoing text-based work, a continuation of her pool series in which Turato creates yearly iterations of pools lined with collections of found language drawn from media, conversations, advertising, and online content. In the next room, the tone shifts dramatically. Lit only by a warm orange glow from a ceiling light, the space is fitted with plush carpets and cushions, with a nonsensical monologue playing out in jarring screams, unhinged sobs and guttural cries throughout the room. It's the kind of reaction we are taught to suppress, except in moments...

What is a portrait, really? What is its role? And what makes it different from ‘just’ a photograph of a person? These are all questions that spring to mind when walking around A Thousand Small Stories, the first ever retrospective of Eileen Perrier’s photography. Since the 1990s, the London-born photographer has used her camera to capture individuals in their local communities, and this show highlights some of her finest work.  In ‘Red Gold and Green’ – a series of pictures taken of British Ghanaians in their London homes – Perrier sets up rolls of fabric in block colours, matching the Ghanaian flag, acting as a DIY professional backdrop. But elements of their private lives sneak into shot, adding a sense of intimacy: we spot framed family pictures, a vinyl collection and other nicknacks, like a Hendon rotary club wall hanging. The result feels personal, as though the family home is an extension of the self. Discrete references to the formal rituals of portraiture – the dreaded school photo day, an awkward extended-family get together – continue throughout her practice. In ‘Nation’, a series of photographs of commuters on the Paris metro in 1999, plasticky red seating doubles as a background, uniting the windswept strangers in their shared surroundings. In ‘Peckham Square Studio’, she uses Victorian photography techniques, with a hidden headrest for the sitters – but the photographs aren’t uptight, they’re vibrant, with a movement and cleanness that feels hyper-modern. ...