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Every year, London’s famous river gets a whole festival of art installations, performances, and talks devoted to her watery charms, many of which are free to check out. This year’s Totally Thames Festival has scores of events throughout September, all dotted along riverside locations from Richmond to Barking & Dagenham. This year, look out for The Waterfront Journals, (Sep 6), a promenade performance of New York City artist and AIDS activist David Wojnarowicz’s monologues, Turning the Tide (Sep 17-20), a site-specific film installation by Turner Prize-nominated artist Catherine Yass projected onto the columns of the disused Blackfriars Railway Bridge and Where the River Holds Us (Sep 27-28), a site-responsive opera on Victoria Embankment. There’ll also be a dance performance from ex-Rambert dancers in the atmospheric Brunel Museum Tunnel Shaft (Sep 24) and recitals aboard Victorian steamship the SS Robin (Sep 26). Old favourites will also be making an appearance, including the Great River Race (Sep 12) from Tower Hamlets to Richmond – where 330 crews from across the world spending the morning speeding down the Thames on wooden rowboats, many of them in fancy dress costumes – and the St Katharine Docks Classic Boat Festival (Sep 12-13), where visitors can clamber aboard more than 50 historic vessels. You can also join a river exploration session as part of Mudlarking Weekend (Sep 5-6), take part in paddlesports sessions and a fishing competition as part of Tidefest (Sep 6)...

Interested in dance music and club culture? AVA London, the mammoth electronic music and arts conference, is back in town for another jam-packed long weekend of masterclasses, talks, interviews, and workshops, with 70+ speakers across more than 30 sessions.  Scheduled for the tail end of the festival season the autumn rather than its previous slot in spring, the 2026 edition will feature a keynote from the Godfathers of Drum & Bass, Fabio & Grooverider, plus chats with the likes of Moby, ascendant French producer Oklou and Aussie electronic duo The Avalanches, alongside fascinating panels on Black and Queer nightlife featuring key figures from London’s nightlife industry, including grime legend Footsie, rapper Flohio, Pussy Palace creator and London Nightlife Commission member Nadine Noor, and DJs Elkka, Shy One and Jamz Supernova.  But it’s not just interesting discussions on the agenda. The day-to-night festival also features a stacked line-up of after-hours fun, with club nights at three of London’s best venues. Outernet Live sees AVA co-curate a line-up with Resident Advisor to celebrate the global clubbing platform’s 25th birthday, while Optimo headlines a Friday night sesh at FOLD, and EartH Theatre hosts a collab with Aussie electronic label Stay on Sight on Saturday night, with label head Skin on Skin taking top billing. More details on the conference programme will come soon. Check out the full line-up here. 

Returning for its fourth edition in 2026, the UK’s only festival celebrating cinema from Hong Kong arrives in cinemas around London this September, with 15 titles curated around the theme of ‘Diaspora As Agency’. We like the sound of Palimpsest: The Story of a Name 隱蹟之書：重寫自我’ an essayistic narrative in which director Mary Stephen searches for the meaning behind her family’s adoption of its Western surname. This opening night screening will be paired with an in-person Q&A with Stephen herself to kick off a rich programme of UK premieres, classic restorations and workshops. Other highlights include a revisiting of My Name Ain’t Suzie (1985) by Angie Chen, an important figure in Hong Kong New Wave cinema in the 1980s, which receives its UK premiere in a 2k restoration, a strand of short films themed around migration screened in partnership with Amnesty International, and a gaming session at Hackney’s Loading Bar where researcher Aidan Page will give a talk on representations of Hong Kong in computer art.

Bloomsbury has got a formidable reputation for artsy goings on, with bohemian artists and writers making it their stamping ground a century ago. But this neighbourhood's relationship with creativity isn’t just in the past – it’s right here in the present too, as is more than evident with the Bloomsbury Festival, a haven of music, theatre, talks, walks and much more. The festival celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2026, with a month-long edition featuring 150+ events at more than 40 venues around WC1, under the theme of ‘Create and Celebrate’.  Keen to learn more about the area? There’ll be a variety of fascinating walking tours throughout the month, including a Trailblazers of Bloomsbury tour (Fri Oct 2), a behind-the-scenes tour of Cockpit Studios (Fri Oct 2), a Dickens-themed musical walk (Sat Oct 3), a Bloomsbury bookshop crawl (Wed Oct 7) and a poetry-focused walk featuring the works of William Blake, Thomas Hardy, Yeats, Rimbaud and the Romantics (Fri Oct 9). You can even put your newfound knowledge to good use at a Bloomsbury-themed quiz night (Sun Oct 4).  With the 200th birthday of UCL coinciding with this year’s edition, there’s plenty going on across its sprawling Bloomsbury campus, including ‘Two Centuries Here’, an exhibition exploring the legacy of London’s oldest university. There’s a slew of performing arts events too, including a one-night-only stop at City Lit for fringe theatre hit PATIENT:SOLDIER (Sun Oct 11).  And the festival concludes with some...

Party like its 1929 this Halloween, as musician Hugo Max provides viola accompaniment to a series of spooky silent classics at Prince Charles Cinema, Chiswick Cinema and Finsbury Park Picturehouse. On the slate across Octoober and November are psychodrama The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, German expressionist masterpiece Nosferatu, found-footage horror film Häxan, avant-garde A Page of Madness, Hitchcock’s The Lodger and The Adventures of Prince Achmed, the oldest survining animated feature film. Expect the unexpected in a unique and transportingly old-world cinemagoing experience. RECOMMENDED: The best scary film screenings in London for Halloween

This October, the London Latino Film Festival will make its grand debut. Sixty feature-length and short films hailing from the likes of Puerto Rico, Brazil and the Dominican Republic will be shown in venues across the city, beginning with an opening night at the Barbican. There’s more to the festival than the screenings, though. Latino stars will make appearances to discuss their work – including Cuban ballet dancer Carlos Acosta, Argentine actor Óscar Martínez and Cuban actor Jorge Perugorría – and there’ll be a rare exhibition of hand-printed Cuban film posters at the Eclectic Gallery and filmmaking masterclasses at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Back to the movies, the programme includes Lucia Garibaldi’s award-winning 2025 feature Un Futuro Brillante; A Procura de Martina by Márcia Faria, a work about a women with Alzheimer’s who has been searching for her grandson for 30 years and Kim Anno’s ¡Quba!, which chronicles the LGBTQ+ rights movement in Cuba leading up to the legalisation of same-sex marriage in 2022. 

Every great movie director had to start somewhere. Chloé Zhao first got recognition with her student short film Daughters, Steven Spielberg entered his first local fim fest aged 14 with Escape to Nowhere, Spike Lee broke through with his 1983 master's thesis film, Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads. In the same vein, London Breeze Film Festival exists to give today’s emerging filmmakers a leg up. Across five days, it will show 135 independent films, spanning feature films, short films, documentaries and animation. Different days of the festivals will bring different programmes – it will open with a day focused on women in film, followed by a showcase of films made by or featuring people with learning disablilities or autism and, later on, shorts and features that address urgent climate and environmental issues. They’ll be shown in venues across the city, from the Garden Cinema in Covent Garden to Cinema at the Power Station to the Ritzy Picturehouse in Brixton. Severak cinemas will also host panel discussions as part of the festival. Find the full programme here. 

Doc’n Roll Film Festival shines a spotlight on some of the movers and shakers who’ve lit up the music world with intriguing and eclectic sounds. The lineup of films for the 13th edition of the festival is yet to be announced but you can expect a programme that covers a wealth of genres and scenes, and takes over the capital’s cinema staples like the Barbican, BFI Southbank, Dalston's Rio and more. Some screenings come accompanied by Q&As with the artists documented and/or filmmakers, or live performances.   

Pitchfork Music Festival is gearing up for another edition, with a jam-packed schedule of eclectic live music encompassing everything from avant-rock and post-punk to UK rap and deconstructed dance music.  This year’s headliners include Boston indie-rockers Horse Jumper of Love (Moth Club, Mon 2 Nov), electronic producer Actress (EartH Theatre, Thu Nov 5), Aussie electronic group The Avalanches (Roundhouse, Fri Nov 6), Chicago rapper Noname (Roundhouse, Sat Nov 7). Elsewhere on the line-up are the likes of Panda Bear, Elijah Wolf, Psychedelic Porn Crumpets, Working Men’s Club, Bloodsports and Kiwi jr. These are just some of the hugely eclectic line-up of 80 artists playing across a plethora of London’s best venues, including Colour Factory, Union Chapel, Village Underground, Earth Theatre, Royal Festival Hall and 93 Feet East.  Check out the full line-up here for a whole bunch of emerging talents you’ve likely never heard of but will no doubt feature on your Spotify Wrapped come December 2027. It’s basically the place to be if you consider yourself a music fan with a finger on the pulse.

Every year, the EFG London Jazz Festival brings together the best and brightest of the genre in venues across the city, from the capital’s major arts venues like Southbank Centre and Barbican, to atmospheric gig spots like Village Underground, EartH Theatre and Union Chapel. The 2026 line-up promises a bounty of bops, whether you’re looking to discover some of the most exciting new names in the genre (Ambrose Akinmusire Quartet, Sun Nov 15 at King’s Place) or witness some legends in action (Yasuaku Shimizu, Sun Nov 15 at Milton Court).  There’ll be a series of special gigs dedicated to the greats, from a night celebrating the centenary of John Coltrane (Coltrane 100, Fri Nov 13 at the Barbican) to Dave Okumu’s genre-hopping exploration of his musical heroes (DVTN: Music that Changes the World, Sun Nov 15 at Union Chapel).  And it’s not just jazz on offer; you can also catch everything from Portuguese fado (Mariza, Sun Nov 15 at Royal Festival Hall) and electroswing (Caravan Palace, Sat Nov 14 at ARC) to trip-hop (Morcheeba, Fri Nov 13 at the Troxy) and drum and bass (Goldie with his Live Band, Orchestra and Special Guests, Sat Nov 15 at Royal Festival Hall).  As well as tons of concerts every day, there are also film screenings, talks, masterclasses, workshops and more, many of them taking place at the festival’s pop-up hub The Jazz Social. Check out the full programme here.