45 Brilliant Things To Do This Weekend in London – weekend events and activities in London (2024)

TheWimbledon Tennis Championships– aka the oldest, and arguably the very best, tennis tournament in the world – is back in SW19 in just a few short weeks.Missed out on ticketsin the ballot this year? Can’t facecamping out on the street for a chance to nab day tickets? Not to worry! You don’t have tomake the pilgrimage to Murray Mound (fine, Henman Hill) to feel like you’re part of the action. Asusual London will be peppered with big screens showing all thematchesin so much blown-up high-res glory that you might as well be court-side.

2023 was the year of Barbie mania, but 2024 is the year of the Barbie exhibition. The most famous doll in the world will be touching down in west London for a major Design Museum exhibition showcasing herevolution from 1959 to the present day. Thanks to a partnership with Mattel Inc., a bounty of rare Barbie items from the Californian archives will be on display alongside other iconic memorabilia. Expect a fabulous foray into all things pink.

In his most serious role to date, James Corden plays Alec in ‘The Constituent’, a fraying Afghan War veteran struggling with the disintegration of the normielife he built for himself after leaving the army. Now he’s going through the family courts in an effort to regain access to his children and his great hope is Monica (Anna Maxwell Martin), his hardworking local MP.Corden is both amusing and unsettling as Alec, and Maxwell Martin is terrific as Monica who wants to do right by her community. It’s athoughtful, probing drama about damaged masculinity and the morality of British institutions. Plus, there’ssimply no world in which 90 minutes in the company of Anna Maxwell Martin is a bad thing.

The current war in Ukraine isn’t the country’s first major conflict. Stuck between east and west, Ukraine has been fought over and pulled apart for centuries. And throughout all that vicious, bloody turmoil, Ukrainians made art. The early twentieth century with its countless conflicts saw the birth of countless modernist movements, and here at the RA are embryonic forms of lots of them. Futurism, cubism, constructivism, and on and on, with almost all the works sourced from two Ukrainian museums. The show isgood because it shows how art offers a way out. Art here is a path towards liberation, towards self-determination, towards self-expression in a world of state repression and national conflict.

This BFI’s summer season is dedicated tofilms that make you grimace. The film institute has put together a brilliantly toe-curling programme including David Lynch’s ‘Eraserhead’, screened with an extended intro by curator Kimberley Sheehan, ‘The Lost Weekend’, a 1945 venture into alcoholism, andDarren Aronofsky’s ‘Requiem for a Dream’, astudy of drug addiction.

Transport yourself to Siciliy by way of Richmond’s Syon Park at Marzamemi festival, which will be bringing southern Italian street food, co*cktails and music to the capital. In between wolfing down arancini and gelato, there’ll also be cooking demos, silent discos and a homeware market, so you can take a piece of Sicily home with you.

Greek director Yorgos Lanthimos follows the baroque, Oscar-winning historical antics of ‘Poor Things’and ‘The Favourite’with this sombre, darker, but no less odd triptych of stories shot in and around modern-day New Orleans.Fast becoming a fixture in Lanthimos’s troupe, Emma Stone rejoins him for the ride, as doesPoor Things’s Willem Dafoe.No surprise for long-time Yorgos fans, the tales are grim,but anyone who shares Lanthimos’s pleasure at swatting his humans like flies will surely extract wry pleasure from it.

It’s a hard heart that can leave Francis Alÿs’s Barbican exhibition without being a little broken by it. The Belgian artist – best known for films where he performs walking actions, pushing a block of ice until it melts, kicking a flaming ball through a desolate border town – has taken himself out of the work, and turned his eye on children.The work is meant to be an archive of children's games, of the vital importance of play. But there's an unignorable context. You can’t walk through this show without now thinking of children in Gaza, Xinjiang, Ukraine, Sudan; children having their childhoods stolen, their play taken from them, their joy erased. Children learning thatto become an adult is to learn to fight, and to lose innocence in the process.

Opened on a residential Holland Park street in 1969 by Julie Hodgess, an interior designer who kitted out stores for high-end hippy fashion house Biba, her restaurant set the template for bohemian west London with stained glass, expensive antiques and fabrics bold enough to make your grandma blush. The latest incarnation of Julie’s doubles down on the fabulous interiors and new owner Tara MacBain is doing her best on the food front with help from chef patron Owen Kenworthy. After proving himself at both Brawn and The Pelican, his menu at Julie’s straddles the line between bistro staples and cheffy flair, Finally, the food at Julie’s is as gossip-worthy as the guests.

Curated by Guts Gallery founder Ell Pennick and influential LGBTQ+ art curator Gemma Rolls-Bentley, this group show features work from some of themost exciting namesin queer art. Jerwood Prize-winning painter and sculptor Maggi Hambling will be exhibiting new work, alongsideboth new and existing works from the likes of Ajamu X, Olivia Sterling, Shadi Al-Atallah, Sarah Jane Moon, Zach Toppin, Whiskey Chow, SHARP, and many more, with each exploring the evolving language of queer coding and expressions of queerness. A percentage of all sales will be donated in support of LGBTQIA+ homeless youth charity, AKT.

Artists spent centuries making art about light, but it wasn’t until the 1970s that anyone really thought to make artwithlight. British artist Anthony McCall was one of the first, creating pioneering films that used projectors to trace shapes in the air, somehow seeming to turn nothingness solid.Now he’s at Tate Modern, taking over the galleries that until recently were home to the blockbuster Yayoi Kusama ‘Infinity Mirror Rooms’.It’s a tough immersive act to follow, but thisquiet immersion in geometric movement does it nicely.

As well as stalls ofedible, sustainable and wildlife-friendly plants, this festival from theLondon Permaculture Network is full of talks, workshops and music all focusising on eco-friendly and sustainable initiatives. Head along to get the lowdown on everything from making a permaculture balcony to keeping chickens in the city.

Modern-day revivals of musicals from the genre’s so-called ‘Golden Age’ can be challenging – caught up, as they often are, in the sexism of their time. ‘Kiss Me, Kate’, which debuted in 1948, is a particularly acute example. But it’s to big shot American director Bartlett Sher’s credit that this major new revival is heavily laced with irony. As Petruchio, Fred (Adrian Dunbar, swapping ‘Line of Duty’ for the chorus line) can’t get his whip (don’t ask) to work and looks stupid; in the climactic scenes, Lilli (played by bona fide Broadway star Stephanie Block) sings ‘I Am Ashamed’ with the kind of knowing wink you could probably see from space. This is all amplified by Michael Yeargan’s gorgeously elaborate set. This is a lush, wittily spectacular production.

What if you could talk to the dead? What if AI could make chatting with the dead as simple as downloading an app?Brace yourselves – because it already can.Jason Rohrer’s Project December is among several Silicon Valley startups that allow people to interact with their dead loved ones, via an AI Q&A platform that uses minimal data about the deceased person to create a digital simulacrum. Eternal You explores these emergent industries through interviews with startup CEOs, coders, psychologists, digital ethicists and, most importantly, users of the new technology. The issues are so profound, in fact, with such implications for the human existence, a single film could hardly scratch the surface. Yet Eternal You is a very good way to start digging.

BST has boasted some of the most exciting London line-ups over the last couple of years, but organising worldwide mega stars to perform in the park clearly isn’t enough work, so BST is also hosting eight days of free activities. All Things Orchestral will be performing a stunning show of classical music, hosted by Myleene Klas. But,if that’s not your thing, there’s also a free open-air cinema, pop-up bars, discussion panels plus chances to play tennis, cricket and football. Norman Jay MBE will be taking to the decks, and there’s even a chaos-fuelled chance to play Bongo’s Bingo.

There aren’t that many bits of London that are actually secret anymore, but the residents of Eel Pie Island have done a very good job at keeping their island as clandestine as possible. Only accessible by boat or via a little footbridge twice a year for the island’s Open Studios event. The summer open days are usually a laidback affair and a chance to see inside the workspaces of 26 artists, from painters and potters to sculptors. View, commission or purchase yourself some art or craft and leave having experienced a still-hidden part of the city.

Bahamian artist Tavares Strachan uncovers hidden Black histories – histories ignored, forgotten, erased by dominant white western narratives – and gives them new life.This show opens with chaotic collages that meld together images of colonialism, scientific diagrams and important figures in Black history andculminates in ‘The Encyclopaedia of Invisibility’, a staggeringly ambitious research project preserving missing histories and lost stories.Strachan is constantly drawing links between African history, slavery, religion, jazz and hip hop, ancient Egypt, space exploration. It’s dizzying, complex, ungraspable, because that’s what history is.

Back in the 1950s, influential British street photographer Roger Mayne looked at the world that we bring children into and despaired. His images of brutally deprived Southam Street near Notting Hill capture children playing, living in a London of squalor, filth, poverty and division.His photos are stark, high contrast, quick, dramatic, bare. There’s so much joy and playfulness in this misery, and all captured with incredible compositional nous.

Punchdrunk are back withmomentous new show ‘Viola’s Room’. It’s the company’s first major show to not require the wearing of masks and it’s also smaller in scale than anything the company has done for years: once it starts properly it’s just 45 minutes long, for a maximum audience of six people (though there are numerous performances throughout the day), with no live actors. Based on Barry Pain’s dark 1901 short story ‘The Moon Slave’ it has an actual text – a true rarity for the company – which has been adapted byBooker Prize-shortlisted Brit novelist Daisy Johnsonand recorded by Helena Bonham-Carter.‘Viola’s Room’ is unquestionably something different for Punch Drunk. It might be short, but in those 45 minutes you’ll live a haunted lifetime.

Branston Pickle,Maldon Sea Salt, Bird’s Custard andTropicana Orange Juice are just some of the zany scoops available atAnya Hindmarch’s summer ice-cream pop-up The Ice Cream Project. Back for the third summer runningadventurous eaters can grab tubs of a long list of whacky flavours in branded cartons.This year’s pop-up will also sell Ice Cream Project tees and caps and you can even challenge your friends to a blind-tasting experience, though be sure to book in advance.

You can contain the whole history of a nation in a tarpaulin. At least, Rheim Alkadhi can. The artist, who grew up in Iraq, uses the sturdy plastic material to recount endless stories of colonial exploitation, capitalist greed and ecological disaster in his ICA show.The tarpaulins are grimy, dirty things, rust-stained, oil-stained, each one a painting composed by time, by everyday use, by the material’s own history, by the country’s history.The final part of the show is an archival look at the modern history of Iraq. It’s all interesting andAlkadhi’s point is a powerful one.

This wildly fun show ingeniously yokes the breathlessness of the true crime podcast genre to the big emotions of a musical. True crime afficionados Kathy (Bronté Barbé) and Stella (Rebekah Hinds) live in Hull and escape from their lives by recording a murder podcast in Kathy’s mum’s basem*nt, discussing the lurid cases they find on Wikipedia. One day, Kathy and Stella’s true-crime idol comes to town… only to be murdered and they decide to turn detective nd Floyd also give us an affectionately wry snapshot of the clamour of internet-era fandom.Beneath the stupidly catchy songs, this is a story about two people navigating a friendship through change andan affectionately wry snapshot of the clamour of internet-era fandom.Kathy and Stella's exploits will absolutely slay you.

Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayamahas been melding photography with digital printing and painting techniques for decades, creating a collection of instantly recognisable ‘gynoid’ female robots with perfect metal carapaces, pouting cyborg lips and ample robo-bosoms. There’s a sculpture of one of his golden gynoids in the middle of the gallery. There’s Joan of Arc, Marilyn Monroe, that mermaid, but also a ludicrously sexual Cleopatra and a naked zebra-woman hybrid. It’s painfully randy, throbbing with ridiculous sci-fi turgidity.It’s essentially sexy robots, and in its own lewd way, it’s kind of brilliant.

A reincarnation of Zoo Lates (which ended in 2015), Zoo Nights returnsto bring‘after hours’ fun to ZSL London Zoo. Attractions entrial a packed street-food market, live music, an after-hours look at the reptile house in ‘The Secret Life of Reptiles and Amphibians’, and a ‘The Birds and the Bees’ tour where experts will shed some light on animal sex. For the extreme animal enthusiasts out there, you can even opt for a Zoo Nights VIP Sleepover and rest your head in one of the zoo’s nine lodges. Time to unpack that elephant onsie?

Most productions of Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo & Juliet’ are about life.Jamie Lloyd’s production is about death. Taking place in a gloomy void, Tom Holland and Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’s titular lovers speak in halting, hushed voices, and the action jumps and skips like a half-remembered dream, as if they were looking back on all this from a great distance. It’s deeply compelling. Another one of Shakespeare’s heroes asked what dreams may come in death. This unsettling production feels like the answer.

In a 1978 American football game between the Oakland Raiders and the New England Patriots, Jack Tatum tackled Darryl Stingley so hard it left him paralysed from the neck down. It was an act of ferocious brutality that was captured on camera and replayed, reanalysed, rewatched a billion times over. It’s atthe centre of Matthew Barney’s latest film, ‘Secondary’; a quiet, unnerving, uncomfortable exploration of how bodies can be broken, destroyed and remade, and how violence is humanity’s ultimate spectacle.

Have you noticed that everyone’s wearing kilts at the moment? It’s partly down to Glaswegian fashion designer and radical creativeCharles Jeffrey, whose fashion brand Loverboy reimagined the textile, creating checked lewks that were more high club night than Highland fling.It’s been 10 years since Loverboy began and this exhibition will go behind-the-scenes, exploring how Jeffrey built the brand from scratch.

How do you adapt one of the all time great British TV series of the ‘80s for the ‘20s stage? ‘Very respectfully’ is the answer offered by James Graham’s version of Alan Bleasdale’s ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’. Itconcerns the titular group of male Liverpudlian labourers, who as the play begins have already lost their jobs laying tarmac and are now on the dole, doingoff the books work.In 2024, ‘Boys from the Blackstuff’ undoubtedly comes across as a period piece, but it has a timeless echo in any straightened times. And it is, simply, a tremendous story about men, masculinity and change.

To walk into London-based artist Alvaro Barrington’s Duveen commission is to walk into the Grenadian shack he grew up in. The sound of rain hammering on the tin roof echoes around the space as you sit on plastic-covered benches.In the central gallery, a vast silver dancer is draped in fabrics on an enormous steel pan drum. This is Carnival, this is the Afro-Carribeandiaspora at its freest, letting loose, dancing, expressing its soul, communing. You’re brought into the frenzy, the dance, the community. Barrington hascreated a space of joy and togetherness, filled with love and critical anger.

Pioneering American feminist, Judy Chicago, has spent decades using her art to call out injustice at the hands of the patriarchy. She’s most well known for smoke-based desert performances and ‘The Dinner Party’, a hugely influential installation celebrating thousands of overlooked women. Both are represented here but this show focuses instead on her drawings and paintings.She has a distinct aesthetic; heady, psychedelic, swirling and geometric all while peddling hervicious, technicolour, satirical attack on the patriarchy, shot through with ecological activism.

Back in 1990, actor-director Kevin Costner defied expectations and turned a three-hour passion-project western into an Oscar-winning hit.Thirty-four years later, Costner the director is back with something even more ambitious. Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 thuds down as merely the first instalment in a planned four-part mega-epic, with which Costner apparently intends to fill with every conceivable western trope, as well as a cast with 170 speaking parts. Has he, at last, bitten off more than anyone can possibly chew?

Jeremy Herrin’s original 2015 production of Duncan Macmillan’s smash addiction drama is back for 2024 withactor Denise Gough (now not a relative unknown as she was 9 years ago)delivering a phenomenal performance. She is beyond tremendous as Emma, a booze-and-drugs-addled actor who we first meet slurring her way through a performance of ‘The Seagull’ before flaming out at a club night and checking herself into a rehab centre. Gough is magnificent and absurd in equal measure, a performance that’s simultaneously high comedy and high tragedy. After a seven year break – going cold turkey if you will – this is the best sort of relapse.

In a warren of concrete bunkers deep beneath the strand, the masters of high end immersive AV art have pulled together some big hits. ‘Reverb’ is a celebration of speakers, drums, beats, songs and noises, of the links between music and art.Four Technics turntables allow you to play looped records by German artist Carsten Nicolai,Jeremy Deller lectures kids on the history of rave, Jenn Nkiru’s traces the history of Detroit techno and Cecilia Bengolea films the convulsive body-popping joy of Jamaican dancehall. It’sa love letter to the power of music, an ear-rattling testament to how sound shapes society, emotion and history.

From Liz Ascroft’s detailed, 1970s-in-aspic set design to the elaborate coiffure of Basil’s wife, Sybil (Anna-Jane Casey), Caroline Jay Ranger’s production of beloved TV comedy ‘Fawlty Towers’ leans heavily on nostalgia. Ranger has form in turning iconic British TV shows into theatre: she directed ‘Only Fools and Horses The Musical’ a few years ago. We get a greatest hits parade of characters from the TV series’ two seasons and a litany of gags.

The Natural History Museum’s big exhibition for 2024 is this massive new celebration of our avian pals. As you can doubtless glean from the title, ‘Birds: Brilliant& Bizarre’ focuses on the weirder end of the feathered spectrum, from strange-looking birds to exploring the links between pigeons and T-rex to daring you to sniff a stinky seabird egg.

For decades now, Elton John has been building a world class collection of photography with his partner David Furnish. It’s been shown all over the world, and now it’s the V&A’s turn.The exhibition is rammed full of iconic images by some of the most important names in photography: Diane Arbus, Robert Mapplethorpe, Juergen Teller, William Egglestone and on and on. Like you’d expect from a megastar, it’s pretty dazzling.This show spills out a story about style, fashion, the crippling excesses of success, the endless, head spinning allure of sexuality. It’s because it’s Elton John’s collection that this exhibition works.

It wasn’t unusual for women to paint in the seventeenth century, it was just unusual for them to live off it. But the Tate’s had enough of that bogus, patronising attitude and are hellbent on showing that anything men could do – even really ugly paintings – women could do too.‘Now You See Us: Women Artists In Britain 1520-1920’is 400 years of women artists going toe to toe with the men. Society portraiture, allegorical painting, you name it, they could do it.This is art existing on its own terms, art of privacy, independence and innovation, finally able to peek out from the long shadows cast by men.

Turns out, not only does Harmony Korine make difficult obtuse films, he makes difficult obtuse paintings too.His show at Hauser & Wirth is full of psychedelic, violent, eye-searing paintings of scenes from his latest film, ‘Aggro Dr1ft’. The movie (starring Travis Scott and Jordi Molla) takes you on a dizzying, weird, fully infrared trip into the world of a masked assassin, patrolling deep undergrowth and lavish villas on a mission to kill a demonic crime lord. The paintings are full of that same tropical violence, 8-bit menace and throbbing, silent aggression.

There was a lot of love in the last years of Michelangelo Buonarotti’s life. Already hugely successful, the Renaissance master dedicated his final decades to loving his god, his family, his friends, and serving his pope. The proof of that love is all over the walls of this intimate little visual biography of the final years of his life, filled with his drawings and letters and paintings by his followers.We’ve had a lot of Michelangelo drawing shows in recent years,but thedrawings in the last room of this show are incredible. They were never meant to be seen, they're frail, weak things, but they’re also an amazing vision of one of history’s greatest painters.

At Between The Bridges every Sunday this summer, SoLo Craft Fair will host the South Bank Summer Market, with over 60 traders selling a huge variety of bits and bobs from art, jewellery and fashion to kids’ products and more. Everything will have been created by independent designers from across the capital and if you want to try your hand at making something, there’ll be free workshops on site.