Arts + Culture

London’s arts and culture scene: theatre, exhibitions, film, comedy, live music and the cultural moments that make this city shine.

Moominmamma, Snorkmaiden, Moomintroll and Moominpappa at a picnic with coffee cups, fruit and flowers, drawn by Tove Jansson

The Moomins went worldwide from a London evening paper, and the first big Tove Jansson show in a decade opens in Clerkenwell

Leake Street Tunnel

Leake Street: London’s legal graffiti tunnel, where Banksy’s one rule has since been reversed

Black Yamaha C3 grand piano with the lid raised, played by Freddie Mercury at Musicland Studios

The Yamaha grand Freddie Mercury wrote on is sitting in a hotel lobby off Oxford Street, free to see until October

A child silhouetted walking through a glowing red chamber inside the ARBORIALIS Luminarium, ringed by blue and green tunnels

ARBORIALIS is a walk-in cathedral of light, and it is free in an East Ham park for four days

Turner's watercolour Dawn after the Wreck, a pale yellow beach under a thin crescent moon with a single dog howling at the water's edge

Not one Georgia O’Keeffe hangs in a UK public collection. The Courtauld is bringing two dozen of them over in 2027

An ink and gouache drawing of a family crowded round a table loaded with cakes and blue and white crockery

£100 a ticket and everybody wins a painting: comedians are raffling off their own art in Hackney

London Design Biennale

Thousands of fresh flowers, fifteen Dianas and a £34 ticket: Fleurs de Villes opens at Somerset House on Wednesday

Poster for Hear Art's production of Constellations showing Stephen Collins and Kitty Devlin, directed by Charlotte Arrowsmith, at Merton Arts Space from 17 to 20 September 2026

A play about parallel universes, performed in two languages at once: a Deaf-led Constellations lands in Wimbledon

Rene Magritte's painting The Philosopher's Lamp, showing a man in a suit whose nose curves down into the bowl of a pipe, beside a candle bending in loops on its holder, against a blue-green ground

Magritte, Koons, Cattelan and Yoko Ono in one Mayfair room, and nobody is charging to get in

Artwork for the Hallelujah House: Inside Handel's HQ exhibition, showing the blue plaque to George Frideric Handel on the brick front of 25 Brook Street being polished

Handel wrote Messiah in this Mayfair terrace, and the letters that argued him into it are going on the wall

Renoir's The Umbrellas painted as a five-metre mural high on the brick corner of Carnaby Street and Ganton Street in London, with shoppers passing below

Hand-painted, five metres tall and free until March: Renoir’s The Umbrellas has landed on Carnaby Street

A panel of the Baa-Ewe Tapestry at the Natural History Museum showing Shaun the Sheep trick-or-treating at a farmyard Halloween party under the stitched caption Party From Dusk Till Shaun

The British Museum got the Bayeux Tapestry. The Natural History Museum got the sheep version

A speaker in a red kurta on a small wooden stage under paper lanterns, addressing an audience sitting on bright beanbags in a covered courtyard

Bring a broken lamp, leave with a working one: Camden Inspire is two free days of fixing things

22 Parkside, the Wimbledon house Richard and Su Rogers built for his parents, seen from the garden

The National Trust has been given the Wimbledon bungalow where British High-Tech was invented

Natural History Museum

39 free museums in London, where the small ones beat the famous ones

A girl in school uniform holding a backpack, standing on stone slabs over a stream in dense woodland, looking back over her shoulder

Half the films are by women, one took twelve years to shoot and a village made the other: London Breeze Film Festival returns this October

A Snr X mural in Shoreditch

A free self-guided Shoreditch street art tour: 18 walls, three hours and a world of colour

The red-brick Edwardian frontage of Stanley Arts on South Norwood Hill, with its pink-faced clock tower and Stanley Arts banners

Electric windows in 1903 and a building Pevsner called eccentric: Stanley Arts is opening free for Open House

London Podcast Festival

Paloma Faith, Judi Love and both Fish shows are still to come: the London Podcast Festival is half over and the best week is the one left

London Transport Museum hides 320,000 objects in Acton, and it’s opening the doors for three days this month