Things to do in London this weekend

London’s getting its annual helping of rainbow flags, fun-loving crowds, and LGBTQ+ spirit with the Pride in London Parade on Saturday July 1. If previous events are anything to go by, expect hundreds of floats and walking groups from across the LGBTQ+ spectrum, which will march through the heart of London. The day usually culminates in a big party in Trafalgar Square, with a line-up of pop-tastic entertainment. And all day long, Soho Square and the surrounding streets will be filled with members of the LGBTQ+ community and allies gathering to celebrate (and continue) the battle for equal rights. Plus, it’s free to join the fun. 

Writer John O’Farrell – who has worked on ‘Have I Got News For You’ and ‘Spitting Image’ – has created a surprisingly clever stage update of the ’90s Robin Williams hit film, thanks to its twenty-first-century jokes, perfectly paced book, and silly voices galore. While director Jerry Zaks thoroughly nails divorced dad Daniel’s lightning transitions from hapless Dad to fiesty Scottish nanny Mrs Doubtfire, who he dresses up as in a desperate bid to see his children. ‘Mrs Doubtfire’ melds the best of past and present, offering a dose of nostalgia that’s more complicated than Mary Poppins’s spoonful of sugar – but just as sweet.

Now onto its fifty-seventh year of hurt, the capacity of the English men’s football team to be the focal point of ruinous national self-mythologization is well documented. As such, a play about the squad’s resurrection under Gareth Southgate feels like a potentially hubristic idea. But, ‘Dear England’ written by James Graham, hits the back of the net. The play focuses on why the England men’s team is burdened with such high expectations? And what do those expectations do to the psychology of both the team and the nation? It’s a big-hearted, technically dazzling celebration of football first and a critique of it second. 

Giving you more attitude than a ‘Now That’s What I Call Punk’ compilation, Dog Day Afternoon is the ultimate celebration of all things leather jackets and Doc Martens. Taking place at Crystal Palace Park this July, this riotous punk fest will see punk pioneer Iggy Pop, post-punk legends Blondie, seminal Manchester band Buzzcocks, garage punk upstarts Lambrini Girls and supergroup Generation Sex (Billy Idol, Steve Jones, Tony James, Paul Cook) taking to the stage.

The well-loved community shop that works closely with independent producers and farmers, Nourished Communities, is putting on its first-ever food festival. The one-day event will bring together over 100 of the UK’s top independent producers, with all kinds of talks, workshops and tastings. If you’re the type of person who likes making their own kimchi, don't miss the fermentation workshop. Alternatively, learn about sustainable farming or try your hand at kefir making.

Never seen Arthur Miller’s puritans and paranoia masterpiece before? You’re in for a treat. This is a production that will be considered a high benchmark for years to come. Lyndsey Turner’s show, now transferred from the National Theatre to the West End, is foreboding and sinister, horrible and creepy. As it should be. 

At a time when photography was going gonzo – when people were hunting out action, shooting from the hip – Evelyn Hofer turned the other way. The German-American photographer had a quieter, more formal, composed approach. She took her large format camera and her long exposures onto the streets of Paris, London and New York. This is a gorgeous show of slow, considered and careful photography that can be small and intimate or big and overwhelming, but always tenderly human.

BST has been an exciting fixture in London’s musical calendar since 2013, and it’s back with a line-up of some of the biggest stars on the planet. This weekend there’ll be shows from Take That (July 1, support from The Script, Sugababes and Will Young) and K-pop stars Blackpink (July 2, support from Sabrina Carpenter and The Rose). 

American artist Carrie Mae Weems uses a contemporary Black aesthetic that weds visual intent with political intensity. She reframes and recolours nineteenth century daguerreotypes of slaves, she dances in the Berlin Holocaust memorial, restages political assassinations, takes photos of a hammer, a sickle, a clock, a globe. Everything, in her hands, has the power to embody a political idea, to fight against oppression, racism and colonialism. The anger in Weems’s art is quiet and seething. She expresses ire with beauty, and that might just be even more powerful.

From Mariah Carey to Gemma Collins, divas have been simultaneously exalted and vilified, but never ignored. The V&A’s highly-anticipated blockbuster exhibition will celebrate the power and creativity of ‘Divas’ – iconic performers who have stood out from the crowd from the 19th century to the present day. Look out for the fringed black dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in ‘Some Like it Hot’ (1959), Janelle Monae’s ‘vulva pants’ and legendary costumes worn by Tina Turner, P!nk and Cher. 

Notting Hill Carnival’s biggest and most infamous soundsystem Rampage heads to the Barbican Hall for an evening of orchestral renditions of the most iconic songs from the past 30 years. Expect performances by Egypt, Damage, Donaeo, Gracious Kay, Kele Le Roc, Maxwell D, More Fire Crew, Mr Vegas, Omar and Terri Walker alongside a 30-piece orchestra conducted by Jules Buckley. 

After a three-year renovation, the National Portrait Gallery is finally reopening its doors on Thursday June 22 with ‘a full re-presentation of the collection, combined with a significant refurbishment of the building, the creation of public spaces, a more welcoming visitor entrance and public forecourt, and a new Learning Centre.’ The real question is, will they still have that terrifyingly awful, soul-drainingly bad Ed Sheeran portrait on display? 

You get to watch life slowly collapse in Martin Wong’s art. Across his career, the Chinese-American artist documented the free love utopianism of 1970s California and then saw everything descend into derelict decrepitude as the reality of urban New York tightened its grip on him. Crime, drugs, prison and the perseverance of immigrant and queer communities, that’s what happens here. Wong died in 1999 from an Aids-related illness. But what he left behind is a picture of America where misery meets hope on a level playing field to fight out for supremacy. Neither side, it seems, ever manages to win.

British artist Chris Ofili’s huge recent paintings relish in the complex, forbidden appeal of transgression. This is Ofili at his most ethereal, glowing and playful. Each of the seven canvases is filled with bioluminescent dots and shimmering soft pastel colours. There are curving, undulating phallic and vulvic flowers, gushes of water, streams of golden sunlight. It’s so full of art historical references it’s like an explosion in the Musée d’Orsay. The dots of Seurat, the colour of Chagall, the hazy myth of Redon, but all unmistakable, uniquely, sinfully Ofili.

Natty little top hats? Check. Bamboo canes swung with wild abandon? Check. A light-up staircase that leads enticingly up to the heavens? Check and check. Johnathan Church’s new production of the shimmering 1933 Busby Berkeley movie turned-stage musical is a sequin-studded riot. A musical about a musical, the deeply meta ‘42nd Street’ sees a fast-talking, hard-working gang of Depression-era New York dancers all eagerly attempting to break Broadway. Their demanding star Dorothy Brock is played to prissy perfection by West End veteran Ruthie Henshall, but it’s Nicole-Lily Baisden as the wide-eyed Peggy Sawyer from the backwaters of Allentown, Pennsylvania, who deserves the most praise, not least for constant flawless hoofing throughout an almost three-hour long show.

Martin McDonagh’s ‘The Pillowman’ is probably the greatest play of modern times to not transfer to the West End. Its original National Theatre – starring a pre-‘Doctor Who’ David Tennant – won massive acclaim at the National Theatre in 2003, and was restaged for Broadway. But now… it’s actually on! Matthew Dunster will direct Lily Allen and Steve Pemberton in the sinister masterpiece set in a totalitarian state in which a writer, Katurian, is questioned over a spate of killings with an uncanny similarity to her gristly short stories.

Glasweigen chef Nico Simeone launched their themed set six-course menu which changes up every six weeks back in 2017. It’s since spread from Scotland across the UK, to London. From now until the beginning of July at the Fitzrovia and Canary Wharf sites you can choose from either ‘The Chippie Experience’ – a menu of re-imagined chip shop classics – or ‘A World of Imagination’ – a menu of new smells and taste sensations. And for the rest of July? Enjoy the taste of ‘Sicily’. Book through Time Out and get all six courses and a glass of prosecco for £35.

Get six courses and a glass of prosecco at Six By Nico for £35 only through Time Out offers. 

Existential angst and toe-tapping tunes blend miraculously well in ‘Groundhog Day’, composer Tim Minchin’s dazzling take on the 1993 movie. He’s taken a much-loved but deeply cynical story and breathed all the emotional weight and heartbreak into it that a musical needs to soar. It’s a surprisingly profound exploration of how to live a good life by appreciating the wonder and specialness in the everyday. It feels like a snowy American echo of another Old Vic hit, ‘A Christmas Carol’ – and one that also deserves to run, and run, and run.

A weight hangs over Bermondsey. A crushing load, heavy with history and war, placed there by German artist Anselm Kiefer. His latest show at White Cube – the third in a trilogy of similarly huge, ambitious, immersive, oppressive exhibitions – takes as its starting point James Joyce’s famously unreadable experimental final novel ‘Finnegans Wake’. Lines from the book are scratched across the walls of Kiefer’s show, almost making sense but never quite coalescing into cogent meaning. Instead, what you’re left to decode are the vast, towering, claustrophobic assemblages of rusted metal, broken vitrines, huge dead sunflowers and endless rubble he has strewn across the gallery.

The National Theatre’s River Stage returns to the South Bank for a month of outdoor live music, dance, performance, workshops and family fun. This weekend, the James Cousins Company take over the stage and we’re promised ‘bold choreography from contemporary to salsa and tap, to line dancing with a flavour of your most loved pop routines’.

Embrace your inner Picasso and get your creative juices flowing with bottomless prosecco at this boozy painting class. Art Play is simple: you sip, paint, and socialise as you’re guided by talented resident artists who will take you through your masterpieces step-by-step so you can learn a new skill, make new friends, or simply have fun doing something a bit different. Save £40 on the experience by booking through Time Out offers. 

£20 for two hours of bottomless prosecco and painting session at Art Play only through Time Out offers.

US writer Jocelyn Bioh’s play is set in Ghana, 1986 at the prestigious Aburi Girls Boarding School, where Paulina and her crew are anxiously anticipating the arrival of the Miss Ghana pageant recruiter. But are Paulina’s dreams of being chosen at risk from new girl Ericka? Monique Touko directs a cast of Heather Agyepong, Bola Akeju, Deborah Alli, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers, Jadesola Odunjo in the UK premiere, which has Idris Elba signed on as associate producer.

You know what your life might need? Endless baskets of dim sum. Preferably at a very popular Chinatown stalwart that wants to feed you to the gills with things like Taiwanese pork buns, pork and prawn soup dumplings, and ‘supreme’ crab meat xiao long bao. Sounds good right? Well, we can go one further by giving you all that – plus a glass of prosecco – for just £23.95.

Bottomless dim sum and a glass of prosecco for £23.95, only through Time Out Offers.

The Almeida’s in-house maestro Rebecca Frecknall turns her hand to her first Shakespeare play for the influential theatre’s summer show. Young rising stars Toheeb Jimoh and Isis Hainsworth (pictured) play the star cross’d lovers in Frecknall’s take on Shakespeare’s romantic tragedy about a young couple caught up in their parents’ bitter feud.

Every year, the Serpentine Pavilion shows up to herald the start of summer, and its 22nd incarnation is designed by French-Lebanese architect Lina Ghotmeh. Titled ‘À table’, the pavilion is inspired by Ghotmeh’s Mediterranean upbringing, which involved discussions over the dinner table. Fittingly, it’ll have its own concrete table surrounded by intricate stools with the cafe serving a new menu based around organic ingredients.

Start your weekend off right with a stylish brunch in Soho. Tuck into a menu of delicious European sharing dishes from Michelin chef Asimakis Chaniotis at Bantof, which combines the quirkiness of old Soho, good food and creative talent into one unforgettable brunch. Tuck into a delicious main and small plate with free-flowing fizz for 90 minutes accompanied by live DJs for just £25 per person.

One main and one small plate with bottomless prosecco at Bantof for £25 per person only through Time Out offers.

Eddie Izzard’s solo offering is a loving, detailed take on Dickens’s most lovable novel ‘Great Expectations’. It’s a pacy two-act show, which showcases Izzard’s ability to hold a room spellbound as she embodies haughty ice queen Stella or gravelly-voiced convict Magwitch. Rigged out in a fetching frockcoat and stilettos, she goes for a faithful two-hour canter through this short but densely-plotted story, letting Dickens give us most of the best laughs. 

Threat is looming on Charles Avery’s island. As glass eels writhe in filthy buckets and revellers dance in the market square, a group of rebels, terrorists, fighters is taking up arms in the desert and preparing for an assault. Avery has been creating his fictional island since 2004. He paints scenes of island life, designs posters that exist in the paintings and on the walls of the gallery. The thing about Avery’s island is that the lore is dense and complex and the narratives are never clear, so you’re left to figure it out, to imagine what is coming, and what has come before. This show is a brilliant mixture of twisted narrative implications, graphic design and sculptural installation. 

Chef Tong, who helped earn Mayfair Chinese spot Hakkasan its Michelin star is back on the London food scene cooking up elevated and refined dishes using techniques and ingredients from across China at Gouqi. Try the Angus tenderloin beef with black pepper sauce, sautéed crystal jumbo prawns with yellow chive in XO sauce, or clay pot silken egg tofu with wild mushroom and vegetable for yourself with this eqclusive deal letting you enjoy top-tier dining for just £45 per person.

Three courses and a drink at Gouqi by Tong Chee Hwee for £45 through Time Out Offers. 

The boldest blockbuster since Mad Max: Fury Road, this Spidey adventure takes the ‘anything goes’ ethos of 2018’s Into the Spider-Verse and somehow finds more boundaries to push, more visual extra-ness to tap into, more roller coasters to ride. It’s such a torrent of universes, ideas and styles that it should collapse under the weight of its own creative payload. But it all works – brilliantly. This one is a future classic.

Guts are spilled on the floor, blood is splattered across the walls, and skin is stretched and flayed. This is sensual, sexual art, but not like Botticelli or Schiele: this is Hardcore. All that gore is spread across an exhibition filled with vicious, confrontational, feverish explorations of the limits of physical intimacy and desire. It starts with Carolee Schneeman’s mini-visual history of the vulva before you enter a world of leather and sweat. Nothing here is actually especially sexy. Instead, it’s political. It’s the body as battleground, the bedroom as trenches, orgasm as rebellion, bondage as freedom. Who knew horniness could be so powerful.

Hackney’s nocturnal NYC-style market is back with a new series of takeovers and collars with artists, festivals and collectives throughout June and July. First up is Brockwell Park festival Cross the Tracks, which’ll be bringing its groove-heavy soul, funk and jazz sounds to Bohemia Place where the roads will be cleared to make way for food stands, cocktail bars and plenty of dancing in the street. All fuelled up on burgers and punch? Stay out late for the after-party.

After a day of set design, creative collaboration and artistic expression, Moki Cherry still had to cook dinner for the kids. Sure, she did it in an improvised kitchen in a museum, but she still had obligations that her husband and collaborator, the legendary jazz musician Don Cherry, was comparatively free of. That’s one of the main narratives of this show, the first of the Swedish designer and artist’s work in the UK. The whole show feels like a post-Beatles, freeform meditation on living in the moment. It’s just an artist turning on, tuning in and dropping out, and then making dinner for the kids.

Frameless is a new permanent gallery dedicated to the art of submersion. Having taken over the old Odeon at Marble Arch, the former subterranean cinema has been converted into four multi-sensory galleries featuring iconic masterpieces from the greatest artists of our time. Well, sort of. As its name suggests you won’t find any physical paintings here. Rather each of the rooms contains a mini show where some of the most famous art in the world is stripped down to its base colours and then reconstructed in dazzling 3D animations that dance across mirrored ceilings and swirl across the floors and walls, all set to rousing soundtracks. Immersive art is certainly divisive, but Frameless has managed to create something genuinely exciting.

This stage adaptation of Annie Proulx’s 1997 gay romance (which was turned into a hugely successful film by Ang Lee in 2005) uses a soundtrack from ‘80s pop star and Americana enthusiast Eddi Reader and her live band to convay the vast empty spaces of Wyoming which form a brooding backdrop to the tortured love affair between Jack and Ennis, two farm hands who fall into each other's arms as young men, and spend the next 20 years failing to quit each other. Young US actors Mike Faist and Lucas Hedges make decent fists of the roles. Faist is magnetic as Jack playing him as a free spirit who drifts through life unbound by the prejudices and repressions of those around him. Hedges hits his marks as the more tortured Ennis, whose emotional inarticulacy and difficulty in imagining a future with Jack essentially dooms them.

Imagine a cross between ‘Annie’, ‘Les Miserables’, and one of those elaborate gymnastic-based spectacles staged by communist countries and you’re halfway there to imaging Disney’s cult classic musical ‘Newsies’ about striking that has finally hit the UK. The Troubadour Theatre’s high-octane production captures all its vigorous spirit, sending its huge cast of plucky, rebellious paperboys tumbling and leaping across its mammoth stage as they stand up to the big bosses who are determined to grind them down.

Get tickets to Disney's Newsies from just £16.50 only through Time Out Offers. 

One for the true carnivores out there. Promising “whole joints, big flames and good times”, chophouse and seafood restaurant Block Soho takes expertly-sourced meat, fish and veg and makes them smoulder to perfection on its huge charcoal grill. It ages its meat in a dedicated Himalayan salt chamber and serves them in a buzzy dining room just off Dean Street. Make your next night out special by tucking into a three-course feast and signature cocktail worth £47 for just £20.

Three-courses and signature cocktail for £20 through Time Out Offers.

The Hunterian is one of London’s most unique museums. It’s based on the collection of eighteenth-century surgeon John Hunter, who amassed a whole bunch of 14,000 specimens for surgical training. And by specimens, we mean dead stuff. Tons of it. The museum has been closed for renovations for six years but is now reopening on Tuesday, so we can finally go ogle the good stuff again. Keep an eye out for an itty bitty crocodile caught just as it emerged from its egg, macabre tables made of skin and a jazzy surgical robot.  

Really, what were the ‘SAW’ movies about if not groups of people playing an escape game? Okay, they were also quite a lot about said people being murdered in exquisitely ironic ways by a deranged serial killer. But assuming the makers of ‘SAW: The Experience’ aren’t planning to kill anyone then this official immersive theatre/escape game hybrid will get your heart racing as you play ‘morally-challenging tasks’ to try and escape Jigsaw. Would you like to play a game? At 50% off? Sure!

Over 50% off tickets to SAW: Escape Experience London only through Time Out Offers.

Dining with a conscience is easy at Edit, which has a hyper-seasonal, low-impact approach to plant-based British dining. Try three delicious courses from the menu, washed down with a glass of low-intervention, locally-sourced wine (or homemade seasonal lemonade) for the ultimate introduction to the fine ingredients sourced from small-scale farms, foragers and independent producers.

Three courses and a glass of wine at EDIT for £25 only through Time Out Offers. 

Think the past couple of years have been rough? Try surviving a Martian invasion and having your blood harvested in a stifling capsule. That’s the 1898 envisaged by H.G. Wells in his sci-fi thriller ‘The War of the Worlds’, which was then adapted by Jeff Wayne in his 1978 prog album.This VR-enhanced immersive theatre show is an adaptation of the beloved album where visitors are tasked with attempting to escape Martian-occupied Victorian London.

Get £10 off two or more standard tickets only through Time Out Offers.

Think Japanese food, think sushi and ramen, right? Well, yes, there’s no shortage of places in London where you can eat excellent raw fish and noodle soup, but Japanese cuisine has much more to offer. Treat yourself to a meal in a traditional Yakitori by heading to Junsei, a Marylebone joint specialising in the quintessential Japanese soul food (aka grilled goods on skewers). The place uses white hot binchotan charcoal for extra flavour, star dishes include seseri chicken neck, grilled duck breast chashu and tsukune chicken meatballs. Try two signature skewers with a main, dessert and drink for a very special price of just £20 – that’s a whopping 51 percent off. 

Two signature skewers with a main, dessert and drink for £20 through Time Out Offers.

Psycle’s boutique fitness centre in Notting Hill is renowned for its high-intensity Ride workouts, which combine resistance and speed to increase cardiovascular endurance and muscular strength. Plus, it hosts sculpting Barre classes, where you’ll workout to music, using weighted balls and resistance bands to tone your figure. Want a taste without the full commitment? Try four classes of your choosing and get started with your fitness journey. 

Four Ride or Barre classes for £28 at Psycle Notting Hill only through Time Out offers.

Tucked away under a derelict public house, The King’s Head private members’ club is one of east London’s best-kept secrets. Down here you’ll find Fu:Dizm, a tapas fusion restaurant led by Chef Jon Villar, formerly of Kopapa. Expect plenty of unique flavours from around the world, spanning vegan tofu tempura to eight-hour braised oxtail manti. Now you can try six globe-trotting courses for just £29. 

Eat six courses for £29 only through Time Out offers. 

From her loft above Times Square in New York, Jane Dickson could spy into the shadows. For decades she photographed the strip show signs, the leering, horny men, the glowing cinema boards, and then she transformed them into heavy, murky paintings. This new series is based instead on a bag of negatives of the same streets in the 1980s, but it’s still incredible. In Jane Dickson’s paintings cities are seedy forever.

This show of new work from Fred Auerbach is filled with some of the great artist’s only self-portraits. He’s one of the most important British painters of the modern era, part of the same set as Bacon and Freud, but he’s just never really looked inwards before. He’s spent his career focusing on the same core group of sitters, and his now iconic images of North London. But lockdown hit, and suddenly left alone with only his own company, he finally looked in the mirror in his early 90s. These aren’t just gorgeous, interesting paintings, they’re a chance to watch a talent finding a new language and absolutely screaming themselves horse in it.

The British Museum’s latest major exhibition is a world-first showcasing the resilience and creativity of 19th-century China. Explore the ins and outs of this little-known century in China and how this pivotal period in the country’s history forms a vital bridge to the modern nation the country is today. Check out 300 objects, most of which are being publicly displayed for the first time, including a water-proof straw cape made for a manual worker and a stunning robe that belonged to the Empress Dowager Cixi, the de-facto ruler of China from 1861 to 1908. 

Park Row is an American-style brasserie focused on top-tier dining and storytelling, transporting you from London to the world of DC comics and Gotham city. The theme is carefully interwoven into a Grade II listed Art-Deco venue, with subtle nods to its inspiration. While you’re here, you can tuck into pulled pork tacos, hefty burgers, chocolate choux and dishes like ‘The Joker’s Grin’ gnocchi. Try three courses for yourself, with a cocktail of your choice. Now for just £25. 

Three courses and a cocktail for £25 at DC Comics-inspired Park Row only through Time Out Offers. 

Remember the indoor playgrounds of your childhood? Well, the humble ball pit has been given a grown-up makeover at Shoreditch’s Ballie Ballerson. Here you can drink cocktails, nibble on pizza and dance to DJs before getting eyeball-deep in, er, well balls. Now, through Time Out for just £6, you can enter at any time, get a two-hour session in the famous ball pits and your choice of a refreshing cocktail including their new Bacardi summer special.

£6 for tickets and a cocktail at Ballie Ballerson only through Time Out offers. 

Saint Francis of Assisi, by all accounts, was a pretty good guy. He gave up wealth and luxury for pious poverty in order to better serve God. He cared for his fellow man, nature and animals, and in his tattered robes he founded the Franciscan brotherhood. The makings of a top-notch saint. What you’re watching unfurl in this show is the birth of a myth. Saint Francis’s life is told first through seven gleaming panels from Sassetta’s 1437 altarpiece for San Francesco in Sansepolcro. There’s enough stunning beauty here to overwhelm the senses and get you feeling quasi-religious, even if it doesn’t quite make you want to ditch your Levis and Adidas for a life in rags.

SplitLip’s delightful spoof WW2 musical has been heading inexorably for the West End for something like five years now. It’s a fringe theatre comet that’s gathered mass and momentum via seasons at the New Diorama, Southwark Playhouse and Riverside Studios. Though it’s been redirected for the West End by Robert Hastie, at heart it’s the same show it always was. It’s slicker and bigger in its way, but still feels endearingly shambolic where it counts. It’s safe to say that the operation has been a total success.

Forget shoddily poached eggs and warm prosecco, craft beer aficionados Brewdog throw a bottomless brunch with a difference. We’re talking classic full English spreads, triple stacks of pancakes, eggs benny and bacon sarnies, which you can wash down with unlimited beer (or prosecco, if you really can’t tear yourself away). Right now through Time Out you can get all this for just £20 per person at the bar’s Paddington, Ealing, Tower Hill, or Wandsworth locations. For an extra tenner you can add on something from the cocktail menu. 

Bottomless brunch for £20 available now through Time Out Offers

Why not swap your usual after-pint for a boozy craft class? So instead of just a hangover, you’ll also get to take away a creation you’ve made with your own fine hands from your evening. Token Studio near Tower Bridge host 90-minute classes that involve throwing a potter’s wheel, making finger-sized miniature pottery, learning hand-building techniques and painting an already-fired piece to create your own beautiful design. The best bit? You can bring your own beer! And if you love what you’ve made, then you can come back two weeks later to collect it for just £10.

Save a massive 57 percent off a 90-minute class at Token Studio only through Time Out Offers. 

Summer has finally arrived, which means its time to get tropical. Cottons – the much-loved Caribbean restaurant with rum shacks in Camden, Vauxhall, Notting Hill and Shoreditch – is hosting a Tropical Bottomless Brunch series in its Shoreditch joint. The party kicks off with 60 minutes of signature Cottons bottomless rum cocktails and moreish chicken and waffles to soak up the rum all set to a reggae soundtrack. Right now you can get your fill for just £25.

Bottomless cocktails and waffles at Cottons Shoreditch for £25 only through Time Out Offers. 

British artist and filmmaker Julien’s work is undeniably serious – his career started in the 1980s with an examination of the Black Atlantic – but he cannot resist making it beautiful. While Julien documents the wholesale pillage of African civilisation, he wreaks subtle revenge by elegantly raiding the iconography of European cinema. Here, a reference to Tarkovsky’s snowy birches, there a nod to Bergman profiles or Cocteau’s ‘Orphée. This is not an exhibition to whizz round quickly. If you commit to sitting with Julien’s blend of the cinematic, political and mythical in these spaces, you will experience if not exactly the ‘rupture and sublimity’ he aims for, then something close to it.

Head to a camp but clever immersive recreation of the 1605 plot to blow up Parliament. This lavish new immersive theatre attraction from the Tower of London is, in essence, a 100-minute theme-park ride using live acting and pre-recorded VR. It engages with its source material with genuine intelligence and care and has set a new gold standard for immersive shows.

Get £10 off two or more standard off peak tickets through Time Out Offers.

Tate Modern’s new exhibition pits two giants of abstraction against each other. In one corner, you’ve got Dutch modernist Piet Mondrian, with his ultra-influential, mega-famous approach to grids and colour. In the other corner, you’ve got Hilma Af Klint, a Swedish painter and mystic who was largely ignored in her lifetime, but whose work has recently been rediscovered, reappraised and reloved. Would we rather they each had their own individual solo shows instead of being shown next to each other for no reason? Sure, yes, but this will probably still be great. 

If we said there was a Kensington health club where you could choose from three massages for just £27 you might think we’d necked too much Christmas sherry, but hey, we’ve done our due diligence and we’re totally not wrong. Hit the London Health Hub and choose from a deep tissue massage, a sports massage or a Swedish massage, and then laugh yourself silly at the fact you’re getting more than 70 percent off. 

Your choice of massage at London Health Club for £27, only through Time Out Offers.

You’ve stood beneath Dippy the Diplodocus and gawped up at Hope the blue whale, but now the Natural History Museum is letting you walk beneath one of the largest creatures to have ever graced the Earth. For the first time ever in Europe, visitors will get the chance to see the largest and most complete dinosaur cast ever discovered: a titanosaur, four times heavier than Dippy and 12 meters longer than Hope. The enormous nine-meter-high skeleton will be stationed in the museum’s Waterhouse gallery where you can track the life of the prehistoric beast from football-sized egg to behemoth predator.  

Fancy playing arcade games while you feast on Asian fusion tapas and sushi dishes? Inamo in Covent Garden combines incredible flavours with interactive tables which let you order food and play arcade games like Space Invaders and air hockey while you tuck into Korean baby back ribs, spicy fries and crispy panko salmon rolls. Futuristic, right? Inamo’s new bottomless food and drink brunch (every Saturday and Sunday) which features a selection of Asian tapas, sushi and sides plus unlimited beer, wine and fizz would usually set you back £113.35, but right now, you can pay a very tasty £35.95.

Bottomless food, plus unlimited beer, wine and fizz, for just £35.95 only through Time Out Offers.  

Peake combines performance, choreography and drawing into a messy, ecstatic world of colour and movement. This show at Southwark Park Galleries will include a huge 50m-long painting and four durational performances for dancers. Peake’s collaborative, interdisciplinary approach makes her one of the most exciting young artists working today. 

See artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s first ever exhibition dedicated to design. A mix of recent works and commissioned pieces will draw on Weiwei’s fascination with historical Chinese artifacts and mediate on everything from value and humanity to what design reveals about our changing values. 

Bored of the tangle of controllers at home? At Platform Canary Wharf you can play classic video games and top-notch multiplayer Nintendo Switch and Playstation 5 games like Mario Kart, Mario Party, Super Smash Bros, Overcooked 2, FIFA and Call of Duty. When your thumbs are throbbing, tuck into a pizza or nachos and wash it all down with bottomless beer, prosecco, or mimosas.

£24 for bottomless drinks, a pizza and video games at Platform only through Time Out Offers. 

Royal W8 pile Kensington Palace’s latest blockbuster exhibition ‘Crown to Couture’ is billed as an immersive journey through the dresses and clothes of the Georgian era and an exploration of how these 200-year-old garments have inspired iconic red-carpet looks today. Everyone from Charles II to Lizzo and Lady Gaga is featured through the 200 objects on show and the opulent palace rooms have been transformed into a catwalk by Alexander McQueen’s production designer Joseph Bennett. Expect something royally special.

London’s latest art space, the Gilbert & George Centre, is exactly what it sounds like: a mini-museum from the UK’s most famous art duo, dedicated to, well, themselves. There’s a gallery space for them to show their own art, a film room for their own films and even an education centre devoted to themselves. It’s a genuinely staggering feat of narcissism. But can you blame them? For decades, they have been at the forefront of British art. The centre opens with a show of ‘The Paradisical Pictures’.

From ’pea soupers’ to mists rolling over the Thames, fog was quite a big feature of fast-industrialising Victorian London. So it makes sense that it wends its way into a lot of Dickens’ work. This new exhibition at the Charles Dickens’ Museum explores why Victorian London was so full of dense murky clouds and why Dickens was inspired by the phenomenon that’s led to the quintessential dark and filthy ‘Dickensian’ city of the past we think of today. 

Impressionism is all about the great outdoors. It’s all fields and waves and flowers. That was OK for the blokes of the movement (your Monets, your Renoirs) but it wasn’t so easy for fellow impressionist founder Berthe Morisot. She was kept away from the boy’s club of traditional French art and also kept away from nature. Women back then were meant to stay home and look after the house. So she turned inwards. She painted women tense in formal evening wear or caught in moments of private silence. Morisot’s life may have had more limits on it than her male peers, but she filled it with just as much passion, and just as much beauty.

‘Guys and Dolls’ is a musical with such a towering reputation and Nicolas Hytner’s Bridge production is a staggering achievement, a more or less flawless take that’s turned into something transcendent by the staging. This version of Frank Loesser’s 1950 classic uses a stunningly choreographed and incredibly fun series of rising and falling platforms to stage the show right in the middle of a standing audience. It’s pure joy. 

The story of the Eurocentric birth of modernism is the most written-about period of art history ever. So what could the National Gallery possibly have to tell you about European art from 1890 onwards that hasn’t already been shown to death? Well, the answer is absolutely nothing. This is an exhibition filled with familiar big hits by familiar big names. Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Seurat, Toulouse-Lautrec and Bonnard are all here, so are Klimt and Matisse and Picasso. You know these artists; you know how they shaped modern art, hell, you probably even know all of these paintings. But, goddamn it, it’s beautiful. You just fall in love despite your cynicism, despite yourself. 

For seven years in the 1980s, Chinese-American New York photographer Baldwin Lee lugged an ancient wooden large-format camera around the Southern states of the USA and took pictures. Pictures of families, of kids playing in the stifling summer heat, of young men posing with their cars, of girls in their best dresses. Of clapped-out wrecks, sagging shacks and ominous intimations of poverty, slavery and racism. This show is a fragment of the 10,000 plates Baldwin Lee yielded during this period. You won’t see a better show of photography this year. Maybe ever.

Despite selling two-and-a-half million copies, Hanya Yanagihara’s novel ‘A Little Life’ has proven unadaptable into a television series. No such problem for Belgian super director Ivo van Hove, whose Dutch stage version of ‘A Little Life’ has been kicking around for a few years. Now it debuts in English language form, for a West End run starring James Norton as the story’s deeply troubled central character, Jude. (It’s been trimmed down from the four-hour Dutch version, fyi). 

Oliver Beer has shoved microphones down a ceramic frog’s throat, a wedgewood vase, a glazed gravy jug and an earthenware pot and he’s made them all sing. Motion sensors trigger speakers attached to each pot, allowing their resonant frequencies to echo out. It’s a signature move by the young British artist, and now he’s doing it in the Mithraeum, an ancient Roman temple in the middle of the City.

‘Oklahoma!’ transfers to Wyndham’s Theatre in 2023. When our theatre critic reviewed its previous run at Young Vic in 2022 they said: “I’m struggling to think of a hornier theatre production than Daniel Fish’s radical revamp of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s 1943 musical. The first half in particular of the deceptively barebones production leans really creatively into the fact that very little happens beyond its characters thirsting after each other, and thirsting hard. It bucks almost every cliche about staging a trad musical, while ultimately hanging on to that which makes ‘Oklahoma!’ loveable.”

After an old-school Soho night out? Head to neon-lit subterranean hangout 100 Wardour Street where live bands and DJs will serenade you while you stuck into a three-course slap-up meal and a complinemtary glass of wine – all for just £19. Think modern European classic dishes and underground jazz club vibes. 

Three-course meal and a complinemtary glass of wine for just £19 through Time Out Offers.

Looking for a new hobby? Shuffleboard has moved off the cruise ships and had a fun makeover. Test your skills on Shuffleboard Bar London’s champion-sized tables with graffiti-lined walls acting as a cool backdrop. Spice things up by hitting up the fully-stocked bar while you play and soaking it up with some tasty food. There are also live DJs, live sports screenings like the Premier League, World Cup, F1, and NFL/NBA and a whole variety of games to play after, including a pool table, a classic arcade machine, foosball, and a boxing machine. 

Get 70 percent off shuffleboard, pizza and a drink at Shuffleboard Bar London only through Time Out Offers. 

As part of its world tour, Circus Extreme is coming to the UK for a unique show that’s been five years in the making. Wild stunts and classic clown escapades collide at this edge-of-your-seat experience, featuring Ayala Troupe’s record-holding high wire act, Danguir Troupe’s double wheel of death stunt and the extreme freestyle motocross team doing cliff-hanger stunts.

Up to 50% off tickets to Circus Extreme only through Time Out offers.

London might well be the world’s greatest food city (that’s right, we’ve gone there) but with spiralling living costs, it’s not like any of us can eat out as much as we’d like to. So, welcome to our list of London’s best cheap eats. Every highlighted dish here costs £10 or less and variety is the name of the game – so expect London staples like fish and chips, and pie and mash, but also discover the best bargain places for banh mi, burgers, gozleme, pizza, shawarma, bao, lahmacun, kebabs, bagels, baps and sarnies. 

Wherever you are in London, there will always be a pub nearby. Without pubs, London could never be its chatty, chaotic and slightly tipsy self. There are thousands here and they come in many forms. Time Out’s 100 Best Pubs list exists to celebrate London’s taprooms in their many guises. From the perfect pubs for drinking alone to the best boozers for giant yorkshire puddings – get stuck in, spot your local and maybe find a new favourite. 

Nineteenth-century French artist Paul Cezanne is not just the best of the post-impressionists, he’s one of the most inventive, radical, experimental, weird, and important painters ever. This major show depicts Cezanne as a political radical painting the degradation, violence, misogyny and injustice of his times. It’s conceptualism long before Duchamp, cubism long before Picasso, pop culture and flesh and weird gloopy paint long before anyone else. It’s amazing modern art, and if the Tate would have let us, we’d have given it all a big kiss.

Have an indulgent weekend by treating yourself to a Murad Method facial at Hershesons Fitzrovia. The treatment helps to reduce pigmentation, lines, wrinkles and blemishes and includes a skin-imaging analysis with a Nexa device so you can customise the facial to your specific needs. The hour-long experience includes a deep cleanse and a professional strength peel or treatment, followed by a facial massage, mask and soothing hand and arm massage. Book now for just £78.

Get 40% off an hour-long Murad Method facial at Hershesons Fitzrovia only through Time Out offers. 

Now in its fifty-eighth year, the celebrated annual wildlife photography competition returns to the Natural History Museum with images of the most extraordinary species on the planet captured by professional and amateur photographers. This year saw tens of thousands of entries from across the globe, with 100 selected including the winner – American photographer Karine Aigner’s remarkable image of a buzzing ball of cactus bees spinning over the hot sand on a Texas ranch. Don’t miss this highlight in the NHM’s calendar.

Londoners love a market. It’s that unique combination of eating, chatting and browsing. Lovely stuff. And weekends were made for browsing around them. Here’s our pick of the very best markets in London, from foodie Borough Market to flower-filled Columbia Road.