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

Each year, Meltdown invites one artist to curate its bill, allowing them to take over the Southbank Centre for a couple of weeks with their favourite stars from across music and culture. This year, Chaka Khan is taking up the challenge with a lineup that brings together established icons and lesser-known discoveries. This week, look out for gigs from Les Amazones d'Afrique, Norman Jay, Master Peace, Emeli Sandé, Rahsaan Patterson and the Chaka herself.

The men’s UEFA Euros are back, kicking off on Friday when Scotland plays hosts Germany. Whether you’re a die hard footie fan or just hoping to catch a glimpse of Jack Grealish’s calves, you’re going to want to know all the best spots in London to catch the matches. From screenings to sports pubs, these are the best places to watch Euro 2024 in London.

Flatspot Records is a label from New York and Maryland championing a new wave of punk and hardcore music. In recent years, it’s been the premier imprint for heavy, boundary-pushing music emerging from the underground across the US. This night at The Dome will showcase some of the hottest talent it has on its roster, with fan favourites like Scowl, ZULU and Speed leading the charge. The Dome, NW5 1HL. Sat Jun 15 and Sun Jun 16, 7pm. From £30.25.

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?

For the past couple of years Corrochio’s has been the Dalston strip’s best kept secret. Now, this tucked-away taqueria has broken out of its basem*nt home and finally leapfrogged up to street level. The new restaurant is about four times the size of the original, with the added bonus of windows. Most importantly, the food is the real deal. Raised in Guadalajara, chef and founder Daniel Carillo knows what he’s doing. His short but punch-pulling menu revolves around regional specials (including huaraches, a flatbread-ish dish rarely found in London’s Mexican restaurants) and the three Ts; tacos, tortas and tostadas. Plus, Corrochio’s dedication to getting the booze just as right as the food is part of what makes it the perfect party restaurant.

From Raising Arizona and Con Air to Kick-Ass and The Croods, Nicolas Cage is reliably entertaining in full-on dad mode. Arcadian proves that once again as he plays Paul, a lone father raising twin sons at the onset of an alien invasion in this tight, action-horror shot in Dublin’s enchanting countryside.Shaky, handheld camerawork establishes the film’s gritty, anxious and naturalistic aesthetic, while the plot and setting is not too dissimilar to the sinister, rural isolation seen in both 28 Days Later and A Quiet Place. And like Krasinki's heroic dad in the latter, Cage plays his devoted father with strict conviction and tender-heartedness.

English artist David Micheaud’s show is full of uncomfortably precise interiors and still lifes; bare, minimal, crisp, hyper-real visions of a coat on its hook, feet up on a table, a hob, an intercom, the shadow cast by a cheese plant. Nothing happens, there’s no action, no big gestures or emotions, there’s just the blank reality of the stuff of everyday life, stared at for so long that it’s no longer comforting, it’s suffocating, overbearing. They’re gorgeous paintings, perfectly rendered. Micheaud manages to lose himself in the uncanny valley of existence, the erotic of the everyday.

The Horniman Museum and Gardens play host to a hugely diverse roster of events throughout the year, and the Daytimers Festival is no exception. On this Saturday in June, the gardens will be taken over by a bunch of family-friendly activities to celebrate all things South Asia. There’ll be live music and DJ sets from the likes of Jawari, an eclectic music collective and British-Bengali musician Tara Lily plus more. There’ll also be drop-in craft workshops, Chai tasting, food activities and arts and crafts stalls.

Munch your way through dishes from the great and the good of the capital’s restaurant scene at this sprawling culinary festival in the picturesque surroundings of central London’s Regent’s Park. Korean rabata (barbecue) restaurant Roka, South American fusion from YOPO and Big Mamma’s quintet of maximalist Italian joints (that’s Gloria, Circolo Popolare, Ave Mario, Jacuzzi and Carlotta) are among the line-up of restaurants peddling plates.

West London’s finest institutions including the V&A, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall – pretty much every big landmark on Exhibition Road are joining forces for the Great Exhibition Road Festival, two days of events inspired by the 1851 Great Exhibition. Everything is free (if you register), and the programme is as mixed as a family bag of Revels. Head down if you fancy an AI silent disco, constructing mini robots or learning about revolutionary medical technology.

Hit up this day of celebrations dedicated to the influential literary figure James Joyce. Bloomsday Festival gathers emerging and established Irish talent, including the likes of Irish singer BLÁNID and musician and podcaster Gareth Keane, for a mish-mash of music and spoken word performances. Singer-songwriter Imelda May is headlining, there’ll be ‘try an instrument’ sessions, Ceilidh dancing and – of course – plenty of hearty food and whiskey.

Pop down for a picnic by the water and then make your way to a (seated) concert in front of Henry VIII's iconic former residence at this open-air music festival in the historic Hampton Court Palace. This week look out for gigs from Nile Rodgers & Chic and Tom Jones.

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.

Part comedy, part environmental lament, all vibes –Sasquatch Sunset is a very weird, largely gross, yet somehowvery charming chronicle of a year in the life of a group of sasquatch, or bigfoots (bigfeet?). Directed by David and Nathan Zellner (2014’s Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter) it follows a family of these apparently mythical beings as they face threat from the natural world and the encroachment of humans on their habitat.It’s easy to see this following in the (big)footsteps of those and acquiring its own cult following.

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.

Due to take over north London’s iconic Roundhouse throughout June, The Last Word Festival is back for its brilliant eleventh edition. The fest is one of the best in the UK for championing exciting voices and emerging talent in the world of spoken word, and what better live venue could there be to host it? This year, there’ll be poetry slam heats, where 18-25 year olds can compete for a cash prize, and a session called ‘redacted’ where poems are created by removing words from articles, chapters or magazines, plus much, much more.

More than 130 events across over 40 parks, streets, churches, libraries and pubs are planned for this year’sWandsworth Arts Fringe. Expect nights of cabaret, live comedy, experimental dance and brand-new theatre. Highlights includeCaBiRet, a celebration of bisexuality through music, magic and comedy, a set by Taskmaster star Sophie Duker, and ‘Still Here’, a moving insight into the lives of migrants from Ukraine and Afghanistan.

Sparky, kaleidoscopic and boldly honest about the tougher side of growing up, Inside Out 2 is Pixar’s most profound and moving movie since, well, Inside Out. This cerebral coming-of-age adventure feels like the studio rediscovering its mojo and putting it to dazzling use.The inside-the-mind storyline is a bit samey, but there’s evenmore balls in the air than in Inside Out, and debut director Kelsey Mann and co-writers Meg LeFauve and Dave Holstein juggle the dual narratives with a breezy elan that belies just how complicated it all is – even before you throw in a host of madcap new characters. It’s anempathetic, emotionally candid treat.

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.

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.

This year marks 20 years of the London Festival of Architecture, which has spent those two decades sparking conversation and inspiring new ways to engage with our city. This year it’s calling on boroughs, architects and communities to rethink public spaces and put people back at the heart of the city. There are over 450 events on the programme, including talks, workshops, performances, tours, installations and ‘interventions in the public realm’. Plus, the return of Studio Lates gives the chance to go behind the scenes of some of the capital’s leading architectural and design practices.

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.

Aussie director Benedict Andrews’s UK reputation is heavily based on his extraordinary 2012 production of Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’, which turned the melancholy masterpiece into a wildfin de siècleromp.Andrews has done it again with another all-time take. Clearly there is something about Chekhov’s large ensembles, bittersweet humour and tales of fading aristocrats that draw out the best in him. The playbuilds to a queasily brilliant climax, but it’s the journey that’s the joy. You wish it would last forever.

Italian neorealism is one of the most prevalent post-war cinematic movements, and this season is centred around the re-release of Robert Rossellini’s‘Rome, Open City’(1945) which is considered the very first example. As with any great film fest, there’ll be insight from some experts, guest speakers will explore the impact various women have had on the movement, in front of and behind the camera, and the entire second half of the season will focus on work from the early ‘50s, with films such asMiracle in MilanandStromboli.

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.

Stephen Adly Guirgis’s Pulitzer-winning play is a meaty watch, a pungent, spikey mix of laughs, tears and doomed defiance that centres on a multiracial group of misfits headed by Danny Sapani’s retired NYPD officer Walter.Boozing away his enforced retirement in a palatial but semi-dilapidated apartment in Manhattan, Walter’s career was ended six years ago when a young white officer mistakenly pumped him full of lead; he has spent the intervening years campaigning for heads to roll. What the play ultimately boils down to is a conundrum that’s been sloshing around in drama since at least ‘Antigone’. Walter has been seriously wronged and wants justice. But is it realistic to believe that he’s going to get it?It’s a timeless dilemma that’s been deftly retooled by Guirgis to ask questions about life in contemporary America. It’s a pleasure to spend time amongst Guirgis’s crew of misfits.

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.

The cycle of 13 songs PJ Harvey has written for the National Theatre’s adaptation of Charles Dickens’s ‘Our Mutual Friend’ slot seamlessly into her body of work and elevate this adaptation of Dickens’s final finished novel. The show is billed as a play with songs: the tune count is a bit low for actual musical status, but nonetheless, Harvey’s songs are integral to the darkly satirical thriller that pivots on the disappearance of John Harmon, who disappeared on the day he returned to collect his inheritance following the death of his wealthy father. This story from the city is something special: Dickens’s late class drama turned into a work both elemental and righteous.

Can art save the world? Can it lead to world peace? Nah, probably not, but Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008) believed it could. In the 1980s, the giant of post-war American art launched ROCI (Rauschenberg Overseas Cultural Interchange, pronounced ‘Rocky’ like his pet turtle), an initiative that saw him travel to countries gripped by war and oppression in an ambitious act of cultural diplomacy.He visited places like Cuba, Chile and the USSR and the results are on display here. As adocument of a world gripped by paranoia and tension, of the slow demise of communism, of the birth of neoliberalism, it’s great.