What's on in London this week: 5 - 11 October 2026

Discover our pick of events in London this week: 5  - 11 October 2026.

BFI London Film Festival

The BFI London Film Festival returns this week for its 70th anniversary, bringing 12 days of premieres, galas and special screenings across the city. A fixture of the capital's film calendar, the festival opens much of its programme to the public, with early access to new international features and documentaries. Screenings take place at BFI Southbank, the Royal Festival Hall, the ICA and the Prince Charles Cinema, among other venues.

Click here for the full programme of events.

Date: 7 - 18 October 2026. Location: BFI Southbank, Belvedere Road, London SE1 8XT, plus BFI IMAX, the Royal Festival Hall, the ICA, the Prince Charles Cinema, Curzon Soho, Curzon Mayfair and Vue West End
Price: From £10, or £6 for BFI 25 and Under, plus a £1 booking fee online or by phone.Book now.

BFI Southbank. Image credit Luke Hayes

Dance Umbrella

Dance Umbrella is London's annual international dance festival, founded in 1978 and now in its 48th year, it the longest running contemporary dance festival in the UK. Led by artistic director Freddie Opoku-Addaie, it takes place across venues around the city and online. Two shows fall inside this week. THE HERD/LESS by Mamela Nyamza opens the festival at Sadler's Wells East, the UK premiere of an ensemble work that uses cloth and cultural sticks, objects tied to masculine authority in southern Africa, to look at how a group moves in harmony and how it is controlled. Nyamza took a Silver Lion at this year's Venice Biennale. A Place to Dance by Poliana Lima and Yinka Esi Graves will take place at The Place, with a set from DJ Oumoukala.

Date: 7 to 27 October 2026. THE HERD/LESS, 8 to 10 October, 7.30pm. A Place to Dance, 9 and 10 October, 7.30pm. Location: Sadler's Wells East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Stratford, London E20, and The Place, 17 Duke's Road, London WC1H 9PY. Price: THE HERD/LESS from £15 plus a £4 transaction fee. £10 tickets held at every performance. Digital pass £15, or £7 concession.Book now.

A Place to Dance by Poliana Lima and Yinka Esi Graves is at The Place. Image credit Miguel Angel Rosales

Darkling

Titas Halder's play is set in Bhopal in 1984, in the lead up to the gas leak that killed and injured more than half a million people. It follows one woman's life, from a childhood spent in poverty with her father and sister, through the arrival of the factory that changes the land around her, to the night that destroys her hometown. Linnea Berthelsen, who played Kali in Stranger Things, performs it alone in her UK stage debut, in a 90 minute solo show directed by Matthew Xia. There is a relaxed performance on 8 October and a captioned matinee on 10 October.

Date: until 24 October 2026. Evenings 7.30pm, matinees 2.30pm. Location: Holloway Theatre, Bush Theatre, 7 Uxbridge Road, London W12 8LJ. Price: £15 to £35. Age guidance 14 and over. Book now.

Arise Festival, London edition

The London edition of Arise brings Bobby Beethoven to an industrial unit in Tottenham across two all-night sessions, presented by Fetchish, basement, Fixity and ada theatre lab. Both nights open with an opera directed by Ken Nakajima and composed by Mujuice and Milo McKinnon. Friday 9 October features bassnotesonhope, supchikmode, acidhousewife3000, BJ Holy, Ushko, Moa Pillar and Exploited Body. Saturday 10 October brings dbeater, Salena, Hovsep (AM) from Hyperkavkaz, veryskeleton, biblemami, whosmeg?, bod [包家巷] and Total Freedom. Entry times are staggered, and an Act 1 ticket also covers Act 2.

Date: 9 - 10 October 2026, 9pm to 4am. Location: Unit 58, Millmead Industrial Estate, Tottenham, London, N17 9QU. Price: from £11.50 - £25.20. Book now.

Arise Festival to take place from 8-19 October 2026.

Oktoberfest

Three versions over the same weekend. Oktoberfest on the Common expects around 20,000 guests across day and evening sessions. Boxpark Shoreditch and Camden Oktoberfest bring steins, singalongs, stein holding contests and pretzel eating competitions.

Click here for our guide to Oktoberfest in London.

Date: 9 - 10 October 2026 at Clapham Common, 10 October at Boxpark Shoreditch and Camden
Location: Clapham Common, Windmill Drive, London SW4 9DE. Between the Bridges, Belvedere Road, London SE1. Boxpark Shoreditch, 2 to 10 Bethnal Green Road, London E1 6GY. Electric Ballroom, 184 Camden High Street, London NW1 8QP
Price: from £20.40.

Oktoberfest returns to London this weekend. Image credit Patrick von der Wehd

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland

The first stage adaptation of Haruki Murakami's 1985 novel comes to the Barbican in its European premiere, following Watashi, a human data processor who encrypts information inside his own brain, through secret conspiracies and towards a discovery that could end his world. Adapted by Ako Takahashi, directed and choreographed by Philippe Decouflé and starring Tatsuya Fujiwara, performed in Japanese with English surtitles.

Date: 8 - 11 October 2026, 7pm. Location: Barbican Theatre, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS. Price: From £25 plus booking fee, £18 Young Barbican. Book now

End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland. Haruki Murakami / Philippe Decouflé. Image courtesy of the Barbican.

fabric, The Martinez Brothers and Sarahrey

The Martinez Brothers take over fabric for a six hour set on Sunday evening, with Sarahrey alongside them. A long Sunday session in Farringdon rather than a late night, opening at 6pm and closing at 2am.

Date: 11 October 2026, 6pm - 2am. Location: fabric, 77a Charterhouse Street, Clerkenwell, London EC1M 6HJ. Price: £45.10. Book now.
Entry is 18 and over, and ID is required on the door.

Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy

Final week of Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy at Theatre Royal Stratford East, the world premiere of Ava Pickett's follow up to 1536 and Lisa Spirling's directorial debut as the theatre's artistic director. Michelle Dockery plays Helen, returning home after a war fought in her name, with Laura Aikman as her childhood friend Cee. The Trojan War is relocated to civil unrest in present day Britain and a Home Counties living room. The production closes on Saturday 10 October, with an audio described matinee as the last performance.

Date: 3 September to Saturday 10 October 2026, closing this week. Evenings 7.30pm, Saturday matinees 2.30pm. Location: Stratford East, Gerry Raffles Square, London E15 1BN. Price: £10 to £50.50. Book now.

Bloodsport: After Helen of Troy. Michelle Dockery (Helen) and Jay Taylor (Marcus). Image credit by Tristram Kenton

KOKO Electronic, Swimming Paul

Producer Swimming Paul plays KOKO Electronic, the Camden venue's weekend series, on Friday 9 October for an all-night session. He is a French producer and DJ from Paris who came to electronic music while spending time in London, and released his first tracks in 2023. His single Fading picked up support from Pete Tong, Danny Howard and Jess Iszatt on BBC Radio 1, and VHS RAVE, made with Tiësto, followed in 2024. A second album, Smiling Through the Pain 2, is due on 24 October.

The venue is 19 and over with physical photographic ID required, last entry is 3am and there is no readmission.

Date: 9 October 2026, 10pm to 5am
Location: KOKO, 1a Camden High Street, Camden Town, London NW1 7JE. Book now

Arts & Culture

Opening this week

Cecilia Vicuña: Living Threads

Chilean artist, poet and activist Cecilia Vicuña receives her first major UK exhibition at Whitechapel Gallery, a homecoming for an artist who studied at the Slade and went into exile in London after the 1973 coup in Chile. Spanning six decades, the show brings together the suspended wool installation Quipu Menstrual, the only surviving work from her fragile precarios series, paintings from the 1970s and previously unseen material from Artists for Democracy, the solidarity group she co-founded in London in 1974.

Date: 7 October 2026 to 14 February 2027, Tuesday to Sunday 11am to 6pm, Thursdays until 9pm, closed Mondays. Location: Whitechapel Gallery, Galleries 1, 2 and 3, 77 to 82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX. Price: £16.50 standard, £9.50 concessions. Book now.

Cecilia Vicuña, Quipu Menstrual 1 (unknotted), 2006 / 2024. Site-specific installation with unspun wool and video. Dimensions variable; video duration: 4 minutes, 13 seconds. Installation view, Cecilia Vicuña: Soñar el Agua. Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Brazil. May 17 – September 15, 2024. Photo Isabella Matheus

Katherine Hubbard: The Great Room

The American artist's first institutional solo show outside the US, grown out of photographs she made with her mother, Antonette Berger, who began to experience the effects of LATE, a progressive brain disease, during the pandemic. Using two large format cameras, the pair photographed Berger's Philadelphia home as it was packed up for her move into residential care. Hubbard echoes the partition her mother built across the house's great room with freestanding walls and doorways that frame the photographs.

Date: 7 October 2026 - 10 January 2027. Location: Studio Voltaire, 1A Nelsons Row, London SW4 7JR. Price: Free. Book now.

Justin Caguiat: Change Ringing

Tokyo-born painter Justin Caguiat makes his UK institutional debut at Serpentine South with paintings made with heat-sensitive pigment, they shift colour and reveal hidden forms as the gallery's temperature and light change. Around them, bronze bells cast in the shapes of flowers and seeds ring out in shifting sequences, drawn from the English tradition of change ringing.

Date: 8 October 2026 - 10 January 2027, Tuesday to Sunday 10am to 6pm. Location: Serpentine South, Serpentine Galleries, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA. Price: Free. Book now.

Justin Caguiat, Untitled 7 (Alphabet of Dots), 2025, Aquatint and soft-ground etching, gampi paper chine collé over monotype on paper, 35.2 x 26.5 cm. Courtesy the artist; Greene Naftali, New York; Modern Art, London; and Serpentine, London

The 90s: Art and Fashion

Edward Enninful curates Tate Britain's autumn show on the decade when art, fashion and photography merged into one cultural force, with more than 100 photographs, paintings, sculptures and garments by nearly 70 artists, photographers and designers, from the Young British Artists to Alexander McQueen. Highlights include Mark Leckey's Fiorucci Made Me Hardcore, Chris Ofili's Turner Prize-winning tribute to Doreen and Stephen Lawrence, and Damien Hirst's formaldehyde sculptures.

Date: 8 October 2026 to 14 February 2027. Location: Tate Britain, Millbank, London SW1P 4RG. Price: £22 standard, £20 concessions, £5 for Tate Collective aged 16 to 25, free for members. Book now.

Jon Shard, Flesh at The Haçienda, 1996 Courtesy of British Culture Archive © Jon Shard British Culture Archive

Charan Singh: Your Tongue in My Mouth

Autograph presents a new solo show by Charan Singh, drawing on more than 20 years of HIV and AIDS activism in India. Singh focuses on Hijra and Kothi communities, who were hit hard by AIDS from the 1980s while life-saving information circulated mainly in English rather than their own languages. Studio portraits, archive material and storytelling look at how colonial history in Britain and India has shaped and erased queer lives in both countries. All the work is newly commissioned and shown for the first time.

Date: 8 October 2026 - 13 February 2027, Wednesday and Friday 11am to 6pm, Thursday 11am to 9pm, Saturday 12.30pm to 6pm. Location: Autograph, Gallery 2, Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA. Price: Free. Book now.

Robert Ryman: The Real Thing

Robert Ryman gets his first in-depth UK exhibition in more than 30 years at the Barbican, with over 60 works by the late American painter made between the mid-1950s and the early 2010s. Ryman worked mostly with white paint and a square format, and the show gathers the variety he found across canvas, linen, fibreglass, steel, aluminium, Plexiglas and coffee filter paper.

Date: 8 October 2026 to 28 February 2027, Tuesday and Wednesday 10am to 6pm, Thursday and Friday 10am to 8pm, Saturday and Sunday 10am to 6pm, closed Mondays. Location: Barbican Art Gallery, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS. Price: £20.50 standard, £15.50 students, under-16s free, £6 for Young Barbican members aged 16 to 29, Pay What You Can every Thursday 5pm to 8pm and Friday 10am to 12pm. Book now.

Robert Ryman in his studio, ca. 1972. Photo: Timm Rautert. Credit: © Archive Timm Rautert, Museum Folkwang, Essen.

Sabine Moritz: Lie Down in Green Pastures

The first UK museum show by German artist Sabine Moritz, with sketches and canvases drawn from her East German childhood, most of them never exhibited before. Many go back to Neulobeda, a satellite town of prefabricated concrete blocks where her family moved after her father's death. The show brings together imagined landscapes of plants encroaching on those tower blocks, floral still lifes and a large new abstract work painted for the exhibition.

Date: 8 October - 20 December 2026. Location: Garden Museum, 5 Lambeth Palace Road, London SE1 7LB. Price: from £13 to £16, or £14.30 to £17.60 with donation. Book now.

Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends

Tim Walker has spent the past five years photographing queer people and their allies, and the results fill the National Portrait Gallery this week. Some 250 new portraits include Isaac Julien, Ian McKellen, Miriam Margolyes and Chappell Roan, alongside activists, social workers, nightlife performers and musicians. The show opens with founders of the Gay Liberation Front and Stonewall who campaigned in the 1970s and 80s, and is Walker's largest museum exhibition to date.

Date: 9 October 2026 to 7 February 2027, daily 10am to 6pm, Thursday and Friday until 9pm. Location: National Portrait Gallery, Ground Floor, St Martin's Place, London WC2H 0HE. Price: £23 off-peak Monday to Thursday, £25 peak Friday to Sunday, or £25.50 and £27.50 with donation, £5 for under-25s through CLUB NPG, Pay What You Can on Mondays 10.30am to 2pm, members free. Book now.

Ian McKellen, Love, London, 2023 © Tim Walker. Tim Walker’s Fairyland. Love and Legends to open at National Portrait Gallery in 2026.

Artist talk

Artist's talk and exhibition preview, Cecilia Vicuña

Cecilia Vicuña talks about her long and personal relationship with London, where she studied at the Slade and lived in exile after the 1973 coup in Chile, co-founding the solidarity group Artists for Democracy here in 1974. The Chilean artist, poet, filmmaker and activist, now based in New York and known for her knotted quipus and fragile precarios, discusses how the city deepened her artistic and political practice, and how memory, cultural preservation, Indigenous knowledge and resistance have continued to shape her work. She is in conversation with the Whitechapel's director of exhibitions Leila Hasham and associate curator Carolina Jozami from 5pm to 6pm, followed by a preview of Living Threads, her first major UK exhibition, which opens the next day and covers six decades of her work.

Date: Tuesday 6 October 2026, 5pm to 7pm
Location: Assembly Room, Whitechapel Gallery, 77 to 82 Whitechapel High Street, London E1 7QX. whitechapelgallery.org

Portrait of Cecilia Vicuña, 2021. Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Seoul, and London. Photo William Jess Lair

#FLOFavourites: Pick of the Week

FREE EVENT OF THE WEEK

Three free exhibitions to see in London this week

Jenkin van Zyl's Enclosure, Somerset House. Image credit MTotoe/ FLOLondon.

This week's free events pick highlights three exhibitions to see in London, all with no admission charge. Amar Kanwar is at the Serpentine (until 31 January), showing films by the Indian artist and filmmaker in work dealing with political violence, land and resistance. Jenkin van Zyl's Enclosure is at Somerset House (until 29 November), a newly commissioned film and large-scale installation set in a decaying cryonics facility in the English countryside where visitors move through the remains of the site, past fairground signage, holograms, inflatable cocoons and decaying ephemera. And René Magritte is at Gagosian Grosvenor Hill (until 12 December), his first major London show in more than a decade, with works on paper, sculpture and photography drawn from across his career, much of it on loan from museums and private collections.

Interview of the week

In conversation Holly Shires

Holly Shires at Saatchi Gallery.

Since April, Winsor & Newton's Art Mail has gathered over 6,000 postcards from artists in more than 40 countries, currently on show at Saatchi Gallery, with a New York edition at Drawing Room in Brooklyn and an auction to follow in aid of Hospital Rooms. We spoke to Holly Shires, Global Head of Creative at Winsor & Newton and the mind behind the project.

Click here to read the full interview.

Food of the week

Frico Very Good

Image courtesy of Frico Very Good

Mercato Metropolitano is serving frico, the melted cheese dish from Friuli Venezia Giulia that has been made in the north-eastern Italian region since the fifteenth century. It comes crisp and thin or soft, usually cooked with potatoes and onions, and served both in its traditional form and in fusion versions created with other vendors in the market. The corners also sell regional products, among them San Daniele PDO ham, Friulian cured meats, wines and traditional spirits. It is a two year project from the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region, PromoTurismoFVG and Mercato Metropolitano, with as much interest in drawing UK travellers to the region as in feeding them in London. The first corner opened at Elephant and Castle on 4 September, with a deli corner now at Mercato Mayfair.

Location: Mercato Metropolitano Elephant and Castle, 42 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6DR, and Mercato Mayfair. mercatometropolitano.com

Cause of the week

Mental Fight Club

Mental Fight Club

Mental Fight Club is an arts and mental health charity founded in Southwark in 2003. Its events are free and open to everyone, with the aim of easing the social exclusion that often comes with mental ill health. The flagship project is the Dragon Café, a weekly Monday space offering singing, dancing, portraiture and animation alongside food and company, with a fortnightly Wednesday version in the City. Volunteers support the delivery of the arts events, set up the spaces and welcome people as they arrive.

Discover more about volunteering at mentalfightclub.art, or email info@mentalfightclub.art