What’s on in London this week: 8 - 14 September 2025
Discover our pick of events in London this week: 8 - 14 September 2025.
Step Inside 25 Weekend
Somerset House are opening their doors this week, offering the opportunity to explore rarely seen spaces and engage with their vibrant creative community. The weekend marks a celebration of the building’s transformation from historic government offices into an internationally acclaimed cultural hub, featuring a programme of free, family-friendly events. Visitors can enjoy installations, performances, and workshops, including a pop-up basketball court, a disco experiences from the CUTE exhibition, and Peanuts-inspired drawing workshops. Guests can also go behind the scenes on Maker Street to visit artists’ studios and see new works by residents such as Nick Ryan and GAIKA. As night falls, Waterloo Bridge will glow “Somerset House Blue” as part of Illuminated River, completing a spectacular celebration of creativity and the hidden secrets of this historic building.
Date: 13 - 14 September 2025. Location: Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 1LA. Price: Free.somersethouse.org.uk
The Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court, Somerset House. Image credit Kevin Meredith
Last Night of the Proms 2025
The 2025 BBC Proms will conclude with the highly anticipated Last Night of the Proms this week at the Royal Albert Hall in London. This grand finale will feature the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chorus conducted by Elim Chan, delivering a programme that blends traditional favourites with contemporary works. Highlights include Mussorgsky’s A Night on the Bare Mountain, Hummel’s Trumpet Concerto in E flat major, and world premieres of BBC commissions such as Camille Pépin’s Fireworks and Rachel Portman’s The Gathering Tree.
Date: 13 September 2025. Location: Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, South Kensington, London SW7 2AP. Book now
London Design Festival
The London Design Festival returns for its 23rd edition this week , with the city once again serving as a global stage for creativity, innovation, and collaboration. This year’s programme explores how design can address today’s most urgent challenges, with highlights including Paul Cocksedge’s What Nelson Sees in Trafalgar Square, Lee Broom’s monumental lighting installation Beacon, and a major exhibition at the V&A examining design’s response to crisis. Across London, the Design Museum, Space House, and a network of Design Districts will present exhibitions, fairs, and events showcasing pioneering ideas, sustainable materials, and cross-cultural collaborations. Alongside these headline projects, the Global Design Forum will host talks from leading voices in the field, while the annual London Design Medals will celebrate outstanding talent.
Click here for our pick of 12 things not to miss at London Design Festival 2025.
Date: 13–21 September 2025. Location: across London. londondesignfestival.com
Lee Broom Beacon, LDF 2025
The Blackbird and The Duke
The Nu Civilisation Orchestra presents The Blackbird and The Duke, a 2.5-hour celebration of the Harlem Renaissance with special guests CHERISE and Bonnie Greer. The evening premieres The Blackbird of Harlem, telling the story of singer, dancer and activist Florence Mills, known as “The Blackbird of Harlem”, through music, dance and spoken word, alongside Duke Ellington’s landmark works A Tone Parallel to Harlem and Black, Brown and Beige. Although Mills and Ellington never worked together, both were central to a cultural revolution whose influence continues to resonate worldwide.
Date: 13 September 2025. Location: Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, London, SE1 8XX. Run time: approx. 2h 30m. Price: from £22 + £3.50 booking fee. Book now
London Symphony Orchestra/Sir Antonio Pappano
The London Symphony Orchestra opens its new season with Sir Antonio Pappano conducting two towering American symphonies that capture the drama and optimism of the 20th century. Bernstein’s Kaddish Symphony, dedicated to the memory of JFK, combines theatre, oratorio and choral symphony in a searching, impassioned dialogue with faith, while Copland’s expansive Third Symphony closes with the iconic Fanfare for the Common Man, a beacon of hope at the end of the Second World War. A bold and stirring start to the classical music season.
Date: 14 September 2025. Time: 7.00pm. Location: Barbican Hall, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London,EC2Y 8DS. Price: £18- 72. Book now
Antonio Pappano. Image credit: Mark Allan
GLUE
GLUE is the ICA’s brand-new artist book fair, bringing together over 70 publishers for a weekend of exhibitions, talks, and workshops. The fair celebrates artists, publishers, and DIY book makers across visual arts and contemporary culture, showcasing experimental and cross-disciplinary creative practice. Alongside the publishers’ presentations, GLUE features special exhibitions, discussions, workshops, and parties, emphasising the role of creative communities and networks in sustaining artistic practice. A special ICA archive sale, offering iconic film posters, rare zines, and other materials, will also be available.
Click here to discover full programme of events.
Date: 13–14 September 2025. Location: ICA London, The Mall, London WC2B 5HU. Price: Free, booking recommended.
Hand to Earth & SHABAKA
Hand to Earth & SHABAKA brings together one of the UK’s most acclaimed jazz voices with the Australian ensemble Hand to Earth in a striking cross-cultural collaboration. Marking the release of Hand to Earth’s new album Ŋurru Wäŋa (ROOM40), the performance explores home, belonging and displacement through Wägilak song, contemporary improvisation and British jazz. Led by First Nations songman Daniel Wilfred, with Sunny Kim (voice), David Wilfred (didgeridoo), Peter Knight (trumpet/electronics) and Aviva Endean (clarinet/harmonic flute), the ensemble’s ancient and modern soundworlds combine with SHABAKA’s Afro-Caribbean fusion, club culture and jazz, creating a powerful and boundary-crossing musical encounter.
Date: 12 September 2025. Time: 7.30pm. Location: St Giles’ Cripplegate, Fore St, London,EC2Y 8DA. Price: £20 + BF. Book now
The Kanneh-Masons.
The Kanneh-Masons and Friends: Carnival of the Animals
All seven Kanneh-Mason siblings come together for a special evening in aid of music education charity Music Masters. The family, aged 15 to 28, will perform a selection of chamber works including Schubert’s “Trout” Quintet, Isata Kanneh-Mason’s original piece Hiraeth, and a reprise of their 2021 BBC Proms performance of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals, narrated by Michael Morpurgo. Leading musicians will join them, and a pre-concert talk with the Kanneh-Masons runs from 6.15–6.45pm. All proceeds support Music Masters’ mission to bring exceptional music education to children across the UK.
Date: 12 September 2025. Time: 7.30pm. Location: Barbican Hall, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London EC2Y 8DS. Price: £15 - £60 Book now
Open House Festival
The Open House Festival returns to London this month, celebrating the city’s architecture and communities with free access to hundreds of buildings, tours, and events across all boroughs. Visitors will have the opportunity to explore iconic and usually restricted sites, including 10 Downing Street, BBC Broadcasting House, and the BT Tower. Beyond these ballot-only landmarks, the festival also opens the doors to historic gems such as Leadenhall Market, Barts Pathology Museum, and the Maughan Library at King’s College London. Community and cultural spaces, including the Museum of Homelessness and the Museum of Transology, are also featured in this year’s programme.
Date: 13–21 September 2025. Location: Across London (all 33 boroughs). Price: Free. open-city.org.uk
10 Downing Street. Image credit Jordhan Madec
Cinema
From Ground Zero
From Ground Zero is Palestine’s official submission to the 2025 Academy Awards. Conceived by filmmaker Rashid Masharawi and executive produced by Michael Moore, this powerful anthology is comprised of short films (3–6 minutes each) by emerging Palestinian artists. Spanning fiction, documentary, animation, docu-fiction, and experimental forms, the collection offers raw, poignant vignettes of life in Gaza, grief-stricken yet resilient, a testament to unbreakable humanity amid ongoing devastation. Withdrawn from Cannes 2024 after initial acceptance, From Ground Zero now finds its vital voice at the ICA. It stands as both a time capsule of lived experience and a defiant declaration that Palestinian stories, mothers, children, artists, dreamers, remain unignorable.
Date: 12–18 September 2025. Location: Institute of Contemporary Arts,The Mall,London SW1Y 5AH. Price: £14. Book now
From Ground Zero (2024, dirs. collective, Palestine/France, 113 min, Arabic with English subtitles, cert. 12)
Arts & Culture
Opening this week
David Bowie Centre
The David Bowie Centre opens this week at V&A East Storehouse, offering unprecedented access to Bowie’s archive and creative legacy. Including rotating displays of costumes, instruments, handwritten lyrics, personal photographs, and unrealised projects, with special guest-curated selections by Nile Rodgers and The Last Dinner Party. With more than 90,000 objects available through study rooms, interactive installations, and archive sessions, the centre is both a museum experience and a working archive, celebrating Bowie’s lasting impact on music, fashion, and culture.
Date: 13 September 2025. Location: V&A East Storehouse, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, Parkes St, London E20 3AX. Price: Free. vam.ac.uk
Internal render view showing the David Bowie Centre in V&A East Storehouse. Image: © IDK.
Helen Cammock: Pelicans Dive at Half Light
Helen Cammock’s solo exhibition, Pelicans Dive at Half Light, opens this week at Kate MacGarry. Inspired by relief prints made during a visit to Jamaica, where her father grew up, the show reflects on place, displacement and diasporic identity. Through moving image, performance, ceramics, text and hand-crafted objects, Cammock explores histories, memory and inherited narratives within a Black feminist intersectional practice. Highlights include ceramics cast from her father’s 1960s moulds, works responding to activist Mary Brooksbank, and a film examining industrial and colonial legacies at London’s House Mill.
Date: 12 September - 25 October 2025. Location: Kate MacGarry, 27 Old Nichol Street, London E2 7HR. Price: Free.
#FLOFavourites: This week
Freedom Rising: The Art of Owusu-Ankomah
Owusu-Ankomah’s selected works from 2008 to 2014 are on display at October Gallery, featuring large scale paintings of monumental human figures immersed in a rich tapestry of symbols. Drawing on traditional Akan adinkra and his own inventive glyphs, the works explore spirituality, freedom, self expression, and the creation of reality. Central to his later pieces is the microcron, a “symbol of symbols” representing humanity’s potential for harmony and growth.
Date: 4 September - 4 October 2025. Location: October Gallery, 24 Old Gloucester Street, London WC1N 3AL. octobergallery.co.uk
Owusu-Ankomah, Microcron - Kusum No.5, 2011. Acrylic on canvas, 150 x 200 cm. (OA053).
Last chance to see
Abstract Erotic: Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, Alice Adams
Last chance to see Abstract Erotic at The Courtauld Gallery, a bold re-examination of 1960s New York sculpture through the work of Louise Bourgeois, Eva Hesse, and Alice Adams. These visionary artists challenged conventions with playful, visceral forms exploring the body, sexuality, and identity. Featuring rarely seen sculptures from major international collections, including Adams’ first-ever UK museum showing, the exhibition also includes Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s, showing how her drawings informed her sculpture.
Date: 20 June – 14 September 2025. Location: The Courtauld Gallery, Somerset House, Strand, London WC2R 0RN. Price: from £14; includes access to the permanent collection and Louise Bourgeois: Drawings from the 1960s. Book now
Lucy Sparrow: The Bourdon Street Chippy
A fully hand-stitched fish and chip shop by artist Lucy Sparrow is now on display at the Lyndsey Ingram Gallery in Mayfair, but hurry, it’s the final week to see it. Bourdon Street Chippy features over 65,000 individually sewn felt pieces, from battered cod and mushy peas to menus, signage, and celebrity portraits, all crafted with Sparrow’s signature attention to detail and available for purchase. The installation offers a nostalgic, fabric-filled reimagining of a classic British chippy.
Date: 1 August - 14 September 2025. Location: Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, 20 Bourdon Street, London W1K 3PL. Price: Free.
The Bourdon Street Chippy by Lucy Sparrow at Lyndsey Ingram Gallery. Image credit Sofia Carreira-Wham.
Artist Talk
Dianne Minnicucci – Vulnerability and Self-Portraiture
Dianne Minnicucci, in conversation with writer Gem Fletcher at Autograph, London, will explore self-portraiture and vulnerability in relation to her new exhibition Belonging and Beyond. The discussion will focus on how discomfort in front of the camera, questions of gaze, posture, and body language,can become a means of self-discovery, intimacy, collaboration. Using her new series featuring herself and her young son, Minnicucci examines the tension between exposure and concealment, showing how moments of unease can open rich artistic possibilities.
Date: 10 September 2025, 6:30 – 7:30 pm. Location: Autograph, Rivington Place, London EC2A 3BA. Price: £5 (free options available; no one turned away for lack of funds). Book now
Felicity Hammond
Felicity Hammond will discuss her multidisciplinary practice at The Photographers’ Gallery, reflecting on her current exhibition. Her work spans photography, sculpture, installation, and technology, investigating construction, decay, and digital traces of unrealised futures. The talk will cover her image-making process, material transformations, and use of archives and datasets, highlighting how photography can both challenge and be reshaped by technology. Joanna Zylinska will moderate the event.
Date: 12 September 2025, 6:30 – 7:45 pm. Location: The Photographers’ Gallery, 16–18 Ramillies Street, London W1F 7LW. Price: £10. Concessions available. Book now
Click here to discover more artist talks in London this autumn.
#FLOFavourites: Pick of the Week
Free event of the week
Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 Fan Zone
Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025 Fan Zone to open at Battersea Power Station from 13 September.
This week, Battersea Power Station opens the Official London Fan Zone for the Women’s Rugby World Cup 2025, offering a lively celebration of sport, community, and culture. Located in Power Station Park, the fan zone features live match screenings, DJs, T1 Rugby coaching sessions, community rugby initiatives, food and drink stalls, and activations from official tournament partners. Open to all ages, it provides a free and inclusive space for fans, families, and visitors to get closer to the action and celebrate women’s rugby.
Date: 13 - 27 September 2025. Location: Battersea Power Station, 188 Kirtling Street, London SW8 5BN. batterseapowerstation.co.uk
Interview of the week
In conversation with Aaron Wright
Aaron Wright. Image credit Pete Woodhead
Aaron Wright is a curator of contemporary performing arts, originally from the Midlands, and currently serves as Head of Performance & Dance at London’s Southbank Centre, a role he took on in 2023. Alongside his work at the Southbank Centre, he runs the queer performance club night Knickerbocker at The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick.
Click here for the full interview.
Food of the week
Pollini Ladbroke Hall
Pollini Ladbroke Hall. Image credit MTotoe.
We recently visited Pollini, an exceptional Italian restaurant led by Chef Emanuele Pollini, Italy’s 2020 Gambero Rosso “Best Chef,” where seasonal, ingredient-driven dishes, from handmade pastas to seafood plates and a bread selection that, on first taste, signals the quality of the meal to follow, set the tone for a memorable dining experience. The interior, designed by Vincenzo De Cotiis, features sculptural walls and antiqued surfaces, while the terrace garden, by Chelsea Flower Show winner Luciano Giubbilei, provides a serene al fresco setting. A trip to Pollini combines delightful cuisine with art, as the restaurant is part of the historic Grade II-listed Ladbroke Hall, which also houses the Carpenter Workshop Gallery.
Location: Pollini Ladbroke Hall, 79 Barlby Road, Notting Hill, London, W10 6AZ. Website: ladbrokehall.com. Instagram: @pollini_ladbrokehall
Cause of the week
London’s Air Ambulance
London’s Air Ambulance
London’s Air Ambulance is a vital service, delivering advanced trauma care to critically injured people across the capital when every second counts. The charity relies on volunteers to help raise awareness and funds to keep this life-saving work running. Opportunities include community fundraising, driving and co-piloting, photography, public speaking, and supporting their charity shop at The Royal London Hospital. Roles are flexible, with full training and support provided, so you can choose what suits your skills and availability. By volunteering, you’ll play a direct part in ensuring the service continues to save lives.
Click here to discover volunteering opportunities.
