Things to do in London this week

No London summer is complete without the Greenwich + Docklands International Festival – aka GDIF – which, as ever brings a spectacular array of gargantuan street theatre shows and spectacular installations to the streets of Greenwich and the Docklands for a couple of weeks in late summer. Running from Aug 21 at multiple venues, the 2026 theme of ‘We Move’, gets underway with 360 (Aug 21), a new work from French choreographer Mehdi Kerkouche that will turn General Gordon Square in Woolwich into a dance arena ‘where propulsive movement, immersive set design and electronic music collide in an expression of the aspirations and challenges of a generation on the edge of change’. This week also sees the Greenwich Fair (all over Greenwich, Aug 22 and 23). 

All Points East returns to Vicky Park for its eighth edition in 2026. Since debuting in 2018, the festival has garnered a reputation for building some of the most exciting line-ups in the UK. Its headliners are often indie or dance-focused big-hitters, while its undercards are packed with cult heroes and rising stars you can say you saw first. This weekend Jorja Smith and Tems will kickstart the festival on August 21 alongside Kwn, Arya Starr and Odeal. Then, Lorde will take over on August 22, along with Djo, PinkPantheress, Zara Larsson, 2hollis, Sienna Spiro and Oklou. Rock and hardcore festival Outbreak will also return for a takeover of APE in 2026, on August 23. It will be headlined by Deftones, alongside Amyl & The Sniffers, Idles and JPEGMAFIA. 

There are worse ways to spend a summer afternoon than drinking something cold beneath the trees at Thomas’ College, Richmond, while watching a succession of Shakespeare’s characters flirt, bicker and generally make a mess of love. But Tom Littler stitches Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing into one continuous romantic saga spanning the years around the Second World War. Characters cross from one play into the next, identities merge, and events in the first become emotional backstory for the second – a neat solution to Much Ado's insinuated backstory and Love's Labour's Lost's abrupt ending. Littler smooths the join between the two so seamlessly it’s nearly impossible to spot. Into this he threads contemporary asides and crowd work, which land as some of the evening's biggest laughs. The ten-strong cast play 17 roles between them; the core characters carry over. Littler has found a real case for pairing these plays: both are fascinated by ego, self-deception and the ways language protects us from intimacy. 

Johnny Boys is a good-natured attempt to bring the West Coast diner to the mean streets of Stoke Newington. Visually, it’s on point, with luminous orange tiles bringing to mind LA’s legendary Canter’s Deli and Norm’s diner, while Formica tables are tucked into cosy booths and a Coca-Cola-branded sign hangs outside. But Johnny Boys draws not just on blue jeans and Bruce Springsteen, but the Mexican and Jewish immigrant communities of southern California. Which is why the short-but-sweet menu sees taquitos, tostadas and pastrami sandwiches alongside chicken plates, patty melts and cheeseburgers. The food too hits the mark; a crab tostada is piled high with juicy meat and tastes as fresh as anything you’d score in Boyle Heights, while chunky zucchini fries with tangy ranch pay homage to those found at the Greek-run LA institution Astro Burger. If Johnny Boys weren’t so all-American, it’d be instantly worthy of classic caff status. 

After pulling in millions of visitors in Amsterdam and Barcelona, Moco Museum London has landed beside Marble Arch with a three-floor showcase of modern, contemporary and immersive art. Inside, you’ll find more than 100 works from names including Banksy, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Yayoi Kusama, alongside immersive digital rooms and sensory installations designed to pull you into the artwork. There’s also the limited-run exhibition ‘Voice of the Street’, dedicated to Haring’s legendary New York subway drawings from the early 1980s. Flex-entry tickets start from £15, so you can drop in whenever suits during opening hours.

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There are few more striking spots to catch a movie than the iconic surrounds of the Barbican Sculpture Court. As usual, the City of London’s temple of the arts has an inventively curated line-up in store for the final week of August. On the year’s line-up is a kaleidoscopic array of films and filmmaking styles, ranging from Spike Lee concert docs to Denis Villeneuve science fiction, via the French New Wave and the best of Iranian cinema. Standard tickets are £20 (£18 concessions and £10 for under-18s) and there’s street food to feast on while you sit back, relax and enjoy the show.

Three feature films deep and it’s safe to say that Jane Schoenbrun has created a brand new subgenre of cinema. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is both a continuation of the preoccupations of their first two features and a leap into more vulnerable territory, accompanied by a dazzling step up in the sophistication of the world-within-a-world building. Schoenbrun has form in creating additional media to sit within their films as a source of nurture for protagonists wrestling with secret shames and desires. Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a meta horror-comedy and a whip-smart entertainment industry satire.

This year’s Royal Academy Summer Exhibition is curated by British sculptor Ryan Gander, who is working under the broad curatorial theme of ‘Interconnectness’. Which is just as well, given there are nearly 2,000 works that he’s chosen to fill the galleries of the London institution. The result is that there really is something here for everyone. Paintings, sculptures, paintings of sculptures, and sculptures of paintings, such as Mark Alexander’s Mother and Child rendered in quartz sand. There are woodcuts of birds by Tom Hammick, and etchings camping under a starry sky by Heidrun Rathgeb. Some prints revel in solitude like the beautiful work of Lene Bladbjerg, while others, such as Karen Keogh’s views of a French village, are rendered with a level of detail that rivals a photograph – not that this exhibition is short of those either. The Summer Exhibition rewards patience, not efficiency. Don’t book the 5pm slot; you’ll only end up having to return the following weekend. Give yourself time to wander as if you do, somewhere among the thousands of works you may discover your new favourite artist.

Magazine Open–Air is a series of outdoor shows, all backed by views of London’s skyline by the River Thames on the Greenwich Peninsula. The open-air fest aims to bring music outside, creating a roofless dancefloor framed by the surrounding cityscape. This week, catch immersive shows from electronic music DJ, record producer, and owner of the record label Lenske, Amelie Lens, back-to-back with hard techno selector Sara Landry, a takeover from German nu-disco and house producer Purple Disco Machine, and RnB & Slow Jams, dedicated to classics of the genre. 

Samuel Abrahams’ feature debut Lady, is an evocatively weird mockumentary with Fleabag’s Siân Clifford throwing herself into the bonkers lead role. Yet, her Lady Isabella, a lonely, self-absorbed member of the English aristocracy, takes the reins. She employs up-and-coming director Sam (Laurie Kynaston) to film the aristocrat gallivanting around her pristine estate in a delectably exuberant wardrobe styled by costume designer Terri Higgins. Lady Isabella is a product of immense wealth, privilege and a narcissistic social media culture that believes their every move is worth documenting. By the final calamitous spectacle, Clifford and Kynaston rip off the bandaids from Isabella and Sam’s inner wounds, in a raucously sentimental display of spoken word, wit and human fragility.

When the pace of city life starts to catch up with you, an hour spent switching off can make all the difference. Spa & Massage offers relaxing treatments in luxurious London settings, with heated beds, organic oils and highly experienced therapists, each with at least seven years’ experience.

It’s the kind of treatment that gives you an excuse to put your phone away, slow down and properly unwind. And for a limited time, you can book the 60-minute massage for £59, saving £40 on the usual £99 price, with a signature Buddha Tea served before and after your session.

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From still lifes of plump, waxy lemons to monumental saints, bloodied martyrs and ecstatic Virgins, baroque master Francisco de Zurbarán did it all. He painted vast multi-canvas scenes that once lined the walls of convents and monasteries across Spain, worked for private patrons, the court of Philip IV of Spain and clients across the Spanish Americas, where more than 100 of his paintings ended up. And now, improbably, many of them are at the National Gallery. The artist’s first UK exhibition is a chance to see more than 40 of his monumental, awe-inspiring pieces in the same room, thanks to major loans from the Louvre, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museo del Prado.

Producer JJ Abrams and writer-director David Robert Mitchell arrive with a fresh, fun spin on stompy saurian carnage. The wheeze here is that, thanks to a blissfully unexplained space-time hiccup, a sizeable chunk of 1982 middle-American suburbia is suddenly dumped in the distant prehistoric past, taking the residents on an overnight plummet several links down the food chain. Despite the full-on B-movie concept and the John Williams-style Amblin-adventure ebullience of the score, this is not some wisecracking romp. There are dark seams to mine, even before the residents of Flowervale hear the shrieks and screams outside their pointlessly locked doors. This is harsh, brutal and, at times, traumatic stuff. Though, thankfully, also entertaining enough to forgive the film’s rather cheesy coda.

Turner Prize-nominated painter Hurvin Anderson’s first major institutional show brings together more than 60 of his lively paintings, dating from 1995 when he was an art student at the Royal College of Art up to this year (some he even finished off once they’d been hung). Inspired by his experiences as a Black man of Caribbean heritage born and raised in the UK, they’re big, vibrant pieces that convey a sense of inbetweenness, or ‘being in one place but thinking about another’ as the artist puts it.

Matthew Bourne’s sultry dance reinvention of Carmen has returned to Sadler’s Wells in all its sweaty, grimy glory after a decade off-stage. Set in the 1950s in the fictional town of Harmony – a midwestern Italian-American community where the residents appear to be permanently horny – The Car Man’s plot mashes up Bizet’s passionate opera (it uses the Rodion Shchedrin score with additional music by Terry Davies) with the erotic noir The Postman Always Rings Twice. Packed with Bourne’s trademark theatrics, a smattering of humour, and some unforgettable performances, The Car Man is one of the choreographer’s best works. Sitting through two hours of this spicy show might leave you feeling a bit overheated, but it will be worth it. 

Cleansed starts with a syringe in the hand of the sloping, scruffy Tinker, some kind of malevolent authority figure in a psychiatric hospital-cum-prison-cum torture den, before said syringe is plunged into the eyeball of the willing Graham. It’s an infamous opening to an infamous play, steeped in the lore of its writer Sarah Kane, whose brutal and bleak dramas in the mid-Nineties redefined theatre and caused no end of controversy. You can read the sharp, shocking scenes as metaphors for Kane’s own time in a psychiatric hospital, for the nadirs of human nature that play out in war zones, for the dark dark places the human mind can go when suffering from adverse mental health. The idea is, though, that love persists, maybe, even when twisted and degraded.

Keen to see some live music this summer but disinclined to fork out hundreds on London festival tickets? King’s Cross’s Summer Sounds festival is the perfect solution. Coal Drops Yard is once again becoming the ultimate alfresco hangout this August for its free outdoor gig series. Visitors can catch an eclectic programme of gigs encompassing everything from classical and folk music to jazz and indie rock over the eleven-day festival. This week, look out for a takeover from Queer Britain & Sounds Queer championing LGBTQ+ artists, plus a big party with the English Folk Dance and Song Society. You don’t even need to book, just show up 

Dulwich Picture Gallery’s big summer exhibition will be an intriguing contrast with the pastoral landscapes found in its permanent collection. Portrait of a City is all about American urban life, as documented by photographers between 1907 and 2012. It'll offer a fascinating insight into how big cities including New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco grew from low-rise communities into towering assemblages of skyscrapers and multi-lane traffic. Photos from big names including Diane Arbus, Lewis Hine and Dorothea Lange will chart the faces and sights of cities in flux.

Soho is packed with places to eat, but few have the enduring charm of Pierre Victoire. Tucked away on Dean Street, this long-standing French bistro has been a neighbourhood favourite for decades, serving classic dishes in a relaxed, unfussy setting that feels a world away from the bustle outside. Expect timeless French cooking, from escargots and French onion soup to confit duck and crème brûlée, with the option to enjoy either two or three courses alongside a glass of Prosecco.

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