SET Ceramics nominated for Best Newcomer Toast award Toast the City We have launched the Toast the City awards 2026 and throughout the year we’ll be speaking to some of the nominees – this week it’s the team at SET Ceramics. To nominate your favourite Square Mile spots for the 2026 awards, from bars and restaurants to galleries and green spaces, visit the Toast the City website [...]
Barbican: Collabs like SXSW are the future of creative industries Life&Style This week SXSW returns to London for its second year. For decades, this festival has brought together music, tech, film and the arts, creating cultural moments and sparking new ideas. The Barbican is proud to be a part of it, hosting a number of world film premieres in the heart of the City. SXSW shares our belief that great things happen [...]
In Other Worlds at the Barbican: Is this what the future looks like? Life&Style In Other Worlds | The Barbican | ★★★★☆ The Barbican seems to have found its groove when it comes to contemporary art, utilising its modernist spaces to create sprawling, immersive exhibitions that couldn’t exist anywhere else. Last year Feel the Sound explored the concept of noise in all of its forms – scientific, spiritual, cultural [...]
The Festival of Words: From Gyles Brandreth to Anthony Scaramucci – all you need to know about the Fleet Street Quarter festival May 12, 2026 The Fleet Street Quarter Festival of Words covers everything from politics to culture, literature, storytelling, broadcasting and public life. It features a fascinating line-up of speakers and panel guests, from political heavyweights to stars of stage and screen. We’re pretty sure it will be a front-running for the Best Arts or Culture Experience category of [...]
Can an AI make art? And would it be worth looking at? April 23, 2026 The last year has seen artificial intelligence disrupt almost every industry – but can it really create art? Chris Dorrell speaks to artists working with AI and meets a robot painter In a darkened room in Camden, I kneel at an altar, pressing buttons on an illuminated red keyboard. Embossed with the shapes of human [...]
The new V&A East Museum is a bold addition to Stratford April 16, 2026 If the purpose of art is to provoke a reaction, the V&A East Museum manages that feat before you’ve even stepped across its threshold. Design studio O’Donnell + Tuomey’s £135m creation is a mad-looking thing, an impossible collection of angles and aspects, animalesque, squatting on its haunches beside Sadler’s Wells and overlooking West Ham’s London [...]
After my weight loss my old photos feel like a different person March 23, 2026 Just before Covid hit, I was in my late twenties, living alone, newly single, and enjoying a job promotion. I felt like I was settling into life, working out who I was. Part of that identity, whether I realised it or not, was physical: I was fat. Then Covid hit, and things only got worse. [...]
Tracey Emin at the Tate Modern review – raw, real and radical February 25, 2026 Tracey Emin: A Second Life | Tate Modern | ★★★★☆ When Damien Hirst’s major retrospective rolled into the Tate Modern all the way back in 2012, it came with a sense of celebration. The multi-millionnaire artist who put British art back on the map had returned with a willy-waving exhibition of his greatest hits. The [...]
Chiharu Shiota and Yin Xiuzhen at the Hayward Gallery February 18, 2026 As you walk into one gallery in this new exhibition, a thick weave of string forms a kind of nightmare spiders’ web around a dozen institutional-looking beds. Once a month, these will be occupied by volunteers, bringing an element of performance to Chiharu Shiota’s installation. There’s a sense of child-like wonder as you navigate narrow [...]