London Calling: The Week Starting 31 August 2026

This is the week London's summer calendar actually closes out. Bank Holiday Monday brings Notting Hill Carnival to west London, covered in full elsewhere in this edition, while a genuine handful of exhibitions and shows reach their final day within hours of each other. By Tuesday, the city has already moved on to its first proper autumn festival.

Monday: the last day for more than the Carnival

Tracey Emin's Tate Modern retrospective, spanning 40 years of her practice and pairing career-defining works with pieces never exhibited before, closes on Bank Holiday Monday itself, making this the final weekend to see it. The same day closes the free English Cathedral exhibition at Southwark Cathedral, photographer Peter Marlow's natural-light study of all 42 Church of England cathedrals, and the Science Museum's free Future of Food exhibition, which traces food history from a 3,500 year old loaf of bread through to beef grown outside a cow. If theatre is more your evening, Horrible Histories: Barmy Britain also plays its last performance at the Apollo Theatre on Monday, a genuinely good option for taking children to something that treats history as entertainment rather than homework.