DADS IN LONDON

Plans worth leaving the house for.

🔲 32 things to do in London this weekend with the kids (10–11 October)

Jeff – Dads in London

Hey DILFs!

A quick update before this week’s five things: I’ve been busy adding to The Golden Ticket, the premium subscription that goes alongside this newsletter. There’s now quite a collection in there:

• The future-events database – always kept up-to-date, with filters for date, age, price and area.

• The weekly Golden Ticket email – a heads-up on shows, workshops and other good stuff worth booking before it sells out.

• The October half-term guide – a huge, organised list of things to do over the school holiday, with more guides to come for future holidays.

• How to do (almost) anything with children – a brand-new interactive guide with practical ways to make museums, festivals, restaurants, live performances and even shopping work for the whole family.

Here’s a quick look at what’s waiting for you inside:

If that sounds useful, The Golden Ticket is £36 a year – the equivalent of £3 a month.

You can get the interactive guide by sharing Dads in London, too. If three people sign up using your personal referral link, I’ll send it to you as a thank you.

Your referral link to share: https://www.dadsinlondon.com/subscribe?ref=7bb1c6e738

Right, on to this weekend!

Jeff xx

1: Hunt for Pokémon among spacecraft, spacesuits and bits of the Moon

Pokémon Space Trail

Did you ever do that viral Skittles experiment with your kids where you place the Skittles around the edge of a plate, add warm water and watch the colours spread out into a rainbow? My kids – like all kids – were OBSESSED with this. We went through so many Skittles that week. We took so many photos of colourful lukewarm water.

You know what has the opposite effect? Things you'd expect to completely blow their minds. Like a three-billion-year-old piece of the Moon, or a spacecraft that's actually carried humans into space, or the spacesuit worn by Britain's first astronaut. Children can see all these things, alongside countless other extraordinary bits of space history, and yawn. Literally yawn. Then ask if you have any snacks.

The Science Museum has recognised this and taken it remarkably well. Rather than moan about the youth of today or make use of its BetterHelp discount code, it's simply found a way to make all this stuff irresistible to even the most jaded eight-year-old: Pokémon.

The Pokémon Space Trail takes you through nine galleries, combining Pokémon with real ESA technology and space missions. It's free: you pick up a trail sheet in the Energy Hall and follow it around the museum, encountering Pokémon with various connections to space along the way.

What exactly will you be doing with those Pokémon? Which Pokémon? How long will it take? Will there be puzzles? A prize? Excellent questions, none of which the Science Museum has decided to answer. Presumably all will become clear once you go and do it. Please can one of you go and do it?

We know considerably more about the Pokémon × ESA gift shop, however. And I don't think I've ever encountered this before, but you need to book a timed slot to go shopping (?!).

If all the slots have gone for the day you're planning to visit, you're not getting in. And even if you do secure the privilege of a designated time in which to hand over your money, there may still be a queue when you arrive. Some of the Astronaut Pikachu products have purchase limits, and there's a good chance anything else you want will have sold out by the time you arrive. It’s bonkers. Even Ticketmaster doesn't make you work this hard to give them your money.

Still, the trail itself is completely free, and if Pikachu can persuade my children that a three-billion-year-old piece of the Moon is more interesting than a plate of wet Skittles, frankly he deserves whatever the Science Museum is paying him.

Find out more: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/see-and-do/pokemon-space-trail
(Link to book a slot at the shop: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/see-and-do/pokemon-ESA-shop)

2: See how many ways one man can paint a white square

Robert Ryman: The Real Thing

If you're immediately suspicious of art when it's a square of paint with a pretentious gallery label next to it, you'll LOVE this guy.

Robert Ryman's art consists, to my untrained eye, of lots of white squares. They're art because the squares have different textures. And they're also art because, I guess, a bunch of galleries decided they're art?

Ryman's journey into the still lifes of bathroom tiles started when he moved to New York in 1952, intending to become a jazz saxophonist. Instead, he got a job as a security guard at MoMA and – after seven years surrounded by the museum's collection – realised, “I can scam everyone just as much as all these other artists.”

That is, to be clear, an account of events based entirely on my own artistic ignorance.

In Ryman's telling, he spent those years fascinated by artists including Matisse and Rothko, and increasingly interested not so much in what they painted, but in how they'd actually made the paintings. He bought some art supplies, started experimenting and eventually abandoned the saxophone to pursue white squares full-time.

Ryman said it wasn't actually the white he was interested in. His thinking was that without colour getting in the way, he could concentrate on the paint itself: its texture, the brushstrokes, the surface underneath it and the way light fell on it.

I'm trying very hard to silence the voice in my head that's saying, “Well, he would say that,” because again: I'm a cynical arse with no art training whatsoever.

Anyway, now's our chance to find out whether he was onto something. The Barbican has brought together more than 60 of Ryman's works, spanning almost his entire career from the 1950s to the 2010s, for the first major UK exhibition of his paintings in more than 30 years.

Upstairs, you can find out more about how he actually made them, including the materials he experimented with, his studio process and even the brackets and other bits of hardware he used to attach paintings to walls. Downstairs, you're basically left to stare at lots of them together and see whether you start noticing all those differences Ryman was banging on about.

And, in fairness, they're not all white. One is blue and white. And another is bright orange. And another has red pencil marks on it. Which, in Ryman terms, is presumably his sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll period.

I should stress once more that I know absolutely nothing about this stuff, and Robert Ryman is a hugely respected artist whose work I have spent the past several paragraphs being spectacularly unfair about. So please don't take my word for any of this. Go and see the exhibition, make up your own mind and report back on which one would work best with the grey grout in my ensuite.

Find out more: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2026/event/robert-ryman-the-real-thing

3: Tackle an enormous inflatable course in an Olympic pool

Swimming, swimming lessons, diving lessons and inflatable sessions (and more) at the London Aquatics Centre

How do you fancy having swimming lessons in a pool designed for Olympians?

Described, with admirable confidence, by the London Aquatics Centre itself as “the most technologically advanced and stunning swimming facility in the world”, it’s that gorgeous great swoop of a building in the Olympic Park. It was designed by architect Zaha Hadid – comfortably the most talented Hadid – for the 2012 Games, when it had temporary seating for around 17,000 spectators.

You might therefore assume that swimming here costs an absolute fortune – especially as these days it’s the sort of place tourists actually put on their itinerary, squeezing it in between Notting Hill and Camden Market because they don't understand London geography.

Except it costs nowhere near a fortune. It’s a regular pool operated by Everyone Active – who, statistically speaking, probably also run your local leisure centre. And that means kids’ swimming lessons work out at about £9.50 per lesson (plus a one-off joining fee), and family swimming costs about £9 per adult and £6.50 per child at peak times. See everything they’ve got going on here.

Most exciting are the “Atlantis Inflatable Sessions” – an epic inflatable course full of obstacles, slides and climbing walls. They’re for ages 8+, but there are also “Inflatable Disco Sessions” (same link) in the training pool for ages 5+, which have their own (smaller) inflatable run and giant floats.

The inflatable sessions run on a timetable I've been unable to reverse-engineer, so check the website for upcoming dates. The next Atlantis sessions are towards the end of October, and the Disco ones are TBC.

Why am I mentioning all this today? Because an email about swimming at the Aquatics Centre landed in my inbox, and I discovered I'd spent the past 14 years assuming you needed either serious money or 23 Olympic gold medals to get in the pool. As it turns out you just need about nine quid and a pair of trunks, I felt it was my civic duty to inform you.

Find out more: https://londonaquaticscentre.org

4: Lose yourself in 4,000 strands of yellow spaghetti

Jesús Rafael Soto: Pénétrable BBL Jaune

Sometimes (OK often), I struggle to understand what makes something a work of art rather than a piece of playground equipment.

For example: the thing in the photo above. Pénétrable BBL Jaune is an outdoor sculpture by Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto, and it consists of around 4,000 yellow plastic tubes hanging from a large white frame.

(The "BBL", you won’t be wondering because you’re more mature than me, has nothing to do with the cosmetic procedure that gives you a much bigger bottom and a much more exciting conversation with your travel insurer. It's essentially a catalogue code – similar to how some artists insist on giving their paintings names like "Untitled No. 7".)

The important thing about Pénétrable BBL Jaune is that you're supposed to walk into it, stroke the spaghetti strands and generally... interact with it, somehow, I think? And perhaps I'm overly cynical or simply too stupid to understand contemporary art (I know I've already made a strong case for being both elsewhere in this newsletter), but the explanations of what's happening when you do this are VERY high-minded.

Soto himself explained his thinking like this: “Contrary to what we have always believed, space is not something that is filled with objects. Objects are in fact filled with space. Space flows. Nothing limits it.”

As for the people strolling around inside his Pénétrables, Soto said: “We exist in the world like fish in water: not detached from matter-energy; INSIDE, not IN FRONT OF; no longer viewers, but participants.”

Meanwhile, the Serpentine explains that your movement will “activate and transform the space” around you, and that the piece is “completed through participation, movement and touch”.

If you don’t really get it either, that shouldn’t be a problem: you can simply walk through the spaghetti (is that a drying rack they're hanging from?), swish them about and lose your children somewhere in the middle. It's bright yellow, it's free and, for once, no one will tell anyone not to touch it.

And if you emerge having experienced a profound new understanding of the relationship between objects, bodies and space, even better.

Find out more: https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/jesus-rafael-soto-penetrable-bbl-jaune/

5: Join a murder investigation where the detective needs your help

The Mystery of… artsdepot

Within about one second of seeing a still from this show, I knew it would be a highlight of my year – because it featured one of those detective evidence boards covered in photos, notes and arrows. You know the ones: they were in all the crime dramas of our childhood, but now they tend to be found in parodies. It's the perfect visual shorthand for a murder mystery that's committed to the detecting without taking itself too seriously.

And that, happily, seems to be exactly what The Mystery of… artsdepot is: a proper whodunnit wrapped up in a lot of silliness.

It starts with the audience being sworn in as Trainee Detectives by a police officer called Constable Newbie. She's investigating the murder of an internet sensation called Chloe Branding, and she needs your help because she's useless. From there, it's essentially Cluedo crossed with an escape room crossed with a murder mystery evening: you examine evidence, watch video footage, listen to audio clues and interrogate suspects, trying to work out whose name is inside the Who Did It? envelope before it's opened at the end.

The audience gets to vote on their suspect at various points in the show, and dice rolls and shuffled cards mean there's an actual element of chance involved. Add in the fact that no two audiences of children are going to behave remotely alike, and you can appreciate why it helps that Danyah Miller, the show's creator and the woman playing Constable Newbie, has a background in improv.

And if you're wondering whether all this improvising and mucking about comes at the expense of an actual, properly constructed murder mystery, don't worry: Robin Stevens, author of the bestselling Murder Most Unladylike books, was brought in as a writing consultant. Basically: the murder mystery isn't just a useful format for an hour of silliness.

There are plenty of opportunities for kids to have their own moment in the limelight, but don’t worry if your own child would rather become the second victim than answer a question in front of an audience. Miller says nobody gets put on the spot, and children can join in as much or as little as they like.

Find out more: https://www.artsdepot.co.uk/event/the-mystery-of-artsdepot/

Other listings

This section brings together both new events I don’t have room to expand on and selected older ones from past newsletters that are still running. If you see a “(see my write-up here)”, that’s your cue to click through and rediscover whatever Past Me felt strongly enough to write about.