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- ☎️ 10 things to do in London this weekend with the kids (15–16 November)
☎️ 10 things to do in London this weekend with the kids (15–16 November)
Jeff – Dads in London
November 12, 2025
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Hey DILFs,
In case the mince pies and M&S Fa La La La Fel wraps haven’t tipped you off, Christmas is coming – and with it, a blizzard of festive shows, pantos, concerts, lights and “experiences”. Lovely, yes, but also mildly terrifying if you’ve ever tried to book anything after mid-November.
Normally, Dads in London is here to guide you through what’s happening this weekend. But Christmas is a different beast. The good stuff goes fast – the decent seats, the convenient times, the tickets that don’t involve a 9am slot in Zone 5. So even the most relaxed among us could do with a bit of forward planning – which is where The DILF Club comes in.
Members get access to everything early, in one tidy, filterable list – perfect for anyone who likes good seats, early tickets, or simply avoiding the annual “why didn’t we book this sooner?” conversation.
Sign up to The DILF Club here. It’s just £36 a year (£3 a month)!
When you join, you’ll get:
The Golden Ticket: an extra weekly email about the events you seriously need to book ahead for (all the best stuff sells out way in advance).
Access to my complete database of future events, so you can browse, plan and book any time. You can filter by date, venue, price and a whole lot more.
School holiday specials (coming soon).
Occasional special editions about the most-requested topics.
It’s useful all year round, but at Christmas, it’s basic survival.
The regular Dads in London newsletters will still be landing each week as usual, full of the best things to do that weekend. Just bear in mind that some of the big festive stuff won’t make it in – not because I’ve missed it, but because it was booked solid back when we were all still pretending summer might come back.
And now onto this weekend’s itinerary – which is still largely Christmas-free.
Enjoy!
Jeff xx
Tower of London River Tour
Saturday and Sunday, hourly from 10:45 until 17:45 (Monday to Friday between 10:45 and 16:45)
Tower Bridge Quay, St Katharine’s Way, E1W 1LD
Adults £23.50, 3–15s £18, under-3s free (prices are a lot more if bundled with Tower of London tickets!)
According to TfL, there are already 11 river cruise companies offering some kind of guided tour along the Thames. Each one has its own spin – different routes, commentary styles, meal options, and speeds ranging from “gentle glide” to “hold onto your eyebrows”.
So if you were hunting for a new business idea in London, you’d take one look at that lot, mutter “saturated market”, and move on to something with more potential – like a Museum of Lost Umbrellas or a queue-themed immersive experience near Shaftesbury Avenue.
Not if you’re the Tower of London – which apparently has both the chutzpah and the name recognition to audaciously plonk its own vessels on an already chock-a-block river. England’s most-visited paid-for attraction now has its very own Thames tour, sold separately or bundled with Tower tickets.
Is it a clever way to squeeze a few extra quid out of each visitor? Or perhaps it’s a response to tourists quietly realising it’d be cheaper to buy their own tiara than fork out for the Crown Jewels – so they’ve sensibly introduced something a little easier on the wallet? Who knows. Either way, it’s an undeniably bold move – and one that, against expectation, seems like it might pay off.
Because the Tower’s river tour is a step up from all the other generic Thames tours. The boat itself is the UK’s first all-electric tour vessel – super sleek and whisper-quiet. But the real star is the commentary: a fully curated script created with Historic Royal Palaces and co-written by one of the brains behind the BBC comedy Ghosts.
It promises to reveal the origins and significance of the sights through creative storytelling, which sounds far more entertaining than the usual facts about bridge heights and dome diameters. I wonder if they’ll mention the OXO Tower’s cheeky history of dodging advertising bans, or the fact that Cleopatra’s Needle has survived more London pigeons than any monument reasonably should. And if Ghosts is anything to go by, there’s a fair chance the humour will be clever, slightly eccentric, and oddly endearing. Either way, it sounds like the rare kind of guided tour you’d actually want to listen to.
While you’re there…
👍️ I mean… you could go to the Tower of London. But at those prices (£59.30 per adult for a combined ticket to do the boat tour and see the tower), they don’t make the decision easy.
👍️ Over the river, across Tower Bridge, is Shad Thames – one of the most beautiful streets in London (check out some photos here). There are plenty of places to eat and get a drink here, and there’s also a Shad Thames Trail if you want to dig into the genuinely interesting history of the place.
Blues Party
Saturday 15 November, 13:30–19:00
Southbank Centre, Belvedere Road, SE1 8XX
FREE – no ticket required
Age guidance: 7+
There’s a company called Serious – a terrible name in the age of Google – which has spent the past three decades making live music happen anywhere there’s room for a stage – from basement gigs to full-scale festivals.
They also help to train and support the next generation of the creative workforce through Milestones (they’re just trying to annoy me with these names now), a professional development programme for 18–25-year-olds who want to break into the live events world. It’s not about training performers but producers – the people who book the acts, balance the budgets and make sure the mics work. Participants take masterclasses with industry professionals before putting it all into practice by producing their own event at the Southbank Centre during the annual EFG London Jazz Festival.
This year, their big event is Blues Party – a full afternoon of music, conversation and dancing, celebrating the influence of Caribbean sound systems and the culture that grew around them. It begins with a discussion on the history and politics of those parties, then spills into live sets and DJ sessions that blend reggae, ska, mento, calypso and soul.
Just don’t expect it to have anything to do with Bluey, which was the reason I was originally interested. In hindsight, this sounds like a much better use of my afternoon.
Find out more: https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/whats-on/blues-party/
Secret Maps
Saturday 09:30–17:00 and Sunday 11:00–17:00 (and Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday 09:30–18:00) – until 18 January
The British Library, 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB
Adults £20, under-16s free
Considering the British Library owns around four million maps, it’s not entirely shocking that it likes to whip a few of them out and arrange them into a themed exhibition every few years. Since 2001, we’ve had five of them – which must be some kind of record.
The latest is Secret Maps, and it’s a good one. It’s all about the maps we weren’t meant to see – the confidential, the classified, and the quietly deranged. There are hand-drawn naval charts once gifted to Henry VIII, Cold War intelligence maps drawn under strict secrecy, and maps designed to hide as much as they reveal – from erased Black townships in apartheid South Africa to the digital maps that track our every move while keeping their own workings secret.
It’s dense but fascinating: there are pirate treasure maps, protest quilts stitched by inmates at Bullingdon Prison – life-sized depictions of their own cell, shoes, loo and all – and even a 1930s “public conveniences” map used by gay men in pre-war London. One display manages to put an Enigma machine, an Apple AirTag and Lady Mountbatten’s silk underwear side by side – all in the name of showing how secrets get tracked and traded. There’s also a healthy dose of Cold War paranoia – a reminder that tracking people through maps isn’t exactly a new idea.
You can peer through spyholes revealing hidden annotations, drop your phone onto a screen to see how much data it’s quietly leaking, and even find Wally in an original Where’s Wally? drawing. There’s plenty to keep both grown-ups and kids occupied – though you might find yourself quietly explaining why there’s an Enigma machine sitting next to a pair of knickers.
Find out more: https://events.bl.uk/exhibitions/secretmaps
While you’re there…
👍️ Head to the Crafty Fox Market at the same location! See below for more info.
No obligation at all, but here’s the link if you fancy it:
x
Annie Frost Nicholson: “And my mother said to me, enjoy your life”
Saturday 11:00–18:00 and Sunday 11:00–17:00
They Made This, Inside Mare Street Market, 2 Lewis Cubitt Square, N1C 4DY
FREE
Why does a wobbly painting of a Kodak disposable camera make my tummy do a flip? How can a slightly wonky picture of a Nokia 3310 drag me straight back to school, when an actual photo from the same year barely raises an eyebrow? And why do I feel nostalgic about Monster Munch when there’s a multipack of them sitting in my kitchen right now?
There’s something about Annie Frost Nicholson’s paintings that gets under your skin in a way photos never do. Her big, wobbly depictions of old-school objects – landlines, crisp packets, pool tables, Marathon bars – somehow bottle the weird comfort of the pre-WiFi world. They’re too lopsided to be nostalgic in a neat way, which is probably why they hit so hard.
The show’s called And my mother said to me, enjoy your life, which sounds like something you’d find cross-stitched above a toilet in Margate. But in Annie Frost Nicholson’s hands, it’s less twee and more… unnervingly sincere. The work pokes at how memory hides in everyday stuff – the kind of objects that only feel important once you’ve thrown them away.
It’s the kind of show that makes you want to take your kids, just so you can spend the whole time saying “We used to have one of those.”
Find out more: https://theymadethis.co.uk/pages/annie-frost-nicholson-and-my-mother-said-to-me-enjoy-your-life
While you’re there…
👍️ If you’ve ever been to the Granary Square area before, you’ll probably have seen Word on the Water – a bookshop housed inside a 1920s Dutch barge, which has been floating on the Regent’s Canal since 2011.
It’s filled to the brim (both inside and out) with a variety of fiction, nonfiction and children’s books, and you can visit the website to check if they have what you want in stock. I recommend going anyway: it’s super-cosy in winter (thanks to a wood-burning stove) and full of life in summer (thanks to a variety of performances – from jazz bands to poetry slams – on its rooftop stage with a solar sound system). All events – including the various workshops and talks held throughout the year – can be found on the shop’s Facebook page.
I’ve always seen it in the same place on the Regent’s Canal Towpath, so I didn’t realise that, due to canal regulations, it used to have to change location every two weeks. But one day the exhausted and exasperated owners decided to break the rules: they squatted in one location for six months. The members of the Canal & River Trust were NOT happy, but – following a campaign led by the shop’s supporters – they finally relented and gave the bookshop a permanent berth.
If you want to learn more about the fascinating history of the bookbarge, The New York Times (of all places) wrote all about it a few years ago. One particularly fun excerpt: “‘Our problem is reverse shoplifting,’ Mr. Privett said. People are constantly sneaking books onto their shelves, without asking for payment, he said. ‘Sometimes we find one we know for sure wasn’t there before, and it’s been signed by the author.’”
Wendy & Peter Pan: Royal Shakespeare Company
Saturday 15 November, 13:30 and 19:00 (and other dates until 22 November)
Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
£25–£95 per person
Age guidance: 7+
Please excuse the sidetrack for a moment, but I’ve just been reading about J.M. Barrie and oh my goodness, what a legend. Did you know that in 1912, he commissioned a statue of Peter Pan and had it installed overnight in Kensington Gardens as a surprise for the children of London? And that he gifted the copyright of Peter Pan to Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital in 1929? And that when the Davies boys (the siblings who inspired the Lost Boys) were orphaned, Barrie became their unofficial guardian? (Don’t worry: I did some digging, and he appears to have been unusually wholesome for someone who spent that much time thinking about boys in trees.)
None of this is a reason to fork out £25+ per person on theatre, but it’s quite refreshing that he seems like a good egg among a carton of absolute rotters. And it means you can watch Wendy & Peter Pan without feeling icky about anything except the fact that Peter seems to call Wendy “Babe” a lot.
This RSC version has been tweaked, rewritten and given a feminist upgrade. To start with, Wendy’s the one in charge – flying off to Neverland to find her lost brother rather than pick up after the Lost Boys. It’s still full of pirates, fairies and sword fights, but it’s also about grief, growing up and girl power. She even teams up with Tink and Tiger Lily for a bit of pirate-thrashing solidarity.
There’s a lot to look at: a pirate ship that sails straight onto the stage, flying scenes, a crocodile in a top hat and video projections that make the whole theatre shimmer like water. Hook’s gone full midlife crisis, Tink’s a pint-sized menace, and Wendy – for once – actually gets to steer the story instead of tidying up behind it.
Find out more: https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2025/event/royal-shakespeare-company-wendy-peter-pan
6–10: More, more, more, more, more!
How to Survive in a Cartoon Universe
Saturday 15 November, 14:00–15:15
The Royal Institution of Great Britain, 21 Albemarle Street, W1S 4BS
Adults £17.27, under-17s £11.02
Age guidance: suitable for all
“You've just been yanked through a wormhole into the wonderfully weird cartoon universe. The sky is technicolour, logic is optional, and the locals? Well, let’s just say they’ve got their own peculiar brand of hospitality. You’re the odd one out - a human in Toon Town - and that might well be a problem…help!!
Thankfully, you’re not alone. Enter Rachel Edwards: your interdimensional field guide, armed with gadgets, a knack for science, and seemingly infinite patience for nonsense. With her help you’ll explore the cartoon universe, from undersea lagoons, to frozen wastelands, and all the way out to strange deserts where the laws of physics don’t seem to apply. Together, you’ll uncover what makes the cartoon universe tick - and how not to get flattened, frozen, or flung into orbit while you're there.”
Melbourne International Jazz Festival presents Jeremy Rose's “Disruption!” and Erica Tucceri
Saturday 15 November, 16:30
Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS
FREE (note: “While this is a free event and a ticket is not required, there will be a set capacity and availability will be on first come first served basis.”)
“Melbourne International Jazz Festival and EFG London Jazz Festival are proud to showcase exceptional artists, celebrating the unique and diverse sounds of the Australian jazz scene.
Taking place on our FreeStage, this event led by award-winning saxophonist and composer Jeremy Rose, Disruption! The Voice of Drums is a thrilling tribute to the elemental and disruptive power of rhythm. Featuring extraordinary drum virtuosi Simon Barker and Chloe Kim, the work channels the visceral energy of the drum through dense rhythmic entanglements, ecstatic improvisation and soaring ensemble textures.
Erica Tucceri is an improvising flautist, composer and producer who sits at the cutting edge of the Australian music scene. Presenting her band in London for the very first time, Erica will be premiering an album of unreleased music bringing the spirit of jazz to the dancefloor. Featuring local legends Lewis Moody, Luke Wynter and Ziggy Zeitgeist.”
Crafty Fox Market at The British Library
Saturday and Sunday, 11:00–17:00
The British Library, 96 Euston Road, NW1 2DB
FREE
“Kickstart your Christmas shopping in style at Crafty Fox Market’s festive pop-up at The British Library! Join us for two days of shopping joy, featuring a fresh line-up of independent artists, makers and designers each day.
Expect a curated selection of handmade gifts, art prints, ceramics, jewellery, homewares and festive treats – all under one iconic roof. With different traders each day it’s the perfect excuse to come twice!”
Nick Cope: I’ve Lost My Bobble Hat!
Sunday 16 November, 11:00 and 14:00
artsdepot, 5 Nether Street, Tally Ho Corner, N12 0GA
£15 per person
Age guidance: 3+
“Help Nick find his beloved bobble hat in this fun filled musical hour with all your favourite Nick Cope hits, and more.
Nick Cope has been writing and recording his beautiful and totally unique songs for children and their families for over 10 years, and performs with his guitar and stunning animations to sell-out crowds all over the country.
His fanatical following of little and not so little fans has grown immeasurably over the last couple of years due to the phenomenal success of the CBeebies show Nick Cope’s Popcast, now in its third series.
Nick has a magical way of reaching into people’s hearts, igniting children’s imagination in an organic, unpatronizing, educational and fun way. With his charming songs and humour Nick engages, entertains, and enthrals all generations.”
Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair
Saturday and Sunday, from 12:00
Woolwich Works, The Fireworks Factory, 11 No. 1 Street, SE18 6HD
Adults £20, under-16s free
“Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair, the leading international art fair for contemporary print, returns to the Royal Arsenal for its celebratory 10th Edition.
Showcasing over 1000 original artworks from famous names, specialist galleries and the next ones-to-watch. Experience, discover and collect the best in boundary-pushing contemporary print alongside a daily talks programme from leading curators, commentators, creatives and collectors, daily tours, and family-friendly interactive activities.”
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