🦖 5 things to do in London this weekend with the kids (26–27 July)

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Hey DILFs,

In the mood for something genuinely jaw-dropping right this moment? The Astronomy Photographer of the Year 2025 shortlist has landed, and the photos are unreal.

You can see loads of them here – and honestly, I’d paste them all into this email if I weren’t shackled by email size limits and the laws of sensible formatting.

The winners will be announced on 11 September, and you can even tune in to the online ceremony if you’d like to see which cosmic masterpiece takes the crown. (After that, you’ll be able to see all the images in person at the Royal Observatory.)

Until then, let’s figure out a more important issue: this upcoming weekend… 

Enjoy! 

Jeff xx

1: Clash swords and questions with real-life armour experts

Hands on Armour: Saturday Knight Live
Saturday 26 July, 13:30–16:00
The Wallace Collection, Hertford House, Manchester Square, W1U 3BN
Free
Age guidance: 5+

Before it became a museum, the Wallace Collection was just that: a vast private collection of paintings, furniture and porcelain, built up by generations of aristocrats with a weakness for 18th-century French art and the money to make it happen. The real star was Sir Richard Wallace, illegitimate (but fully funded) son of the 4th Marquess of Hertford, who inherited the lot and installed it in Hertford House – this central London townhouse. After he died, his wife left it all to the nation.

Usefully, if members of your family aren't into Rococo furniture, Sèvres porcelain and Fragonards, the house also comes with a slightly overstocked armoury. The Marquesses of Hertford had a full-blown obsession with the arsenals of other aristocrats, and Sir Richard Wallace made it worse by spending a small fortune on a French nobleman’s collection.

The armoury is always available to view, but this Saturday, Saturday Knight Live brings it all to life with a title that deserves a fist bump. Kids can try on real and replica armour, watch live demonstrations, make their own paper paladin (that’s a knight, made of paper), and quiz the Wallace Collection’s resident armour experts in a live Q&A.

Find out more: https://www.wallacecollection.org/whats-on/events/hands-on-armour-saturday-knight-live-6/ 

While you’re there… 

👍️ Does a “hidden urban oasis” count as hidden if it has 377 Google reviews? Yeah, course it does. It’s London. Buckingham Palace has 182,000 reviews. The Shoreditch branch of Dishoom has 30,000. A destination with 377 reviews is basically classified intel.

That destination is Brown Hart Gardens – a raised public terrace just south of Oxford Street. Built on top of an old electricity substation, it’s now home to limestone decking, water features, plant-lit seating and a domed gazebo disguising the giant electrical box below.

Brilliantly, because it’s within the Grosvenor Estate, it’s subject to some particularly, umm, “unique” bylaws. You can’t be “intoxicated”, “unclean” or “in a verminous condition” – which is fair enough. But you’re also banned from “games, quarrelling, shouting, singing, and the practice of gymnastics” – and if you breach the rules, you’ll be prosecuted. 

2: Taste the future at a food-focused exhibition

Future of Food
Saturday and Sunday, 10:00–18:00 (and daily until 4 January)
Science Museum, Exhibition Road, SW7 2DD
FREE (but ticket required)
Age guidance: 7+

Hands up if you’ve eaten a vegan steak and thought, “Never would have known that’s not beef.” Anyone? No? At the back there? No? 

The tasting-like-meat industry hasn’t made much progress over the past few decades: it all tastes distinctly non-meaty. But just like bankruptcy, it seems that this is an industry in which things happen verrrrryyy slowwwwly and then suddenlyallatonce. Lab-grown meat is (nearly) here, guys! Not just burgers, but steaks that resemble real cuts of meat in both texture and appearance. And you can see it here, at this exhibition. Which is almost as good as tasting it, if you try really hard to make yourself believe that’s true. 

And because this exhibition is about the past and present of food as much as the future (to show how far we’ve come), you’ll also see one of humanity’s earliest examples of leavened, baked bread: a 3,500-year-old loaf, which proves we were surprisingly sophisticated as a species millennia ago. We’d already figured out how to blend agriculture, craftsmanship and fermentation – so perhaps it’s time to stop gloating about your Bluetooth-enabled salt shaker with built-in mood lighting.

There’s tons more to see at Future of Food, such as the seed-swapping ceremonies they hold in parts of the Amazon – in which farmers bring seeds they’ve saved from their crops and exchange them with others. It’s a way to preserve biodiversity, keep locally adapted plants in circulation, and pass on farming knowledge without relying on industrial seed companies. 

It looks at grassroots projects too – from community kitchens in Peru to organic food subsidy schemes in Cardiff – that are working to reduce the environmental impact of what we eat.

Everything’s very interactive. You can prod things, play things, and think a bit differently about what’s on your plate.

Find out more: https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/see-and-do/future-of-food 

While you’re there… 

👍️ The Space Show at the Science Museum proves that an event description can be vague as anything, the show itself can be ONLY TWENTY MINUTES LONG, and the venue can be a ballache for anyone with a pram or an address outside West London – and none of this will matter if you include the failsafe words: “experiments”, “space”, “flames” and “whipped cream”.

I have no idea what this show is about or aims to do. All I know is that it finishes its run in August, and barely any dates are still available. (If you were a DILF Club member, you’d have known about this show months ago…) Oh, and it’s free. 

3: Step into a cinematic stampede of dinosaurs`

Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs
Saturday and Sunday, time slots between 09:00 and 17:30 (10:00–16:30 on Sundays), and daily until 2 November
Adults £25, under-18s £15, under-3s free
Age guidance: suitable for all

Unless you and your children are all under three years old (or very convincing liars), this glorified cinema screening isn’t cheap. But I’ve been to almost all the Lightroom’s shows, and they’re bloody, bloody good – and far superior to anything you’ll see at your local multiplex. 

Lightroom claims their productions are “immersive”; I wouldn’t go that far, because I’ve always felt like an observer rather than “enveloped” in the art in some way. But it’s still pretty cool to be surrounded by screens that show everything at an enormous scale – especially when a T-Rex stomps into view.

Prehistoric Planet: Discovering Dinosaurs blends custom animation and extended CGI sequences with footage from the Apple TV+ series of the same name, adds Damian Lewis doing his best Attenborough, and ends up blowing the socks off both critics and civilians alike.

According to those who’ve been (not me yet), it feels like a realistic glimpse into what it might have been like to see dinosaurs roaming the Earth.

You get to see four-storey-tall dinosaurs all around you as they cross deserts, protect their babies, fly overhead, attack each other and fall in love. And it’ll feel like you’re there. It’ll also possibly feel like you need physio afterwards: I know from experience that the 360-degree presentation means you’re constantly swivelling like a periscope in a panic. The kids will be fine – no doubt chasing a stegosaurus while trying to high-five a pterosaur, completely unaware their neck even has a range of motion. But unless you’re really under the age of three, you won’t be so lucky. I’m pretty sure it’ll still be worth it. 

Find out more: https://lightroom.uk/whats-on/prehistoric-planet/ 

4: Build a dragon, wear a mask and storm the stage

Monster Chetwynd: Thunder, Crackle and Magic
Saturday and Sunday, 09:30–18:00 (and daily until 25 August)
Tate Modern, Bankside, SE1 9TG
FREE
Age guidance: suitable for all

When I read, “Artist Monster Chetwynd has created three fantastical sets in Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall,” I genuinely thought this was the fun-and-fictional backstory for Tate Play’s latest offering – something involving a lesser-known Roald Dahl character called Monster Chetwynd who probably lives in a disused lighthouse and eats only jelly. But then I kept reading, and saw: “Chetwynd’s installation is inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1975 film The Magic Flute.” Which confused me greatly, because Dahl’s characters aren’t usually the sort to be inspired by 18th-century opera filtered through Swedish existentialism.

Ohhhh. Monster Chetwynd is an actual person. You probably know this, because it feels like something I should already know too. But just in case this is the first time you’ve heard the name as well… Monster Chetwynd is a performance artist formerly known as Spartacus Chetwynd, and before that Marvin Gaye Chetwynd. I promise I’m not making this up. According to various sources (mainly Wikipedia because I really thought Chat GPT was hallucinating when I asked), she’s British, she trained in painting, and she’s best known for staging scrappy, homemade spectacles based on bits of pop culture, history and mythology – often with a cast of friends in oversized masks and repurposed bin bags.

I’m not entirely sure I understand all those words together in that format. 

Anyway. To tie all this together, Tate Play is Tate Modern’s free family programme – a sort of playground-meets-gallery in the Turbine Hall where kids can dress up, build things, and occasionally launch foam shapes the size of small cars across a polished floor. It’s never not a hit.

This summer’s Tate Play installation is Chetwynd’s most family-friendly production yet – not hard, given her other work has included painting a wall with her bare bottom, and a surreal performance involving a dildo seesaw and a lot of orgasms. 

Here, kids can go backstage, don a costume, make a racket and act out scenes across three theatrical sets. There’s Dragon Island, where they can charm a dragon as a performer, musician or general mischief-maker; Wild Animal Forest, where they animate puppets and create sound and movement; and Tested by the Elements, where wind, fire and water show up to cause problems.

It WILL be good. It will be excellent, in fact. Just don’t Google her other work while you’re still in the Turbine Hall.

Find out more: https://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/uniqlo-tate-play/monster-chetwynd-thunder-crackle-and-magic 

5: Rethink design through the eyes of non-humans

More Than Human
Saturday and Sunday, 10:00–18:00 (and daily until 5 October)
Design Museum, 224–238 Kensington High Street, W8 6AG
Adults £14.38, 6–15s £7.19, under-5s free

What do you think of all the new glass architecture muscling its way into central London? I’m a fan: I think the Gherkin is delightful, I love how One Blackfriars has been nicknamed The Kim Kardashian, and the Walkie-Talkie looks like someone hit “warp” on a perfectly normal office block. And I like what it’s all done to the London skyline – which looks phenomenally cool and unique these days. 

You know who’s less enamoured with the aesthetic? Birds. They don’t see the glass, so they fly straight into it. And then they die – either instantly or from brain injuries shortly after. Oh.

That’s why this exhibition includes Bird-Safe Building Guidelines – an initiative proposing a few remarkably low-tech ways to save up to a billion bird lives a year (in the US alone). One method: films that make the glass visible to birds, while still looking like glass to us.

There are lots of clever fixes like this in the show – where the design brief isn’t “make it pretty” or “make it work for humans”, but “don’t completely ignore the rest of life on Earth”.

You’ll also spot Pollinator Pathmaker, a living artwork designed for bees. Not in a crystals-and-cauliflower-cakes sort of way – it’s a planting scheme generated by an algorithm, based on what different pollinators actually like. You can even use the tool online to create your own version. It’ll look lovely, but more to the point, it might stop your garden (if you have one) from turning into an insect dead zone.

Some of the works are harder to pin down or fully grasp. One depicts a tradition where men from a rural Italian village dress up as trees for the day – and while I understand it’s meant to express our connection to nature, I’m not convinced it achieves anything beyond awareness. Awareness is fine, but I thought the Design Museum’s remit was a bit more on the practical side.

So a bit of a mixed bag, then. But an interesting one. And even the more baffling bits feel like part of the point: what would happen if design stopped being a private members’ club for humans, and let a few other species join in? 

Find out more: https://designmuseum.org/exhibitions/more-than-human 

While you’re there… 

👍️ Holland Park Adventure Playground enrages me because it’s not for adults. If someone could create an identical version where it’s socially acceptable to play there as a grown-up, I’d be very grateful. 

👍️ The Kyoto Garden in the same park is stunning. Fun fact: it was a gift from the city of Kyoto (in 1991) to commemorate the long friendship between Japan and Great Britain. 

👍️ Look around Leighton House. Three reasons why: 

1: You’re already there, so you may as well.
2: It looks AMAZING.
3: Entry to the house normally costs £14 for adults (£5 for 6–18s), but your ticket to the workshop (£5 per child and free for one accompanying adult) includes free entry to the house. So you’d be a plonker not to.