Top 5 Things to Do in London This Week: 14–20 September 2026

London has several giant cultural calendars running at once this week, but the interesting action is in the details. From Monday 14 to Sunday 20 September, the most persuasive plans involve a documentary that turns forestry into a human story, a photographer rebuilding the family album, an Elizabethan songwriter pulled into contemporary theatre, a genuinely emerging Shoreditch bill and a museum-wide night in which sound, craft and technology keep colliding.

That variety matters. None of these is simply something to look at and leave: each asks its audience to listen differently, reconsider a familiar form or participate in the atmosphere. Here are five sharply timed reasons to make room in the diary.

1. See a forest documentary before the exhibition opens

Forested Future begins with a deceptively simple question: what if the knowledge needed to protect forests is already embedded in the ways some communities live and work with them? Director Petr Krejčí follows people connected to American hardwood forests and explores a model of stewardship built around natural cycles rather than short-term extraction. Inspired by environmental journalist Fred Pearce’s book A Trillion Trees, the film gives climate optimism some practical roots without pretending that optimism is easy.

This London screening is also a threshold event. It precedes the opening of Wood for the Trees, an immersive Shoreditch Design Week exhibition that traces hardwood from forest to finished object. After the film there is a drinks reception, live music from Pennsylvanian folk musician and forest campaigner Van Wagner, and a preview of the installation. The combination turns a conventional documentary night into a meeting between cinema, material design and lived environmental knowledge.

When and where: Monday 14 September, 6.30–9.30pm, the Tab Centre, 3 Godfrey Place, London E2 7NT. Advance registration is required. Find the screening details and registration link on the official Wood for the Trees page.

2. Let Jesse Glazzard rebuild the family album

The Sound of Dirt and Beauty treats family as something made through attention rather than guaranteed by biology. Photographer Jesse Glazzard draws on an evolving archive of friends, lovers and collaborators, placing spontaneous images beside more deliberately staged portraits. Working-class and low-income lives sit at the centre of the work, while queer experience shapes its edges and its understanding of care. The result is intimate without turning intimacy into spectacle.

The ICA exhibition launches Glazzard’s new photobook with independent publisher Self Publish, Be Happy. It includes archive material shown publicly for the first time alongside newly commissioned portraits made across London and Manchester. That combination gives the show both time and friction: people enter and leave the frame, bodies and relationships change, and the supposedly stable family photograph becomes a living record of endurance, vulnerability and affection. Glazzard received the 2025 Loewe and Studio Voltaire Award, but the work retains the directness of a personal zine.

When and where: Tuesday 15 to Sunday 20 September, noon–8pm, Lower Gallery, ICA, The Mall, SW1Y 5AH. Timed booking is required: noon–1pm is £3 pay what you can or £5 full price; entry from 1–8pm is £5. Choose a slot through the ICA exhibition page.

3. Hear Dowland’s melancholy become theatre in the round

An Anatomy of Melancholy folds John Dowland’s songs into Robert Burton’s vast 17th-century study of sorrow, then places both inside a visual and theatrical world. Countertenor Iestyn Davies and lutenist Mónica Pustilnik perform in the round in the Barbican’s Pit, where the closeness of the room should make every breath, plucked string and shift of light feel unusually exposed. It is early music, but not preserved behind glass.

Netia Jones created the work and its atmospheric visual language for its 2022 premiere; Emma Doherty directs this revival. The interesting move is not simply matching sad songs with a famous book about sadness. Burton’s writing is curious, excessive and often surprisingly companionable, while Dowland’s music makes private feeling formally precise. In a 70-minute performance without an interval, the production asks whether melancholy can be examined without being flattened into diagnosis—and whether beauty offers consolation or merely sharper language for the ache.

When and where: Wednesday 16 to Sunday 20 September, The Pit, Barbican Centre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS. Performances run for about 70 minutes. Standard tickets are £49 including the transaction fee; Young Barbican tickets are £12 for eligible 16–25-year-olds. Select a performance on the Barbican website.

4. Catch Ellenda before the story is already written

Some bills arrive surrounded by biographies, campaigns and a consensus about what you are supposed to hear. This is the opposite: a compact Thursday night built around three artists whose music still feels close to the point of discovery. Ellenda headlines The Star in Shoreditch, with Carter Low and Natsuma completing a lineup that rewards arriving early and paying attention rather than waiting for a familiar name.

Natsuma brings the clearest clue to the night’s range, pulling heavy guitar against electronic grit and alternative pop instincts. Ellenda’s public demos make the headline set feel similarly open-ended: songs encountered before their edges have been polished smooth. The upstairs room at The Star is well suited to that scale—close enough to notice the decisions inside a performance, but lively enough for those decisions to land as a gig rather than a showcase. Presented by Real Sounds, it is the week’s best bet for hearing something at the beginning rather than after the fact.

When and where: Thursday 17 September, doors 7pm, The Star in Shoreditch, 243 Old Street, EC1V 9EY. The show is 18+ and general admission is £11.22. Book through the Real Sounds event page.

5. Stay late while the V&A wakes up

The V&A’s Awakenings programme asks what design becomes when craft, bodies and technology stop behaving like separate subjects. For one Friday night, installations made for London Design Festival are activated by performances, workshops and conversations across the museum. Ukrainian composer Andriy Kyrychenko combines ambient electronics with evolving 3D geometries; Holy Harm supplies DJ sets; Li Yilei responds to the galleries with theremin, tape, sampling and movement.

The quieter encounters may be even stranger. Visitors can place their hands into sterilised soil and hear the ecosystem that ought to be there, join an Uzbek suzani embroidery workshop, make speculative flowers, or take a tour about maintenance and care in an age obsessed with acceleration. There are conversations about machines learning to move like human bodies and performances responding to migration, identity and intergenerational memory. Because the programme occupies the museum rather than a single stage, the pleasure lies in building your own route through it—and accepting that the best moment may be the one you did not plan.

When and where: Friday 18 September, 6.30–10pm, V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road, SW7 2RL. The event is free and drop-in; individual activities are first come, first served, with some workshops requiring sign-up after arrival. Read the full programme on the V&A website.

Start with the one that feels furthest from your usual week. London is at its most useful when it changes the subject.