- Charlotte Becque
- 6 hours ago
- 17 min read
Things To Do In February, 2026
February is a month many people claim to find worse than January. I have always found that baffling. Has anyone saying this recently had to complete their tax return? That poisonous little bite at the start of the year. I have just done mine and am very happy to leave it behind in the month just gone.
February, yes, is still cold. The nights remain dark and the weather dismal. But there is a glimmer of hope. The days are stretching and Valentine’s Day looms. I would usually treat it with a degree of scorn, but this year I find myself firmly behind the Hallmark holiday. A small nod to love feels no bad thing when it seems to be in such short supply.
If the thought of that cherubic little archer makes you recoil, fear not. As ever, Charlotte Becque has gathered events from across the UK for these pages, and we are very happy, as always, to be of service.
Now - 1st February
Exhibition: London in the Second World War, Now - 19th February, The City Of London, The London Archives, 40 Northampton Rd, London, EC1R 0HB
This free exhibition at The London Archives explores the lived experiences of Londoners during the Second World War, from surviving the Blitz to volunteering in the city’s emergency services. Through bomb damage maps produced by the London County Council, striking photographs by City Police photographers Cross and Tibbs, and personal diaries and artworks, the exhibition documents destruction at both a city-wide and deeply personal scale. Visitors can explore independently or join curator-led tours on selected dates.
Performance of a Lifetime Lee Miller, Now - 25th February, Lyndsey Ingram, 20 Bourdon Street, London W1K 3PJ
Lee Miller: Performance of a Lifetime is a focused exhibition of photographs by the pioneering American artist, presented to coincide with her major retrospective at Tate Britain. Curated by Clara Zevi in collaboration with the Lee Miller Archives, it explores the role of theatre, staging and performance in Miller’s work from her arrival in Paris in 1930 to the end of the Second World War. Proceeds from sales will support the conservation of Miller’s photographs and the establishment of a charity to preserve Farleys, her home shared with Roland Penrose.
Cirque du Soleil’s critically acclaimed OVO returns to the Royal Albert Hall, bringing a high-energy spectacle for the whole family. Packed with breathtaking acrobatics inspired by the insect world, the show features gravity-defying stunts, dazzling costumes and immersive staging. With vibrant choreography and a sense of childlike wonder, this buzzing adventure promises an unforgettable night out.
Film Club offers a varied programme of screenings, from recent releases to award-winning cinema, perfect for dedicated film fans and those simply after a great night out. Hosted at The Soho Hotel, Charlotte Street Hotel and Covent Garden Hotel, every ticket includes popcorn, with special Film Club offers and the option to dine in the hotels’ restaurants. Upcoming titles include Marty Supreme, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Hamnet, Avatar: Fire & Ash and Wicked: For Good.
Price: From £25 Per Person
Lâl Yılmaz: As Above, So Below is a forthcoming exhibition at 8 Holland Street’s flagship gallery in St James’s Park, London. Bringing together new paintings and drawings, the show invites viewers into emotionally charged narratives shaped by recurring motifs, personal mythologies and a sense of spiritual interconnectedness. Based between London and Istanbul, Yılmaz explores duality, transformation and inner life through richly textured surfaces that blend the mystical with the everyday.
Mark Manders: Room with All Existing Words, Now - 4th July, London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE, 12 Walbrook, London, EC4N 8AA
London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE presents Room with All Existing Words, a contemporary commission by Dutch artist Mark Manders, offering a fresh perspective on the site’s layered Roman history. Installed above the Temple of Mithras alongside more than 600 excavated artefacts, the work brings sculpture and language together in a space suspended between past and present. Through fragmented forms and texts that resist interpretation, Manders invites visitors to reflect on how meaning is shaped by what survives, what is lost, and what remains unresolved.
Hadestown is now playing at the Lyric Theatre, with music, lyrics and book by Anaïs Mitchell and direction by Rachel Chavkin. The award-winning Broadway musical reimagines the mythic love stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, alongside Hades and Persephone, in an unforgettable journey to the underworld and back. With its powerful score and message of hope, Hadestown is a bold, uplifting theatrical experience where a song can change your fate.
Price From: £20
Gathering Landscapes celebrates 150 years of Weston Park Museum, exploring how people have connected with the land through art, ritual and collecting. Curated by Heavy Water Collective, the exhibition brings together objects and artworks that reframe nature as dynamic, cultural and deeply entwined with human experience.
Storm-Cloud: The Look of the Sky explores the legacy of John Ruskin’s early thinking on climate change, using his 1884 lecture as a starting point. Bringing together works from the Guild of St George’s Ruskin Collection, a video by Jake Goodall and research from the University of Sheffield, the display connects artistic and scientific responses to our changing climate.
Writer and curator Shannon Smith leads an in-depth talk on The Two Roberts, exploring the lives and work of Robert MacBryde and Robert Colquhoun. Drawing on works and archival material from the exhibition at Charleston, the talk traces their creative partnership, influence and place within mid-20th-century British art. Curated by Damian Barr, the exhibition restores the artists to the centre of the modernist story, offering deeper insight into their shared legacy.
Price: £5-12
New opening hotel: The Newman Hotel opens in Fitzrovia, blending neighbourhood-inspired design with modern hospitality. The hotel features Brasserie Angelica, a live-fire modern European brasserie, and a dedicated wellness floor offering spa and fitness experiences.
Week Commencing 2nd February
This lunchtime talk marks Kettle’s Yard’s recent acquisition of two poetic Polaroids taken by Dorothy Bohm in 1981. Bohm’s daughter, art historian Monica Bohm-Duchen, will give an illustrated talk placing these works within the wider context of her mother’s remarkable life and seven-decade career. The event also highlights Bohm’s shift from monochrome street photography to colour and Polaroid experimentation in the early 1980s.
Hoppers opens a new restaurant in Shoreditch, located inside the iconic Tea Building. Marking ten years since its Soho opening, the new site looks to the future with menus that delve deeper into South Indian flavours, alongside the Sri Lankan dishes Hoppers is known for, and feature new food and drinks inspired by travels across South India.
Domestic Relics brings together eight artists who explore memory through the spaces, objects and rituals of everyday life, reimagining the home as a living archive of personal history. Curated by Nick JS Thompson and Benjamin Murphy of Delphian Gallery, the exhibition traces how the domestic preserves, reshapes and mythologises the past.
Ancient Egypt’s influence can be seen across London, from imposing Victorian monuments and graveyard obelisks to hidden sphinxes and stylised art deco details. Spanning more than three centuries, these traces reveal the many ways Britain has engaged with Egypt, from Cleopatra’s Needle on the Thames Embankment to the Egyptian-inspired staircase at Harrods. This one-day V&A Academy walking tour charts these stories and explores how echoes of ancient Egypt remain woven into London’s architecture today.
Price: £70
Join portrait artist Robin-Lee Hall for a free, drop-in drawing session focused on simple shading techniques to help create a stronger sense of depth and form in portrait studies. Suitable for all abilities, participants can stay for as little as 10 minutes or as long as two hours, with materials provided and a friendly group critique at 19.45. Capacity is limited, and seating is restricted, so visitors are encouraged to drop in at any point during the session.
Tristan Hoare Gallery presents Ascendance, Sussy Cazalet’s second solo exhibition at the gallery. It brings together fourteen handwoven tapestries that blend traditional flat-loom weaving with contemporary abstraction, using natural fibres and hand-mixed dyes to create richly textured works. Alongside the tapestries, the exhibition includes watercolour studies and a selection of mid-century furniture curated by Fiona Scarry.
Supervised Sessions at the London Centre for Book Arts offer a supported step up for those who have completed Introduction to Letterpress Printing and want to develop their own projects. With access to presses, an extensive range of type and ornaments, and finishing equipment, participants can produce work such as cards, invitations, posters and artist books with expert guidance in small groups. Proofing paper, inks and tools are provided, and the sessions offer valuable experience towards independent studio use through membership or a Studio Pass.
Week Commencing 9th February
Together Through Art is the first art exhibition by The Sick Children’s Trust, proudly sponsored by Henderson Rowe. Featuring nearly 100 artists across a wide range of styles and media, the exhibition celebrates creativity while raising vital funds to help keep families together when they need it most.
All works are for sale, with at least 50% of each purchase supporting the Trust’s Homes from Home, providing safe, supportive accommodation for families with critically ill children in hospital.
This online talk with Fiona Davison explores the lives of ten women who helped shape the history of gardening, from botanical artists to writers and educators. Drawing on collections from the RHS Lindley Library, the event includes a live Q&A and is hosted via Microsoft Teams.
Price: £5
Seeds of Exchange explores the botanical collaboration between John Bradby Blake, his Chinese collaborator Whang At Tong, and the artist Mak Sau in Canton during the late 18th century. Bringing together botanical paintings, research and archival material—shown in Britain for the first time in 235 years—the exhibition reveals a rare exchange of knowledge between Canton and London. Produced in collaboration with the Oak Spring Garden Foundation, the exhibition reunites Bradby Blake’s botanical archive with the artworks it inspired.
Price: £13-16
Extra/Ordinary Women explores the many remarkable women who supported and inspired Charles Dickens, drawing on the world’s most comprehensive collection of historic Dickens material. Featuring rarely seen objects, including a first-time display portrait of his daughters, Katey and Mamie, the exhibition highlights figures such as Catherine Dickens, Angela Burdett Coutts and Ellen Ternan, linking their lives to Dickens’s fictional characters. It offers a fresh perspective on how these women shaped both the man and his writing, bringing their overlooked stories into the spotlight.
Lucian Freud: Drawing into Painting is the UK’s first museum exhibition dedicated to Freud’s works on paper, spanning the 1930s to the early 21st century and including works shown publicly for the first time. Featuring drawings, prints and a select group of paintings, it reveals the dynamic relationship between his practice on paper and on canvas.
Price: From £23
This major new exhibition brings together works by Lynda Benglis and Alberto Giacometti for the first time, as part of Encounters: Giacometti. Presenting Benglis’s previously unseen works alongside her own selection of Giacometti’s sculptures, the exhibition creates a powerful dialogue across generations, exploring shared concerns with form, material and the human body.
Price: £8
The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition - Seurat and the Sea, 13th February - 17th May, Denise Coates Exhibition Galleries, Floor 3, Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 0RN
In 2026, The Courtauld will present the first exhibition devoted entirely to the seascapes of Georges Seurat, and the first UK show on the artist in almost 30 years. Bringing together 27 paintings, oil sketches and drawings made along the northern French coast between 1885 and 1890, The Griffin Catalyst Exhibition: Seurat and the Sea traces the evolution of his radical Neo-Impressionist style through depictions of ports, regattas and coastal light. Offering a rare chance to reassess this overlooked body of work, the exhibition sets Seurat’s luminous seascapes in dialogue with his better-known Parisian scenes.
Price: £18
Valentine’s Dinner Menu at Andrew Edmunds offers a romantic, seasonal selection celebrating classic flavours. Highlights include dressed Cromer crab, seared scallops, Cornish lamb rump, wild bass, and a sharing aged beef wing rib, followed by indulgent desserts and Neal’s Yard cheeses.
Price: £75 Per Person
Week Commencing 16th February
Callanish to Chysauster: Drawings by Philip Hughes at BRINK brings together works from the 1990s to newly made on-site drawings from 2025, highlighting drawing as a continuous foundation of the artist’s practice. The exhibition reflects Hughes’ enduring fascination with Britain’s ancient landscapes, tracing only what remains—stone, tracks, ridgelines and coastal edges—while disregarding all else. Through this pared-back approach, his work evokes timescales that stretch beyond the individual, where human history converges with the vastness of geological time.
Reopening: Simpson’s in the Strand returns in February 2026, reclaiming its place near Covent Garden after nearly two centuries at the heart of London’s dining and cultural life. Reimagined by Jeremy King Restaurants, the revived landmark brings together the Grand Divan, Romano’s, Simpson’s Bar, Nellie’s and a small ballroom, celebrating the traditions of the English roast, silver carving trolley and chess under one roof.
Gesture and Being presents new work by six recent graduates of the Royal College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, whose figurative paintings challenge inherited ideas of gender, the body, and the self. Through fluid, performative figures set within psychological and imagined spaces, the artists explore vulnerability, tension and transformation, revealing the body as unstable, porous and vividly alive.
This walking tour complements Mike Berlin’s 10-week V&A Academy course, London 1666–1851: Emporia and Empire, though participants do not need to be enrolled to attend. Led by Berlin, a lecturer at Birkbeck, it explores Spitalfields as a historic centre of migration and silk production shaped by diverse communities over four centuries. Please note that the route may not be fully accessible due to narrow, uneven pavements.
Price: £70
This expert-led talk explores Elizabeth Cavendish, Duchess of Devonshire’s connections to Rome and their lasting influence on Chatsworth House, particularly the Sculpture Gallery. Focusing on her relationships with artists such as Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, and the influence of Cardinal Consalvi, the talk reveals how Rome’s artistic circles shaped the 19th-century transformation of the house.
Set in Brooklyn in 1938, Broken Glass follows Sylvia Gellburg, whose growing fixation on the persecution of Jewish communities in Europe manifests as a sudden paralysis, dismissed by her husband as imagined. As she forms a powerful connection with her doctor and the fractures in her marriage widen, Sylvia’s private crisis becomes an act of defiance against collective denial. Directed by Jordan Fein, this Olivier Award-winning play by Arthur Miller comes to the Young Vic Theatre as a bold examination of what happens when society turns away from uncomfortable truths.
Price: From £37
This guided tour explores leisure in Roman London, from the discovery of the Roman London Amphitheatre to the social role of games and the realities behind gladiatorial myths. Walking through the ancient city, the tour concludes at the Billingsgate Roman House and Baths, a hidden site beneath a modern office building that reveals the central importance of bathing in Roman life.
Price: £15
The Taylor Wessing Photo Portrait Prize presents outstanding contemporary portrait photography by early-career artists, amateurs and established professionals. Arriving in Sheffield direct from the National Portrait Gallery, the exhibition brings together over 50 powerful images exploring how people see themselves and others. This is the only opportunity to see the exhibition outside London.
Week Commencing 23rd February
This first UK retrospective of Beatriz González brings together over 150 works spanning her influential practice from the 1960s to the present, many shown in the UK for the first time. Drawing on found imagery from postcards, newspapers and reproductions of Western art, González transforms the everyday through a bold graphic style and vivid colour. Her work playfully interrogates taste and power while offering profound reflections on violence, grief, displacement and community.
Price: £19
This display explores ideas of place and identity through works by artists including Fay Godwin, David Hockney, Frank Auerbach, Eric Ravilious and Kateřina Šedá. Bringing together painting, photography and conceptual work, it considers how landscapes, homes and cities shape memory, belonging and identity, inviting reflection on the ways our surroundings influence how we see ourselves and the world.
Royal Society of British Artists, Annual Exhibition 2026, 26th February - 7th March, Mall Galleries, North, East & West Galleries, The Mall, London, SW1Y 5AS
The Royal Society of British Artists Annual Exhibition 2026 brings together contemporary work by Society members and selected non-members from thousands of submissions. Featuring Ken Nwadiogbu, recipient of the RBA Rome Scholarship, the exhibition also includes major awards such as the £10,000 Huaicun Zhang Award and a programme of special events.
Price: £7
This candlelit Strawberry Hill After Dark event marks the publication of Essie Fox’s bold reimagining of Wuthering Heights, told from Catherine Earnshaw’s perspective, with an evening of after-hours access to Strawberry Hill House. Guests will explore the Gothic legacy from Horace Walpole to Emily Brontë, before gathering for an in-conversation talk and Q&A with Essie Fox, followed by a book signing. Atmospheric, theatrical and immersive, the evening invites audiences to experience the Gothic as Walpole intended—after dark and alive with stories.
Price: From £25
The Spotlight Market returns to London, bringing together leading and emerging antiques dealers for two days at MKII. Showcasing a curated mix of antique furniture, art and objects across eras, the fair offers design-conscious collectors the chance to discover distinctive, one-of-a-kind pieces in an intimate setting.
Price: £12
Collect is the leading international art fair dedicated to contemporary craft and design, founded in 2004 by Crafts Council. Hosted across three wings of Somerset House in central London, it brings together museum curators, interior designers and collectors to discover work by 300 living artists, most of it made within the last five years. Alongside prestigious galleries and a wide range of disciplines, the fair also showcases pioneering installations through the Collect Open platform.
Price From £25
This landmark exhibition traces forty years of Tracey Emin’s radical, confessional practice, bringing together career-defining works with pieces shown for the first time. Working across painting, textiles, film, writing, sculpture and installation, Emin uses the female body to explore love, trauma, pain and healing, dissolving the boundary between the personal and the public. Tracey Emin: A Second Life presents her recent painting as the culmination of a lifelong commitment to turning lived experience into art.
Price: £20
New Film Releases
The Chronology of Water (6th February), Wuthering Heights (13th February) & Wasteman (20th February)
Antique Fairs & Markets
Auctions