The Autumn Events To Book Now

There is a particular species of regret that belongs to late October: the one where you discover the tickets you meant to book sold out in the first week of September, while you were still deciding whether summer was over. And there is a great deal worth being early for this autumn. 

The Chelsea Arts Festival is returning in September with a line-up that runs from The Vampire’s Wife founder Susie Cave in conversation with Bella Freud, to five nights of award-winning stand-up scattered across the neighbourhood. 

Come October, Chelsea Physic Garden has an enchanting number of witchy events planned, from an equinox sound bath to herbal remedies and broomstick-making. And for the academics, the boffins, and the incurably curious, the Chelsea History Festival is back with around 100 events that are sure to send you home with at least three new obsessions. 

The Royal Court is wrapping up its 70th year, with two world premieres — one of them about the Zambian space programme. And, in South Kensington, the museums are unpacking their winter blockbuster exhibitions. 

This is what to book now so that autumn arrives sorted rather than sold out.

Wednesday 16 to Sunday 20 September

Across Chelsea

The second year, and the talks have got seriously good. Susie Cave — model first, then founder of fashion brand The Vampire’s Wife, which she built into cult status over ten years — talks to Bella Freud on Wednesday evening, the day her book comes out. Freud is a masterful interviewer, so expect rather more than a plug for the book. On Thursday, Bernardine Evaristo, Booker winner for Girl, Woman, Other and president of the Royal Society of Literature, gathers a group of women writers and then has actors read their work for them, Gugu Mbatha-Raw among them; Bonnie Garmus will discuss whatever follows Lessons in Chemistry. 

And on Friday lunchtime, at Blue Plaques Talk Back, the Royal Ballet’s Lauren Cuthbertson makes the case for Princess Serafina Astafieva, who taught Margot Fonteyn to dance in a studio at the Pheasantry, just up the King’s Road.

And there’s award-winning comedy every night, which is where the festival loosens its collar.

Monday 21 September, 6 pm to 7.30 pm, £25
66 Royal Hospital Road, SW3 4HS

Ninety minutes of gongs and singing bowls among the medicinal beds on the evening the year tips over. The garden’s four acres are walled and south-facing, which is why the tender specimens survive here and nowhere else in London, and why the warmth holds long after the light has gone.

Thursday 1 to Sunday 4 October
Across Chelsea

Around 100 events over four days, themed this year on world history and curated by John Simpson, who reported six decades of it first-hand. Book two things early. The Twilight Tours of the Royal Hospital run 90 minutes after dark on the first, third and fourth, led by a Chelsea Pensioner through a floodlit Figure Court and ending at the Chillianwala Memorial, which commemorates a battle in the Second Anglo-Sikh War. And the choral music of Elgar fills the Wren Chapel on Friday 2 October, sung by the Royal Hospital’s own Chapel Choir under William Vann. There are also talks, concerts, workshops, and a large programme of walking tours — Spies of Chelsea among them.

Thursday 1 October to Saturday 7 November, £15–£30
Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS

Joy Nesbitt’s debut, one of four world premieres the Royal Court has drawn from open submissions in its 70th anniversary year. It cuts between a South Carolina plantation in 1862, where a woman is raising five children as the war closes in, and the same cabin now, listed on Airbnb, where a pregnant woman uses conjure to reach her ancestors.

Saturday 3 October, 6 pm to 8 pm, £25
66 Royal Hospital Road, SW3 4HS

Maria of Herstorical Tours leads you through the darkened Garden, where the women who once knew which plants healed and which ones killed — herbalists, midwives, cunning folk — step out of the shadows to account for themselves. Their stories were bound up in the Witch Craze, and this evening is spent in their company. It ends with a mulled drink in hand, a talk on where the persecution began, who it took and what it left behind, and a final poetic performance that will follow you home.

Opens Friday 16 October, from £17
Cromwell Road, SW7 5BD

The mesmerising exhibition acts as much as a record of the natural world under pressure as a photography prize. This year, you’ll see a polar bear’s face filling a seal’s breathing hole, shot from beneath the sea ice north of Svalbard; a common swift over west London, captured mid-migration from southern Africa in exact silhouette alignment with a passenger jet on approach to Heathrow; and a black bear sitting on the steps of a swimming pool in Monrovia, California, looking as though waiting for someone to bring out the towels.

23, 27, 28 and 29 October, from £10
66 Royal Hospital Road, SW3 4HS

Two answers to the half-term problem. Pumpkin carving runs on the 23rd, 27th and 29th, and broomstick making on the 27th, both 90 minutes, both requiring nothing of the accompanying adult beyond attendance. Slime is available on the 28th, should matters have reached that stage.

Saturday 31 October to Sunday 1 November, 10 am to 4.30 pm, £200
Royal Hospital Road, SW3 4HT

Two days of stumpwork — the raised, three-dimensional kind — with Hand & Lock, the 1767 embroidery house that stitched Elizabeth II’s coronation gown and Diana’s wedding veil. Saturday opens with a curator bringing out historic poppies from the museum’s own collection before the class begins; you will learn design transfer, beadwork, chipping, wrapped stems, and how to build shapes over wire. It sells out every year.

To Sunday 21 February, free
Royal Hospital Road, SW3 4HT

During the First World War (1914–18), French artist Paul Sarrut served as a liaison officer and interpreter with British, French and Indian units on the Western Front. Living among the men he drew, he captured daily life at close quarters in camps, billets, and medical stations. This exhibition brings together more than 50 original drawings and works on paper, many shown publicly for the first time in over a century, alongside uniforms, photographs, archives, and medals.

Sunday 1 November, 10.15 am to 4.30 pm, £140
66 Royal Hospital Road, SW3 4HS

A full day with medical herbalist Alex Laird, timed for the fortnight when London starts coughing. You will come away understanding how the immune system actually works, what is going on beneath a cough, a cold, or an allergy, and how to identify the rose family and put it to use. Then you make four remedies to take home: an inhalation, a vapour rub, a throat decoction, and a gargle spray. Lunch is included.

From Saturday 7 November, tickets available soon
Cromwell Road, SW7 2RL

The city once called Constantinople, and now Istanbul, was the imperial and religious capital of two successive empires: the Byzantine (AD 330–1453) and the Ottoman (1453–1922). This major UK-first exhibition explores 1,600 years of extraordinary art and design, offering a compelling new perspective on a city defined by artistic excellence across sixteen centuries.

Saturday 14 November to Saturday 19 December, £15–£74.50
Sloane Square, SW1W 8AS

Ryan Calais Cameron closes the Royal Court’s anniversary year with the true-ish story of the Zambian space programme: 1964, a schoolteacher named Edward Makuka Nkoloso, a handful of recruits and a plan to reach the moon while the superpowers thundered overhead.