May 2026 has arrived and London is, frankly, showing off. Between art openings in the City, a Chelsea in full bloom, a brand-new museum in east London, and a woodland restaurant that sounds like something a novelist invented, the calendar this month is genuinely stacked. Whether you’re looking for a free afternoon, a special-occasion splurge, or somewhere to take that friend who always says they’ve “already done everything London has to offer” (insufferable), there is an answer here.
The difficulty, as always, is knowing where to start. We’ve pulled together everything from a £7 Borough Market seafood evening to a fairytale open-fire dinner outside the city, a Tony-nominated Broadway musical haunting the West End, and one of the most singular buildings in London finally open again for the season. Some of these are date-specific, so bookmark this and set your reminders.
These are the things in London (and just beyond) that our editors would actually clear a diary for this May.
Borough Market’s Evening of Seafood, London Bridge
Best for: A proper foodie night out on a budget
Price: £7 per person
Date: Wednesday 20 May, 6.30pm–9.30pm
Borough Market after dark is its own kind of magic, and on 20 May the market opens its gates for something genuinely special: an after-hours evening dedicated entirely to seafood. Oyster shucking contests, fish-filleting demonstrations, expert talks led by food writer Giulia Crouch, and traders including the eighth-generation oystermen at Richard Haward’s Oysters, Shellseekers with hand-dived Dorset scallops, and Furness Fish Markets running through the seasonal catch. Tacos Padre are doing ceviche tostadas. Brindisa will have a special menu of gildas, pintxos and boquerones-topped crisps. The Tinned Fish Market arrives with artisanal bites. For £7 a head, this is one of the most interesting evenings on the London calendar this month. Book fast, it will sell out.
Tim Tam x Copains Babka, Covent Garden and Islington
Best for: The gluten-free friend who is tired of being handed a sad brownie
Price: £8.50
Available: 13–31 May, Covent Garden and Islington bakeries
Look, we did not expect to get this excited about a babka, and yet here we are. Tim Tam has collaborated with Copains, the celebrated Parisian-style bakery known for its entirely gluten-free patisserie, on a chocolate-and-biscuit braided loaf that is exactly as good as it sounds: ribbons of chocolate, chunks of Tim Tam Gluten Free throughout, finished with ganache and a crunchy crumble on top. Available for the whole of May in support of Coeliac Awareness Month, and if you happen to be passing one of the two bakeries on 16th or 17th May, 100 are being given away for free. Fifty per day across the two shops, 25 per location. Don’t say we didn’t tell you.
Infrared Sound Healing at Hart Shoreditch, Shoreditch
Best for: Anyone who needs to actually decompress on a Sunday
Price: Check website for pricing
When: Every Sunday, 4pm
The combination sounds almost too wellness-influencer to be real, but we’re genuinely interested: infrared light therapy paired with a live sound journey using crystal singing bowls and shamanic instruments. The infrared light works on circulation and muscular tension while the sound does what sound healing does, which is to say: something you can’t entirely explain but that leaves you feeling measurably better. Hart Shoreditch is a hotel worth knowing anyway, and this ongoing Sunday series has been drawing a loyal crowd. The ideal reset before the working week restarts.
Sunset Yoga Climb at Up at The O2, Greenwich
Best for: A wow-factor wellness evening that isn’t another rooftop bar
Price: £50 per person (O2/Virgin Media customers: 20% off via Priority)
Dates: Tuesday 12 May and Tuesday 19 May, from 7pm
Age restriction: 18+
Fifty-two metres above ground, golden hour, a 50-minute yoga class with 360-degree views across Greenwich, Canary Wharf and Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park. Twenty spaces per session. We’ll be honest: we assumed this would be gimmicky and we revised our opinion quickly. The climb itself is the warm-up, the class is the main event, and the views during that hour are probably the best argument for stepping away from a screen that London currently has on offer. A portion of proceeds goes to YoungMinds, the UK’s leading youth mental health charity. Book now: it will not last.
Botanica’s Garden Against Time Afternoon Tea, South Kensington
Best for: Chelsea Flower Show week, obviously
Price: Check website
Dates: 18–24 May only
The Botanica Tea Room at 100 Queen’s Gate is one of those places that earns the words “hidden gem” without being embarrassed about it: a Victorian glass-and-mirror atrium decked out in cherry blossom and proper greenery, just 1.5 miles from the Royal Hospital Grounds. This month it’s running a limited-edition menu inspired by Olivia Laing’s memoir The Garden Against Time, a Sunday Times number one bestseller about restoring a walled garden in Suffolk. Dishes are designed to reflect the garden’s changing seasons and the quiet drama of restoration. Timed precisely for Chelsea Flower Show week. If you’re going to the show, this is the obvious pre or post plan.
Souvenirs Exhibition at Montcalm Royal London House, Finsbury Square
Best for: A free culture evening in a City hotel that doesn’t feel like a corporate art drop
Price: Free
Opening reception: Friday 15 May, 6.30pm–8.30pm (running until June 2026)
Photographer Emile Kees has restaged hotel rooms in domestic settings, creating photographic reconstructions that sit somewhere between memory and documentation. The resulting series, Souvenirs, is about the slippage between experience and recollection, the way remembered details (textures, objects, colours) translate into something new and not entirely reliable. It opens on Friday 15 May with an evening reception at Montcalm Royal London House on Finsbury Square: complimentary drinks, nibbles, the artist in attendance, and Rise Art curators on hand. Runs until June. Worth it as both an outing and an exhibition.
Fashion Becomes Tea at The Kensington Hotel, Kensington
Best for: The friend who is going to the Schiaparelli exhibition and needs a full day of it
Price: Check website for pricing
The V&A’s Schiaparelli: Fashion Becomes Art exhibition has been the talk of the season, and The Kensington Hotel has responded with one of the more inspired afternoon tea concepts we’ve seen in a while. The menu works through Schiaparelli references: Le Choux Shoe is a caramel choux bun filled with apricot gel and caramel chocolate, a direct nod to the iconic upside-down shoe hat designed with Dalí. The Pink Parfum is a ruby chocolate bavarois with berry medley and cacao Sablé Breton, after the 1937 fragrance ‘Shocking’. The Iconic Atelier is a mandarin curd tart shaped like an eye. The execution sounds genuinely rigorous, not just themed-for-the-sake-of-it. Reserve a table for the day you’re heading to the V&A and make an afternoon of it.
High Street Kensington Wellness Week, Kensington
Best for: Packing in as much free fitness as is humanly possible in seven days
Price: Mostly free; booking required
Dates: 11–17 May
We’ll be honest with you: this is a genuinely good week if you live in or near W8. Free classes at BoxcleverLDN, 1Rebel, Virgin Active and F45. Complimentary 20-minute massages at the five-star Milestone Hotel. Free hand and arm massages at Rituals. Mindful art sessions at Cass Art. PT sessions in Holland Park. A 5km social run with lululemon and Urban Greens on Saturday 16th, finishing with a DJ set and goodie bags. A Women’s Wellbeing Summit at Kensington Library on the same day. Heritage wellness talks daily at Kensington Palace. It has the energy of an entire gym membership spread across one neighbourhood for a week. Book what you want via the website before it fills up.
At the Tea Table: The Making of a National Drink, Bank of England Museum, City of London
Best for: Anyone who takes their tea seriously (which, in this country, is everyone)
Price: Free Dates: 5–29 May 2026
The Bank of England Museum is not somewhere most people think to go in May, and that is exactly why this works. The Chitra Collection has brought an exhibition of historic silver and ceramic teawares to the bank, tracing Britain’s relationship with tea from luxury import to national ritual. The centrepiece? Admiral Nelson’s personal teapot. The design takes the form of an actual tea table. The collection was assembled by philanthropist Nirmal Sethia in memory of his late wife, and supported by Newby London. Free entry as part of London Craft Week. A genuinely lovely way to spend a weekday afternoon in the City.
RHS Chelsea Flower Show, Chelsea
Best for: The full sensory overload of the gardening calendar’s biggest moment
Price: Tickets via RHS website (£75–£120)
Dates: 19–23 May 2026
Chelsea in May, the flower show in full swing: over 400 exhibits from the world’s finest landscapers and horticulturalists, spotlights on charities including Parkinson’s UK, the Trussell Trust and Asthma + Lung UK, and the much-anticipated bargain plant sell-off on the final afternoon. This year’s Show Gardens include Tom Stuart-Smith’s Tate Garden (a preview of the Clore Garden at Tate Britain) and a King’s Foundation Curious Garden backed by Sir David Beckham and Alan Titchmarsh. If you’ve been before, you know. If you haven’t, know that it is one of those London events that genuinely delivers on its reputation. Go on a weekday if you can. And if you’re combining it with the Botanica afternoon tea in South Kensington, just 1.5 miles from the grounds, you’ve essentially planned a perfect Tuesday.
The Wild Table at Tey Brook Orchard, Essex
Best for: A truly special occasion dinner that London cannot replicate
Price: Check website for pricing
Dates: 15–17 May 2026
This one requires getting out of London, and it is worth it. The Wild Table is a collaborative woodland restaurant from The Laundry Brixton and Browning Bros, taking over Tey Brook Orchard just outside the city for three nights only. Open-fire cooking, seasonal ingredients, many grown on or near the site, eaten beneath the trees in a setting that sounds like something staged for a very good magazine shoot (it is not staged). Extend the evening with a stay in the estate’s luxury glamping accommodation if you want the full picture. Tickets are available now. This is genuinely one of those experiences that will be impossible to get a table for by the time word fully spreads, so go now.
V&A East, Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park
Best for: A free afternoon that earns you serious cultural bragging rights
Price: Free (ticketed exhibitions charged separately)
Getting there: Hackney Wick is the nearest station
The newest addition to London’s museum landscape has arrived in Stratford, and it is free. V&A East opened this year with two permanent galleries featuring over 500 objects from the V&A collection, chosen to address what the museum calls “the most important issues in contemporary culture.” The building alone is worth the trip east. Limited-time exhibitions are ticketed, but the permanent galleries are not, which makes this one of the better free afternoons London currently has on offer. Make a day of it in the Olympic Park and you’ll understand why east London keeps winning the argument about where to be right now.
Beetlejuice the Musical, Prince Edward Theatre, Soho
Best for: A proper West End night out that earns the hype
Price: From £24
Dates: From 20 May 2026 (booking until April 2027)
The Broadway sensation has crossed over to the Prince Edward Theatre for a limited haunting only. Tim Burton’s cult 1988 film gets the full musical treatment: the story of gothic teenager Lydia Deetz, a pair of newly-dead ghosts, and the demonic, chaotic Beetlejuice causing havoc from the Netherworld. David Fynn leads as Beetlejuice, with Hannah Nordberg as Lydia Deetz and West End favourites David Hunter and Chelsea Halfpenny as the Maitlands. Directed by Alex Timbers, who also helmed Moulin Rouge! The Musical, so the theatrical excess is in very safe hands. Tickets start from £24 and are on sale now. Do not sleep on this one.
GALA Festival, Peckham Rye Park, South London
Best for: The best three days of dancing you’ll have all year
Price: From £76.74 (via DICE)
Dates: 22–24 May 2026 (Bank Holiday weekend), 18+
South London’s most beloved electronic music festival returns to Peckham Rye Park for the bank holiday weekend, and the 2026 lineup is genuinely exceptional. The bill features Todd Edwards, CASisDEAD, Jennifer Loveless, DjRUM, Mia Koden, CCL and Objekt, alongside Benji B, Job Jobse, Peach and Prosumer, and Chaos in the CBD. Friday dives deep into bass and system culture, Saturday leans into club euphoria and queer nightlife, and Sunday brings soulful house, Chicago heritage, and Amsterdam’s Rush Hour energy to close things out beautifully. The theme this year is The Floor Is Ours. For a fourth year running, GALA is fundraising for Southwark Day Centre for Asylum Seekers. Final tickets are available but going fast. This is the one.
The Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration, Clerkenwell
Best for: London’s most anticipated cultural opening of the year
Price: Free public spaces; ticketed exhibitions
TBC Location: New River Head, Clerkenwell
Twenty years in the planning, the Quentin Blake Centre for Illustration opens its doors in Clerkenwell this month as the world’s largest dedicated space for illustration. Set in the grounds of an 18th-century waterworks, now accessible to the public for the first time, the Centre presents regularly changing exhibitions across three galleries. The inaugural show is MURUGIAH: Ever Feel Like…, a solo exhibition for the Sri Lankan illustrator whose kaleidoscopic, sometimes macabre world draws on Hollywood film, sci-fi, Japanese anime and 2000s pop-punk. There’s also a free library, learning spaces, half an acre of public gardens, a café and a shop stocked with illustration gifts. One of the loveliest additions to London’s museum landscape in years. Go in the first week if you can.
The Cosmic House, Holland Park, Kensington
Best for: The most singular hour and a half you’ll spend in a London building this year
Price: £16 (with donation); £13 (without); £5 students
Opening hours: Wed–Fri, 12.30–4.30pm; open April–December Note: 12+ only, no heels, steep spiral staircase
The Cosmic House reopened its gates this spring after its long winter hiatus and is available to visit until December. One of only two Grade I-listed postmodernist buildings in the UK, it’s a Holland Park townhouse that looks entirely normal from the street and is absolutely extraordinary inside: mythological friezes in the Cosmic Oval, a calendar-inspired spiral staircase, a Sundial Room with a window that lowers entirely into the floor, and a jacuzzi designed as an inverted dome. Tickets are released on the third Friday of each month at 12pm and are limited to four per booking, so planning is required. Visits are capped at 15 guests. This is a genuinely rare experience and one of those London things that most people who should know about it don’t. Go this month.
Firsts: London’s Rare Book Fair, Saatchi Gallery, Chelsea
Best for: Serious book lovers, or anyone who wants to feel like one for an afternoon
Price: Free; entry tickets required
Dates: 14–17 May 2026
Held at the Saatchi Gallery on King’s Road, Firsts brings together leading antiquarian booksellers from around the world, showcasing rare first editions, manuscripts, maps, prints and collectable works. Whether you’re a collector with a specific list or simply someone who finds the smell of very old books unreasonably satisfying, the fair is worth an afternoon in SW3. A programme of talks and special displays runs alongside the main fair, with a hands-on calligraphy session on 17 May among the highlights. Sloane Square is five minutes on foot. Combine it with the Schiaparelli exhibition at the V&A around the corner and you’ve assembled a quietly excellent Chelsea afternoon.
