Don’t let a boring January set in, there’s plenty happening in the capital to fill your time. These are the best things to do in London this weekend.
Your breakfast, lunch, dinner and drinks plans are covered: Michelin-starred breakfasts, hot new restaurants and bars with a view set the pace this weekend (alcohol- and meat-free included). But if, like many of us, you’re looking for less indulgent ways to spend your time this January, visit a thought-provoking exhibition, settle into an underground listening bar or head to a rooftop for some morning yoga. This is where to find it all this weekend.
1. Try a Michelin-starred breakfast tasting menu
Move over Michelin-starred evening tasting menus, this weekend sees the launch of London’s first ever Michelin-starred breakfast tasting menu. Pull up a chair at Pavyllon at Four Seasons Hotel London at Park Lane to try it. Created by executive chef Benjamin Ferra Y Castell, and under the guidance of chef Yannick Alléno, this five-course menu comprises dishes like tiramisu pancakes and French toast with freshly pressed juices (or amuse-juice as the restaurant has named them), pastries by chef Francesco Mannino and Eggs Royale – go all out with added caviar. Katie Silcox
Available from 6.30am on Saturdays and 7am Sundays, until 10.30am
£70 per person with an option drinks pairing for an additional £20pp
Book here
2. Do Dry January Right At These Bars And Restaurants
Whether you’re going all in on Dry January or veer towards the more sober-curious mindset, London’s bars and restaurants are serving up options in the glass-load. The May Fair Bar and Wild Idol have collaborated on three Broadway-inspired, alcohol-free cocktails; GǑNG at Shangri-la The Shard have curated a mindful menu featuring zero and low-alcohol drinks to be sipped with a view; The Bloomsbury Club and No. 3 Gin have teamed up to create three Dry Martinis served alongside small plates; COMO The Halkin’s plant-based afternoon tea combines Veganuary with Dry January courtesy of freshly pressed juices and herbal teas; and, on 20 January, Jose Pizarro’s veg-heavy Spanish dishes like courgette carpaccio and olive oil cake are being paired with non-alcoholic cocktails at Lolo in Bermondsey. Hangover who? Katie Silcox
3. Shop at The Giant London Flea Market
Hackney Flea Market’s next event, The Giant London Flea, takes place this weekend (Sunday 11 January, 10am – 5pm), with more than 200 vintage dealers assembling at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in East London. In the market for salvaged homeware? This is the place to source it, with stalls selling period furniture, decorative lamps, retro vases, vintage kitchenware – and a whole lot more. When you’ve finished shopping, we recommend brunch or lunch at nearby The Breakfast Club Hackney Wick, followed by a visit to the recently opened V&A East – both are less than a 10-minute walk away. Katie Silcox
Location: Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park Multi-Storey Car Park, Hackney, London E15 2GZ
Sunday 11 January 2026, 10am-5pm. Entry fee: £2 (free entry for children under 16).
4. Flow Into The Weekend With Sunrise Yoga at art’otel Battersea
Start 2026 as you (perhaps) mean to go on at art’otel Battersea, where sunrise yoga kicks off at 7.30am sharp on Saturday 10 January. Taking place in Perola Bar on the hotel’s 14th floor, one-hour gentle flow yoga classes are led by @jinisyogi. Overlooking the Battersea Power Station chimneys and with breakfast included (coffee or juice and a pastry), this is one very good reason to get up and go this weekend. Katie Silcox
Saturday 10 January at 7.30am. Equipment provided.
Address: 1 Electric Boulevard, London SW11 8BJ
Find out more and book here
4. Dine At One Of London’s Newest Restaurants
Who said January dinners need to be boring? There are plenty of new restaurants in London to try, and it would be rude not to. We’ve got our sights set on Chargal, the newest Turkish spot to hit Mayfair, opening on 11 December. Brought to you by Serdar Demir, the man behind Turkish fine-dining restaurant The Mantl in Knightsbridge, and spread across three floors, Chargal uses oak-charcoal cooking to serve up delicious plates of mezze (kuru cacık, hummus, muhammara, manti and more) alongside main dishes like pistachio lamb cutlets, lamb fillet with smoked aubergine, and a fish platter comprising scallops, sea bass, octopus and carabinero prawn. Don’t miss the dark chocolate sorbet made with fennel pollen and olive oil for dessert. Katie Silcox
Address:11 Berkeley Street, Mayfair, London, W1J 8DS
6. Enjoy The Traitors: Live Experience with friends
Are you hooked on the new season of The Traitors (seriously, the twists and turns in this season have our heads spinning!). If you, like us, are avidly watching the TV show, convinced your tactics would leave you with the trophy then it’s time to find out if you’re right. Let out steam with family and friends at The Traitors: Live Experience in Covent Garden, where you become just like a contestant in the show. The experience lasts about two hours (longer if you fancy taking it to the bar) as you’ll be sent missions to win and conversations to start. Let the lies (or is it the truth?!) all come flowing out… Ella Mansell
Address: 60 Short’s Gardens, Covent Garden, WC2H 9AH
Tickets start from £29.50
Book tickets here
7. Drinks with the girls at Kitty Hawk
Address: 8 St. Martin’s Place, London, WC2N 4JH
8. Take a Day Trip
While not technically in London, all of these trips are very easy to reach from London – whether for the day or overnight. Top spots include Bath to warm up in the spa waters; Oxford to spot the university (and Harry Potter) landmarks; Canterbury to see the cathedral; Winchester to pick up a sale bargain on a historic high street, The Cotswolds for winter rambles; Margate to blow the cobwebs away on a beach walk; and Brighton to shop the pretty lanes (and Laines). All are less than two hours from London. Katie Silcox
9. Step into the wonderful world of Wes Anderson at The Design Museum’s latest exhibition
Wes Anderson’s characteristic visual symmetry, funky colour schemes, tongue-in-cheek exaggeration, but often serious plot lines, are known to all – avid fans or not, his films are inescapable. This Design Museum exhibition is a behind-the-scenes snapshot into the incredible productions, as over 700 items from the archives are on display for the first time ever in the UK, marking the first ever retrospective of the filmmaker. The exhibition is arranged largely chronologically, sectioned out by film. In each, marvel over everything from the colourful costumes, clips from the movies, mini set replicas (the entire Darjeeling Express included), on-set BTS stills, soundtrack snippets, and all the props you could think of, from sketches, to books, to typewriters to perfume bottles, and even the iron tasseled keys from The Grand Budapest Hotel near a scaled model of the entire hotel. As co-curator and chief curatorial director of the Design Museum, Lucia Savi explains, Wes Anderson’s “extraordinary archive is testament to his unique cinematic approach,” and this exhibition is a wonderful prompt to revisit your favourites from his work. Ella Mansell
Wes Anderson: The Archives is open now until 26 July 2026 at the Design Museum.
Address: 224-238 Kensington High St, London W8 6AG, United Kingdom
Book tickets here
10. Hunker down in a Soho Listening Bar
Image Credit: Eleonora Boscarelli
Inspired by the Tokyo-style underground bars of the 1960s, listening bars have become all the rage across the world – including right here in London. One of the city’s newest is The Listening Room, which opened in October 2025, inside Wardour Street’s MOI restaurant, a Japanese-inspired grill and omakase bar. An intimate lounge-bar on the lower ground floor of the restaurant, this space serves small plates, sushi and low-intervention wine, sake and cocktails – and all with music at its centre. Live DJ nights at weekends are a mix of digital and vinyl sets, and the sound system is sharp – boosted by the expertise of London-founded audio specialist Friendly Pressure. Katie Silcox
Address: The Listening Bar, MOI , 84 Wardour St, Soho, London, W1F 0TQ
Walk-ins welcome, or book a table here
11. Visit These Two Exhibitions At The Royal Academy Of Arts
Kerry James Marshall, Untitled (Porch Deck), 2014. Acrylic on PVC panel, 180.3 x 149.9 cm. Kravis Collection. © Kerry James Marshall. Image courtesy of the artist and David Zwirner, London
Head to The Royal Academy of Arts to see two of London’s standout exhibitions this winter. Start with the incredible contemporary American painter Kerry James Marshall (closing on 18 January 2026) whose large-scale canvases paint colourful vignettes of life. Marshall draws influence from classical painting techniques, positioning Black subjects as the focal point in scenes and styles through art history, from which they have been previously excluded. After soaking these in (leave a good hour, they are worth every minute) head upstairs to the newly opened A Story of South Asian Art: Mrinalini Mukherjee and Her Circle for a multi-disciplinary exhibition spanning a century of South Asian art. Indian Modernist art movements are presented in their many forms through approximately one hundred artworks, spanning collage, sculpture, painting, prints, textiles, and more. Ella Mansell
Address: 6 Burlington Gardens, W1S 3ET
Book tickets here
12. Visit the Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion exhibition
Dirty Looks, Paolo Carzana, Spring/Summer 2025, How to Attract Mosquitoes. Headwear and creative consulting by Nasir Mazhar. Styling and creative consulting by Patricia Villirillo. Photograph by Joseph Rigby. Courtesy of Paolo Carzana.
Does high-gloss equal high-end fashion? That’s one of the questions being explored at the Barbican’s first fashion exhibition in seven years – and the answer comes courtesy of a curated selection of dirty, sweaty, decaying clothes. Among the 120 objects on display are Helmut Newton’s paint-splattered jeans; Hussein Chalayan’s 1993 garden-buried graduate collection; plus “torn, worn and artificially aged fashion”, like Vivienne Westwood’s distressed denims and Balenciaga’s 2022 “destroyed” sneakers. The exhibition opened in September 2025 and will run until 25 January 2026. Katie Silcox
Dirty Looks: Desire and Decay in Fashion: until 25 January 2026
Address: Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London, EC2Y 8DS
Book tickets here
13. Browse the UK’s largest ever retrospective of Lee Miller, fashion and war photographer
Fashion-model-turned-war-photographer (one of very few female war photographers, too), Lee Miller lived an extraordinary life. Her work has previously been exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery (2005), the Victoria and Albert Museum (2007) and Imperial War Museum (2015), but the largest retrospective of her photographic work in the UK is now on display. More than 250 of her prints – including many never-showcased-before – are on display at Tate Britain, and take us on a chronological journey through her remarkable life and contributions to French surrealism and fashion and war photography, displayed alongside her still life and landscape shots from Egypt, where she lived between 1934 and 1939. Eye-opening, daring and emotional – this is an exhibition well worth carving out time for. You might even find you need to visit more than once. Katie Silcox
Address: Tate Britain, Millbank, London, SW1P 4RG
Now until 15 February. Tickets cost £20 / free for members
Book tickets here
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