Real Sounds Feature
Top 5 Things to Do in London This Week: 27 July–2 August 2026
By Real Sounds
A mountain-scale Prom, a manga musical’s first night, Arab and SWANA performance, home-grown hip-hop and award-winning botanical art: five ways to spend 27 July–2 August in London.
London is changing register as July gives way to August. This week’s best plans move from a symphonic mountain climb to a manga morality tale, then out into contemporary Arab and SWANA performance, a many-voiced hip-hop night and the precise, patient art of looking at plants. Each recommendation belongs to a particular date or closing moment; none is filler for an empty afternoon. The practical details below were checked on Sunday 26 July, but limited tickets and free-entry capacity can move quickly.
Monday 27 July: From the Alps to the Auvergne at the Royal Albert Hall
Monday 27 July, 7pm — Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, SW7 2AP. Tickets are £19.34–£71.36 including the booking fee. Book through the official BBC Proms page.
The London Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Edward Gardner have built a programme that behaves like a walk becoming an expedition. Kristine Tjøgersen’s Between Trees, heard here in its UK premiere, begins in the close grain of a Nordic forest. Louise Alder then sings a selection from Canteloube’s Songs of the Auvergne, music shaped by remembered rural voices and landscapes. After the interval comes Richard Strauss’s An Alpine Symphony: a huge, continuous orchestral ascent through woodland, pasture, glacier, summit and storm.
The sequence is what makes this Prom more than a night of attractive nature music. It moves from ecological attention to folk memory and finally to extravagant sonic architecture, while the Albert Hall supplies the scale Strauss imagined. Listen for the way physical places become musical ones: Tjøgersen’s textures invite close concentration, Canteloube gives Alder room to colour a line, and Strauss turns the orchestra itself into weather. It is a satisfyingly ambitious way to begin the week.
Thursday 30 July: Death Note begins its new London life at the Barbican
Thursday 30 July, 7.30pm — Barbican Theatre, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS. The first performance has an active seat-selection link; standard tickets start at £29 including the £4 transaction fee. Running time is about 2 hours 20 minutes, with a 20-minute interval; age guidance is 12+. Check dates and book at the Barbican.
Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata’s manga starts with a brutally simple device: a brilliant student finds a notebook that can kill anyone whose name is written inside it. The plot’s real engine, though, is the escalating duel between Light Yagami, who appoints himself judge of the world, and the detective L. This newly reimagined London production gives that argument a full theatrical frame, with Xander Pang as Light, Colin Ryan as L, a revised script, new songs and Frank Wildhorn’s existing score.
Opening night is the interesting occurrence here. The musical has already travelled widely and appeared in London in concert form, but this is the first public performance of the Barbican staging before reviews settle its reputation. The source material’s operatic appetite — secret identities, supernatural rules and grand claims about justice — is unusually compatible with musical theatre. Go ready to watch how a story famous for interior calculation is translated into bodies, voices, movement and design.
Friday 31 July: V&A Friday Late x Shubbak — Body as a Vessel
Friday 31 July, 6.30–10pm — V&A South Kensington, Cromwell Road, SW7 2RL. Entry is free and drop-in. Activities are first come, first served, and the museum may operate one-in, one-out access if spaces reach capacity, so arriving early is sensible. Read the programme on the V&A website.
Made with Shubbak Festival for its 15th anniversary, Body as a Vessel treats the body not as a theme to be illustrated but as a working artistic material: a carrier of memory, resistance, healing, appetite and joy. The programme ranges across performance, outdoor fashion, film, digital encounters and somatic practice, bringing contemporary Arab and SWANA cultures into rooms whose collections were formed through very different histories of travel, trade and empire.
The specificity is compelling. Yasmeen Ayyashi’s Baraka Obscura begins with the black seed and its dense medicinal and cultural lore. Athar, made by Young Shubbak with elders, constructs a youth-led Arab anti-archive from oral histories, textiles, images and objects. Arwa Aburawa and Turab Shah’s film The Park (Dancing on the Rubble of Empire) looks directly at the imperial exhibitions that shaped museums including the V&A. You can build an evening from several encounters rather than queue for a single headline act.
Friday 31 July: Real Sounds presents Mixtape in Shoreditch
Friday 31 July, doors 7pm — The Star in Shoreditch, 243 Old Street, EC1V 9EY. The event is 18+. General admission is currently £10, rising to the £12 final release on the day; the live ticket page reports availability and is not sold out. Get tickets from Real Sounds.
Real Sounds is presenting this one, and the inclusion is deliberate rather than automatic. Mixtape is built around nine artists performing original material, arranged to feel like a live compilation with sharp changes of voice. The bill moves through Osi, The Parker Project, Persona, SUPER FREDDY, Carter Freeman, JRDee, STERLING, O$uN and Akinjo — a broad span of London rap, R&B, Afro-fusion, melody and alternative hip-hop in one room.
The appeal is discovery at human scale. Carter Freeman brings conscious rap threaded with Latin instrumentation; SUPER FREDDY draws on a Cameroonian and third-culture background; Akinjo connects Afrobeats, UK urban music and storytelling; JRDee switches between jazzier hooks, grime and heavy bass. A long multi-artist bill can become anonymous when it is treated as background noise, but the mixtape idea asks you to listen for sequencing and contrast. At £10 before the final release, it is also the week’s most economical ticketed night out.
Sunday 2 August: the final day of the RHS Botanical Art and Photography Show
Sunday 2 August, 10am–6pm; last entry 5.20pm — Saatchi Gallery, Duke of York’s HQ, King’s Road, SW3 4RY. Tickets start at £6 on the door or can be booked through Saatchi Gallery; RHS and Saatchi members enter free. This is the exhibition’s closing day. See the official RHS show details.
Botanical art sits in a productive tension between scientific record and aesthetic decision. These works have to be recognisable down to species or cultivar, yet the best examples also shape scale, rhythm and colour with a painter’s intelligence. This year’s subjects travel widely: Japanese mushrooms, Jeju Island wildflowers, Texas lichens, South African limestone fynbos, garden roots, succulents and sunflowers. The photography portfolios apply the same discipline of sustained observation across six related images.
Look especially for Jenny Hyde-Johnson’s study of the threatened fynbos of Grootbos, which achieved both Best Botanical Art Exhibit and Best Botanical Artwork — an exceptional double. The show rewards slowness: noticing the architecture of a root, the diagnostic mark on a leaf, or the choices by which a specimen becomes a composition. A final-Sunday visit has a pleasant sense of deadline without spectacle. It closes the week by making attention itself feel like an activity.
Five dates, five very different rooms: book the scarce seats, arrive early for the free Late, and leave enough space to look properly.