London's Autumn Galleries: What's Worth the Ticket Right Now
London's winter exhibition season has just opened in full — Renoir at the National Gallery, Hokusai in Dulwich, and a run of photography shows that may be the strongest in years. Here is what is on, what it costs, and the handful of ways to see world-class work for nothing at all.
Mid-October is when London's galleries put their best work on the walls. Almost everything below opened in the last three weeks and runs well into the new year, which means for once you are not racing a closing date — you are choosing. Here is what is actually hanging, with real dates and real prices.
The big one: Renoir at the National Gallery
Renoir and Love is the National Gallery's first Renoir show since 2007 and the most significant UK presentation of his work in two decades. Forty paintings, gathered from collections around the world, hung in the Sainsbury Wing until 31 January 2027.
Tickets are £20 Sunday to Thursday and £25 on Friday and Saturday, with under-18s free. But the detail worth knowing: every Friday evening until 15 January, the exhibition is pay-what-you-wish. You can pay £1. The booking page says so plainly. If you are flexible about when you go, this is the single best value in central London right now.
A genuinely strong year for photography
Three shows opened within a week of each other, and together they make a proper itinerary.
Light and Magic: The Birth of Art Photography at Tate Modern (until 21 February 2027, £20) gathers more than 200 rare vintage prints to trace pictorialism — the first international movement that argued photography could be art rather than record. If you are 16 to 25, Tate Collective gets you in for £5.
Tim Walker's Fairyland: Love and Legends at the National Portrait Gallery (until 7 February 2027) is 250 portraits made over five years, photographing Britain's LGBTQ+ trailblazers — activists, social workers, nightlife performers, musicians. Walker's fashion work is theatrical and saturated, and at this scale it is a lot to take in. £23 Monday to Thursday, £25 Friday to Sunday; £5 if you are 25 or under via the free CLUB NPG membership, and £5 for 12- to 18-year-olds. There is also a Pay What You Can window on Mondays, 10.30am to 2pm, with tickets released weekly.
William Eggleston: All that goes unnoticed at The Photographers' Gallery in Soho marks fifty years since William Eggleston's Guide and brings together dye transfer prints both famous and rarely shown. £14 on the door, £12 booked ahead, with reduced rates around £11. The same building is showing Sanlé Sory: Colour Years — Burkinabé studio portraits of youth culture and fashion, a first in the UK — on the same ticket.
Worth knowing: the gallery's outdoor Soho Photography Quarter is free and always open, currently showing large-scale work by NINAGAWA Mika. And Roots, a group show on trees and memory, is free inside until 15 November.
Hokusai, complete, for the first time
Hokusai: Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji at Dulwich Picture Gallery until 17 January 2027 is the first time the complete set has been exhibited in the UK — all 46 prints, including a well-preserved Under the Wave off Kanagawa and a rare Blue Fuji variant never before seen here. Tickets are £21.50.
Dulwich is a short train ride from London Bridge or Victoria, and the gallery sits in a quiet pocket of south London that rewards the trip out. Pair it with a walk through Dulwich Village and you have an afternoon.
Free, and very good
Sir John Soane's Museum on Lincoln's Inn Fields is free, with no booking, open Wednesday to Sunday, 10am to 5pm. It is currently showing Michael Landy: Future Ruins until 17 January 2027 — drawings of landmark buildings imagined as ruins, including Mar-a-Lago abandoned, alongside places from Landy's own childhood in Ilford. The house itself is one of the strangest and most densely packed interiors in London. Arrive early; capacity is limited and the queue is real.
Frieze Sculpture in the English Gardens at the south end of Regent's Park is free, needs no booking, and closes this Sunday, 1 November. Eleven international artists, outdoors, in a park that is doing its best work of the year right now. If you only do one thing from this list this week, make it this one — it will be gone.
Coming up
Constantinople to Istanbul: One City, Two Empires opens at the V&A on 7 November and runs to May 2027 — 1,600 years of art and design across the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, a first for the UK. £25 weekdays, £27 weekends, and worth booking ahead.
Making a day of it
The geography is kinder than it looks. The National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery and The Photographers' Gallery sit within about fifteen minutes of each other on foot, and Sir John Soane's is a twenty-minute walk east through Covent Garden and Holborn. Two exhibitions and the walk between them is a better day than three exhibitions and two Tube journeys.
That stretch between Trafalgar Square and Lincoln's Inn Fields is also one of the most layered bits of the city — which is why our Viazo walking tours spend so much time in it. If you want the streets explained as well as the galleries, that is the gap we fill.
A last practical note: book the paid shows ahead where you can. The October openings are still drawing crowds, and weekend slots at the Tate and the National Gallery go early.