I just wanted to start off by saying the person that rated Alice Underground 1 star is a complete…read moreimbecile. The characters are upstairs after you finish watching the show. Fucking idiot. Now for the review of the actual show! This show was amazing. The amount of detail put into each of the sets and the costumes was absolutely jaw dropping and completely exceeded my expectations. The acting was phenomenal and truly made you feel that you really were in another world. I was told by a worker at the bar that you could go to this show 4 times and have a different experience each time. I would definitely not mind doing this show multiple times to be able to see ALL of the sets, costumes, scenarios and different pieces of the story. Immersive theater at its finest! I flew from New York to see this show and it was worth it. My 2nd event at the vaults and I can promise I'll be back for more. DO NOT MISS THIS.

"If you had taken me on this when I was younger, I would've cried the whole way through" - this is…read morehow I've opened my story of the Alice's Adventures Underground experience to everyone I've spoken to. We had an amazing time, but my god this place sticks to the 'original' Alice = totally mind altering! Located in Waterloo Vaults, you first enter into a bar and merchandise area, at which point you're asked to check your coat and bag in. There is a bar available but, having been to Cubana for a happy hour cocktail beforehand, we were just ready to get started. This is also the opportunity to pre-order your drinks for the Mad Hatter's Tea Party if you so wish - white or red wine, or a gin and cucumber cocktail at £5 a pop. The experience itself is hard to describe, partly because there's just so much going on your brain can hardly comprehend and partly because I don't want to ruin anything for those who want to attend in the near future. Four different stories unfold alongside one another, culminating in a huge court scene with the ferocious queen and interspersed with all the well known characters. The Mad Hatter's Tea Party was a personal favourite (and not just for the opportunity to sit down!) - the characters are all very well played, the right balance between scary and comfortingly familiar. Plus the look on people's faces when the scene begins again is something of a picture...worth swotting up if you want to know what's to come! The final bar is where you can revel in the success of escaping this twisting world, with a brilliant little band, bar and hot food available. There's a maze and some flamingo croquet for activities, and plenty of alcohol available. You can re-enter this area throughout its run this summer with your SUIT card, issued earlier in the evening, and worth visiting if you know someone who possess something so powerful. Why four stars? Giving in our bags as recommended rendered us purse-less, so that last area was a bit of a let down - once you exit, there's no re-entry on the day, so it was a quick nose around and then out again. Coming out at £50 a ticket, you'd also think that perhaps that the tea party drink could be on the house. Whether you go for 'eat me' or 'drink me', I recommend the Alice's Adventures Underground Experience. Just, please, don't eat the jam tarts!

LAST WEEK!! Get down here!…read more It's the pop up that popped up in May, then why and how have I only just visited? I wish I had gone earlier so it couldn't been my summer haunt. This is an elaborate venue. All the fun of the fair with a circus/freakshow feel about it with olde posters donning every wall. Candy floss, sweets. fair ground rides, actual freak show, theatre and lots and lots of bars. There's ample outside and covered seating. Subtly lit in the darkness you could see couples making out in some of the outside booths and friends perching together in stationary bumper cars. The atmosphere was chilled and upbeat. On a date night with the mrs, we booked ourselves in for Fasinating Aida. I would highly recommend you all do the same. Book yourself in for this topical musical comedy and enjoy the quirky atmosphere before it disappears at the end of the month.

Well, we booked in to see The Tiger Lilies and we didn't really get it. All around us were people…read morewho had come to worship at the feet of their heroes...and us. We didn't really get it ....however the spiegeltent is fab and the south bank is the place to be on a Saturday night! It's good to try something new...even if you don't get it!

So much fun! Had to add a little gaming fun to counter all the history my children were…read moreexperiencing on our trip to London from California. A couple of items... my children 14 & 10. Like all other pre-teens and teens, they love to game. I joined them during the gaming session, which was about 1.5 hrs for both games, Tetris and Squid Games! Note that you will be moving around your space quickly. Jumping, stepping forward, backward, side to side, and toucing the walls as you play. You will get thirsty. No problem! They offer drink order and delivery to the room where you have a shelf to keep your drinks. Personal items: You can not keep on the floor or room with you. They will get in the way. No worries. They provide free lockers. It has been 2 days, and we are still talking about the fun we had there. Tried to get another trip in but may miss out. However, I learned there is one in Los Angeles, Ca. Will absolutely make the drive up from San Diego, Ca, (~2 hours) to play again! Thanks for the amazing family memories!

We visited Immersive Gamebox today and we played the Alien Aptitude game experience! We had so much…read morefun. It is located very close to Southwark Tube Station and to Nando's. We checked in and our greeter was fantastic! They also have plenty of lockers to store belongings in. The waiting area is nice too and there is a wide choice of drinks available. The box that we played in was fantastic and the screens were excellent and really interactive. There are four different games included in the Alien Aptitude experience and every single game was so fun to play! Each game was so thoughtfully designed . The rules for each game was explained clearly and presented in a way that wasn't overwhelming. We had such a great time and the time goes so quickly! The gif at the end is so fun to make as well! Thank you so much to Immersive Gamebox for giving us an A+ experience and we cannot wait to return for many more happy memories. I would highly recommend visiting Immersive Gamebox.

Oh, this was so disappointing. We were expecting the torture chambers, and we booked this by…read moremistake! Do the Tower Of London tour if that's what you want to see. I give the actors credit for trying to keep us amused for an hour and a quarter, but how anyone could work in those conditions is beyond me. I thought it was pretty awful. But give it a try if that's your thing.

Seeing a world class city such as London with a ten-year-old is challenging, as it's a balancing…read moreact between what a child and a middle aged man both find worthwhile. The London Dungeon isn't something I would have seen on my own, but I'm thoroughly pleased I brought my son to see it today. He absolutely loved it, and might have even learned some history along the way. Admission was expensive, but I felt we definitely got our money's worth. Timed tickets worked like a breeze. I bought our tickets for a 2:45 time slot on my phone just ten minutes prior, and when we arrived we walked right in. No line at all. I have a lot of experience in the theater, both acting in and seeing live shows, and I was very impressed by the dedication and talent of all of the actors, as well as all of the sound, lighting and various special effects. The scene with the witch in the cage was particularly excellent. The tour ends with a short "execution" ride, and then out into the macabre gift shop and small pub with a full bar. Would probably be a fun place to stay for a drink after the show. Had a great time and would definitely do it again!

Shakespeare's Globe is a reconstruction of the Globe Theatre, which was completed in 1997. I…read morevisited with my husband on a recent trip to London earlier this month and had a great time. There are a couple of ways to experience the Globe. You can attend a performance (they typically have 1-2 performances per day at a range of rates) or you can tour the theater. The performance times didn't work well with our schedule (such a short trip), but we were able to fit in a tour, which was great. Our tour guide was wonderful. We started the tour inside the attached visitor/admission center, where he provided some context. Then we walked over to the theater itself and sat on each of the three levels to get a sense of the different individuals who attended Shakespeare's plays and how they would have experienced the performances they attended. We learned that the theater was built in 1599, when there was only bridge connecting Bankside and London. People either took barges across the river or - if they didn't have the money for a boat - walked to and across the bridge. We learned how much a performance cost for people sitting in different sections of the theater. We learned that the Globe burned down during a performance of Henry VIII in 1613 (the theater was rebuilt the following year but closed by 1642 and torn down in 1645). The modern recreation you can visit now is close to the original site (you can find the original site just a few steps away) and based on historical drawings and designs. It's as close to Shakespeare's Globe as we can get, and it's an incredible thing to see and experience. If you can fit in a performance, I'm sure it's amazing. But the tour was pretty great, too. I learned a lot about Shakespeare, the Globe, and London. We had a pretty tight schedule due to it being a shorter trip, and a tour of the Globe was a great way to take in such a historic and important site.

Even if you're not planning on seeing a show here, do the tour!…read more William Shakespeare's company built The Globe Theater very close to this spot in 1599. This is a replica of Shakespeare's theater which was built in the late 1990s. Originally, the idea was to mostly perform Shakespeare plays during the summer months, demonstrating exactly how those plays might have been seen in Elizabethan/Jacobean London. So, all-male casts, no modern technology, etc. Nowadays they make a lot more concessions with the aim of putting on enjoyable shows, but this is still an outdoor venue with a courtyard "groundlings" area that has no seats. The outer ring is covered and has wooden bench seating, with cushions available to rent. If you're a tourist who has spent the day hoofing it around this great city, you should probably make sure you have a seat. Furthermore, you might consider that a back-row seat would allow you to lean back, which you can't do in the other rows. This is very much a true professional theater experience. It's not just a gimmick; the original artistic director was no less than Sir Mark Rylance so you know you are going to see a high-quality production. However, the expertise on hand regarding the history of William Shakespeare makes for a very informative tour. I've done it multiple times and always loved it. But the production I saw of A Midsummer Night's Dream was lots of fun, easy to recommend. They involve the audience a lot, even bringing people on stage during actual scenes. Anyone who considers themselves a theater nerd owes themselves a visit. I strongly recommend the tour, and if you can make it to an actual show, you won't regret it. There are concession stands with a decent selection of snacks and drinks, alcoholic and otherwise. And there's a very large gift shop which was closed at the end of the show I went to, sadly. I would have bought something. But that's normal. NOTE: a second stage has been added to this complex, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. It's a traditional indoor theater. If you're booking tickets, you might want to make sure you know which stage it's on, as that greatly impacts the experience. ANOTHER NOTE: I spoke to some people who believed the final scene of the movie Hamnet was filmed here. Although that might sound right, it is incorrect. That sequence was all done at Elstree Studios in Hertfordshire.

Small museum dedicated to gardening in London. The museum is housed inside an old church, so it is…read moreworth visiting just for the architecture alone. The actual exhibit about gardening, while interesting, is quite small. In the price of admission, you get access to climb their medieval tower to see views of London from above. The staircase is very, very narrow with low ceilings. I was too claustrophobic to make it up, although they do have a video of someone climbing the stairs and showing the view, so you can see what it's like. I got a student ticket which cost me £5 and that's really as much as I'd be willing to pay to come in. It's a nice place to kill about an hour, but unless you are really into gardening, this might not be the place for you.

I'm a Landscape Designer from the United States. Finding this museum was much like finding the…read moreHoly Grail to me. When I first came here, it was the dead of Winter, so I didn't get to explore the garden. However, given that the garden is in an old Church Yard, and there are crypts scattered about; it was an awesome, albeit gloomy, sight. There were some delightfully daft exhibits up the next time I came. For instance, an exhibit of garden gnomes; one of which looked disturbingly like Tony Blair. I'm not joking, look at my posted pictures! The gift shop is also amazing.

Marvelous place, the Tate Modern, though unfortunately my children did not see the appeal…read more I had fond memories of our first visit, back in 2010, and wanted to peek into the Tate during a family outing along South Bank last month. I love London's free museums, which make this sort of perfunctory drop-in both easy and practical. Our kids didn't like the Musée d'Orsay, so we didn't have high hopes for the Tate, especially after a long walk from the London Eye. We'd barely gotten them up the escalators and into one of the exhibit halls when they started saying they wanted to leave. We admired what we could of the heavy-hitting collection. We also talked to our children about some of the art, and maybe a trickle of it got through. There was a still life I loved, that turned out to be a Picasso, and a Mondrian painting I'm pretty sure I learned about in first or second grade. Our six-year-old volunteered that he liked a still life of a beer mug by Fernand Léger, and both kids were drawn, just a little, to Warhol's Marilyn Diptych. I hope the boys remember this quick visit, but if not, I certainly will. Maybe I'll bring them back when they're older, and we can give the Tate the time it deserves.

I visited the Tate Modern for the first time earlier this month when I visited London for a few…read moredays with my husband. The Tate opened in 2000, but a new building opened in 2016. The museum is located in the former Bankside Power Station, and the museum's Turbine Hall is an incredibly large and open space (but I did wonder why they don't utilize the space to display any large sculptures since it's such an enormous and unused space). It's a striking space, it's one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the world. It's free to visit, but exhibits may have a cost unless you're a member of the museum. When we visited earlier this month, they had three exhibits: Frida: the Making of an Icon (though January 3, 2027); Ana Mendieta (through January 17, 2027); and Julio Le Parc: Light. Color. Action (through May 3, 2027). The Frida exhibit costs 25 pounds, the Mendieta 18 pounds, and the Le Parc 15 pounds. That means that if you wanted to visit all three exhibits, it would cost 58 pounds a person which is, I think, outrageous. I couldn't justify spending that much, so I picked one exhibit - the Frida exhibit - and then just explored the free galleries after our visit to the exhibit. The Frida exhibit (which was organized in collaboration was the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston) was interesting. I've been lucky enough to see much of Frida Kahlo's works before in Mexico and Texas. But the exhibit included many works I had never seen before, and it also included works by artists that were friends or contemporaries of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and works by artists that were inspired by her. The inclusion of "Fridamania," the transformation of Kahlo into an icon, image, brand, made the exhibit different from other Frida exhibits I've seen. The exhibit was extremely crowded - but you have to expect that with an exhibit like this! I found the museum a little confusing to navigate, but we just wandered for the time that we had. Some of the works that really struck me were pieces by Gerhard Richter (the Cage paintings), Belkis Ayón, Sam Nhlengethwa, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Alberto Giacometti, David Hockney, Salman Toor, Mark Rothko, and more. The museum is definitely worth visiting, but I just didn't love it as much as I expected. Since it's free, I'm sure I'll be back to explore more of the permanent collection another time, but I did find it a little difficult to navigate and thought the exhibition admission prices were prohibitively expensive.

This venue is amazing and is in its last year so get down there before it closes!…read more A converted theatre there's lots of different rooms, bars and spaces as well as a lot of nooks and crannies! The events that run here are also usually pretty amazing, with Torture Garden being the reason I've been before. I also have on high authority that the events run by A Curious Invitation are also very worthwhile and I look forward to going again at the end of April for the Goblin King Ball

I came here a few years ago with a friend for a techno night. The club is an old cinema, and as…read more'concepts' go it's pretty awesome. There is a dance floor and various rooms. The layout is a little odd as they don't obviously correspond to that of a cinema. Still there is a balcony with seats, that I imagine is unchanged aspect. At the show I was at they were projecting nuclear bomb warning adverts from the sixties whilst the artist played this stormy atmospheric music. Then they showed an edited version of The Shining as another artist performed a live soundtrack. It was an incredible experience, hampered only by people trying to buy drugs from me because I was sober. If you can, try and see an audiovisual show, the venue will make it a memorable experience.

The screen and sound here are great. Everything else feels so dated and underserved compared to…read morelike a hundred + cinephilie places in the US. On the outside it looks like a temple to movies as you're getting close to it; it's a huge, imposing oval of a building in the middle of the street. But the temple illusion is shattered quickly as to get to the place you have navigate into one of several tunnels with some of the local homeless community and their respective full use of the place as a toilet. This is especially disconcerning if you go to a late showing. Once you get inside, your feeling will shift from slightly tense to slightly underwhelmed. The interior here is kind of like an AMC megaplex from the early 1990's. There's some light celebration of movies going on but it really doesn't appear like some flagship for the BFI, especially given the gravitas they employ on their movie collection video they play before many movies here. Food is also really underwhelming compared to nearly all higher end theaters in the States with full service; I guarantee if you were to visit the first Alamo in Austin that was converted out of a dumpy old 1970's style four theater complex you'd find that experience an order of magnitude better than what you'll get here (and that's before we get into just the attention paid to the love of cinema bv a company like that compared to the vanilla offerings here!) LIke I wrote before, once the movie starts it's very good. If you have a BFI membership like I do and can access the VIP seating, they definitely have more legroom than anywhere else I've been in the country. But overall experience is just deeply underwhelming and they should really overhaul this whole place to truly immerse people in the love of film - even the Everyman chain in London does a way better job of this than this location does.

BOOOOOOOOM! That is…read moremy experience here in a word. Yep just one word...but this is me and I have way more to say than just one word so... This place is amazing and if you love cinema and are going to see a spectacular then I would recommend popping your bottom in one of their super comfy seats. Warning: fear of heights, just don't bother! I saw Batman here and as a HUGE comic book fiend it was superb seeing the portrait stil shots displayed as they were intended. God bless the IMAX! Oh and its nice and convenient right by waterloo .

Visited here for a gig and while the event itself was great and the building itself is quirky and…read morecool, the insane bar queue, slow staff and the cider running out very early on let it down. Extra point given because the venue has a free photobooth. I am a total sucker for a photobooth and if it's free that is even better!

Yay, FIRST! I'm an…read moreavid attendee of the House of Vans in Brooklyn, NY. I've been there quite a few times for quite a few events and it's always super fun. I'll tell you what though, I went to the HOV in London this past weekend and all I can say is: Chill B. That place is like 100x the size of the BK one, and that's funny because the BK one is REALLY REALLY big (24,000 sq ft allegedly)! First of all, this one has a more underground skater feel to it, mostly because the skate park is literally underground, underneath some arches! It's set up amazingly, with AMAZING graffiti that greets you upon entering. In fact, the whole opening arch is probably half the size of the BK HOV, and you haven't even gone inside yet! Inside there are ramps and such set up for skating, but of course I was there for a show, Vans were doing a collabo with a japanese/english designer and had their launch party on Saturday night with a slew of UK Grime artists performing. The decor was great, seemingly thousands of inflated balloons were everywhere in the stage room, which of course was huge. There was an art display room as well as 2 bars, one by the stage room and one in it's own separate space. Adjacent to the 2nd bar is a movie screening room (WHAT!) and there's an art room where you could check out the clothing that was launching that night. Oh and I almost forgot, there's a working kitchen with chairs and tables for you to sit, set up basically like a cafe! This place is great, and just like the NYC iteration, they have great live (and FREE) concerts that usually have free drinks, though the night we went there were none. *sigh* There was a full bar of course but you had to pay. I guess I'll just have to come back when it's free! The also have free skate days where you can show up with your board and just skate for a while, just like the NYC one. There really is no reason NOT to go to this place. Enjoy!