3x Unique Things To Do in London at Night

If you're looking for unique things to do in London at night, the obvious answers come quickly: go to a bar, find a club, book a restaurant. And those are all fine. But London has enough going on that you don't have to default to any of them, and sometimes the evenings that stick with you are the ones where you did something you wouldn't normally think to do on a Friday. Here are three worth knowing about.

1. Vibe & Paint at Art Play, Shoreditch

• Tickets start from £25, which for a Friday night in London is pretty reasonable when you factor in that you're leaving with actual artwork.

• First Fridays are hip hop, second Fridays R&B, third Fridays Afrobeats and Amapiano, fourth Fridays house and garage. Saturdays follow a similar rotation. Learn more >>

The idea of a painting night can sound a bit wholesome when you first hear it, like something you'd do on a Tuesday afternoon rather than a Friday night out. Vibe & Paint at Art Play in Shoreditch is not that. It's a proper evening out that happens to involve painting, which sounds like a small distinction but makes quite a big difference in practice.

The setup is simple. You get a canvas, paints, brushes, and an apron, and you paint whatever you like while a DJ plays. There's a bar doing cocktails and stone-baked pizzas, the room fills up, and it ends up feeling much more like a night out than a class. Nobody is telling you what to paint or how to hold a brush. The point isn't to produce something technically impressive, it's just to have something to do with your hands while the music plays and the evening moves along at its own pace.

The music changes each week, which is one of the things that makes it worth bookmarking rather than just going once. So depending on what you're in the mood for, there's usually a night that fits. The venue is in Spitalfields, just off Liverpool Street, which puts it in a part of east London that already has a decent amount going on around it if you want to make a bigger evening of it.

It works particularly well as an alternative to just going to a bar, because you end up with something to show for the night. There's a slight absurdity to arriving home at midnight holding a canvas you painted yourself, which is honestly part of the appeal. You can take it home or leave it with the studio briefly while you sort yourself out.

It's beginner-friendly and unguided, which is the right call. A class where someone tells you step by step what to paint and how would kill the atmosphere entirely. This way you're just in a room with good music, a drink in hand, and a blank canvas, and whatever you make is yours.

Art Play also has a Chelsea location if Shoreditch doesn't work for you, and they run private and corporate bookings for groups who want to take over the space, which is worth knowing if you're trying to organise something for a hen do or a team night.

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2. Late-Night Museum and Gallery Openings

London has a genuinely good habit of opening its museums and galleries after hours on certain evenings, and it's one of those things that a lot of people know about in theory but don't actually make use of. It's worth changing that.

The National Portrait Gallery does late Friday openings, and there's something quite different about being in a portrait gallery in the evening with a glass of wine that you don't get during a crowded Saturday afternoon visit. The Tate Modern does similar late openings and periodically runs evening events that sit somewhere between a gallery visit and a night out, with music, talks, and bars open across the building. The V&A has done late-night events with real regularity over the years, and their Friday Lates tend to have a loose theme and draw a crowd that is there to actually enjoy themselves rather than dutifully tick off the collection.

What's good about these evenings is that they have a different energy to daytime museum visits. Fewer families, more people who chose to be there specifically that evening, and often some kind of programme running alongside the usual collection. They also tend to be free or very cheap to enter, even when there's a ticketed exhibition on during the day, which is either a well-kept secret or something that more people ought to be talking about.

The Barbican Centre is another one worth adding to the list. It's not strictly a museum, but it runs late events across its gallery, cinema, and arts spaces that can be combined into an evening that takes you across architecture, art, and film all in one building. The building itself is worth wandering around at night when it's a bit quieter.

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3. Late-Night Food Markets and Street Food

London's street food scene has gradually become a proper evening option rather than just a lunchtime one, and a few spots now run late enough that they fit comfortably into a night out rather than just a gap before one.

Mercato Metropolitano in Elephant and Castle is the most interesting of the lot. It's a large indoor and outdoor market spread across a former paper factory, with a serious number of traders covering everything from Italian deli food to Korean barbecue to natural wine bars. It runs late on weekends and has the feel of somewhere you could arrive at eight and still be there at eleven without having made any particular effort to stay. The crowd is mixed, the lighting is good, and it doesn't feel like a tourist trap in the way that some of the more prominent food markets do.

Flat Iron Square near London Bridge has a similar evening energy, with street food traders, bars, and occasional live music or events running throughout the week. It's an outdoor space, so it depends a bit on the weather, but on a decent evening it's one of the better spots to spend a few hours eating and drinking without committing to a sit-down restaurant or a club.

Borough Market, which is primarily a daytime market, also has evening events and late openings that are worth checking the schedule for. It's a slightly different experience to the weekend crush, and some of the traders who don't open during the day appear specifically for evening events.

London has more going on after dark than most people who live here actually take advantage of. The bar and club options aren't going anywhere, but if you're looking for something that gives the evening a bit more shape, any of these three are a good starting point. Vibe & Paint in particular is the kind of thing you end up recommending to people afterwards, which tends to be the best sign that something was worth doing.