Once in a lifetime things to do in London

There is a category of experience that sits above fun. Above a good evening or a memorable night or even a brilliant weekend. There's a tier of thing you can do in a city like London that genuinely changes something in you, that creates a before and an after, that you come back to in your memory for years and years because it was the kind of moment that life very occasionally produces when everything lines up and you find yourself somewhere extraordinary doing something that felt completely unlike anything that had come before it.

London is one of those rare places on earth that has enough of these experiences to fill an entire lifetime of discovery. And yet most people who live here or visit will walk past the majority of them without ever knowing they existed. They'll do the Eye and the Tower and Buckingham Palace and they'll have a perfectly lovely time and go home satisfied but not quite changed. And that's fine. But what about the other stuff. The experiences that don't appear on every tourist map but that will, without question, produce the kind of story you find yourself telling at dinner tables for the next decade.

We've got three for you today. Just three, because once in a lifetime experiences deserve proper attention rather than a list where everything gets a paragraph and then you move on. One of them is us and we are going to talk about it with the full weight of everything we believe about why making something with your own hands is one of the most quietly profound things a person can do. The other two are genuinely extraordinary and we would recommend them to anyone without a single hesitation.

These are not things you do every Saturday. These are things you plan and anticipate and talk about afterwards. So let's give them the space they deserve.

Making Your Own Silver Ring at Art Play Chelsea, and Why This One Lives With You

📍 Chelsea, London 🎟️ From £60 🔗 Book now.

We need to start by saying something honest. We run a lot of workshops at Art Play. Beautiful ones, creative ones, consistently wonderful ones. Candle making and pottery and painting and mosaic and all sorts of things in between that we're very proud of and that people genuinely love.

But the silver ring making workshop sits in a different category in our hearts and in the feedback we receive and in the faces we see at the end of a session, and we want to explain exactly why.

There is something that happens when a person makes a piece of jewellery from silver clay with their own hands and then wears it on their own finger. Something that is very hard to put words to but that every single person who has done this workshop understands immediately once they experience it. You created that. Not in a metaphorical sense, not with a lot of assistance, not by following a template that produces something generic. You genuinely, actually made that ring. You worked the silver clay, you shaped it, you formed it, you put your intention into it, and then it was fired and transformed into solid silver and you put it on your hand and it was yours in the most complete sense of the word.

The silver ring making workshop at Art Play Chelsea runs as a small and beautifully attended session. You work with silver clay, which is a genuinely magical material that behaves like clay when you're working with it and then becomes actual solid silver when it's fired. No experience is required and none is assumed. Our workshop leader takes you through everything from the beginning, the properties of the material, the techniques for shaping and forming, the details that make the difference between something good and something you are absolutely in love with, and the whole process has this wonderful quality of being completely absorbing without ever being stressful.

People come to this workshop for all kinds of reasons. Some come for a birthday and want to mark it with something that will last. Some come as couples and make rings together, which produces a moment at the end of the session that we have genuinely witnessed move people to tears in the very best way. Some come alone, wanting to make something for themselves, wanting to do something with their hands that is genuinely skilled and produces something genuinely beautiful. Some come having never considered themselves creative in any meaningful way and leave wearing something on their finger that makes them look at their hands differently.

The ring you make will not look like something from a shop. It will look like something handmade, which is precisely what makes it extraordinary. It will have your fingerprints in it, literally and metaphorically. The decisions you made about shape and texture and form will be visible in the finished piece. And every single time you look at it, every single time someone notices it and asks where it came from and you say I made it, you will feel something that no purchased jewellery has ever produced. Something warm and proud and quietly extraordinary.

The workshop costs £60 and runs at our Chelsea venue on Chelsea Manor Street, SW3 3TW. You leave with a piece of solid silver jewellery and a skill you didn't have when you arrived and a story you'll be telling for years. Book Silver Ring Making in Chelsea and come and make something that lasts.

Cahoots Underground in Soho, Where London Hides an Entire Decade Beneath Its Streets

📍 Soho and Borough, London 🎟️ From £14 per cocktail

We want to describe how you find Cahoots Underground because the finding is part of the experience and understanding it matters. You are in Kingly Court, a small covered courtyard off Carnaby Street in the heart of Soho that most people walk past without noticing. You find the entrance, which is not obvious by design, and you descend a flight of stairs and then something genuinely extraordinary happens.

You are no longer in 2026. You are in 1940s London, in a disused underground station, and the detail and commitment to that world is so complete and so immaculately executed that the present day falls away from you almost immediately. The tiled walls of a tube station stretch out around you. Vintage carriages sit on platforms and you take a seat inside them on authentic tube upholstery. Staff dressed as if they walked directly out of a wartime photograph approach you with menus written as ration books. The cocktails arrive in vessels that belong to a different century. Live jazz bands play on the platforms and the sound echoes through the tunnels and everything about where you are tells you that you have stepped through a door in time.

This is not a theme bar that nods at an era. This is a full and total immersion in one, and the difference between those two things is enormous. Cahoots exists because of an obsessive commitment to the details that create total belief. The signage is period-accurate. The language the staff use stays entirely in character, they're referred to as Scoundrels and they're serving you black market hooch and bootleg spirits and they will not break the spell for any reason. You are not watching a performance. You are inside one, which is a very different and far more extraordinary thing.

The cocktails are genuinely excellent and genuinely unusual. The menu is structured around the 1940s spirit of wartime ingenuity and black market creativity, and the drinks that arrive are as theatrical as the venue itself. There are cocktails served in tin cups and others in period vessels and at the new Borough Yards Postal Office location there is a pneumatic tube system that actually delivers certain drinks overhead through the air, which is a detail so completely wonderful that we feel the need to mention it twice. A pneumatic tube system for cocktail delivery. London, honestly.

There are now three Cahoots locations. The original Underground in Kingly Court, Soho. The Ticket Hall pub directly across the street. And the Postal Office in Borough Yards near Borough Market. All three share the same meticulous attention to period detail and all three are worth visiting, but if this is your first Cahoots experience we send you to the Underground without question because descending those stairs for the first time and finding London 1944 waiting for you is one of the most genuinely surprising and delightful things this city can do to you.

Book ahead because it is popular and deservedly so. Weekends have live bands that raise the energy in the tunnels to something almost euphoric and they book up well in advance. Dress up if you want to, a little 1940s flair is always appreciated and adds enormously to the experience, though it isn't required. Arrive ready to surrender to wherever those stairs take you. Leave reluctantly, blinking slightly in the twenty-first century light, wondering if there's any chance you can go back.

Secret Cinema, the Immersive Experience That Genuinely Blurs the Line Between Watching and Living

📍 Multiple Locations, London 🎟️ From £50

The question that Secret Cinema asks, and that it has been answering brilliantly for nearly two decades now, is: what if you didn't just watch the film. What if you lived inside it.

It sounds like a marketing line. It sounds like the kind of promise that gets made and then slightly underdelivered on. We want to be very clear that Secret Cinema is neither of those things. It is one of the most genuinely transporting, technically extraordinary, completely unlike anything else in London experiences that this city produces, and the people who have attended Secret Cinema events and then tried to describe them to people who haven't are consistently defeated by the inadequacy of words for what they're trying to convey.

Here is roughly how it works. You book tickets to a production. You receive information about your character and a dress code that places you within the world of the film. You arrive at a location that has been transformed, often on a scale that is genuinely breathtaking, into the world of that film. And then for the next two to three hours you are not an audience member. You are a participant in the story. Actors who inhabit the film's characters interact with you personally. Scenes from the film unfold around you rather than in front of you. You move through different spaces and environments, each one detailed and designed and inhabited, and at some point the film itself begins to play in a way that is inseparable from the live performance happening simultaneously all around you.

Secret Cinema has produced immersive versions of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, Casino Royale, Dirty Dancing, Moulin Rouge, Grease and many others, each one the result of months of construction and casting and design. The Grease production that ran in summer 2025 featured a cast of thirty performers and the entire film playing across giant multi-screen platforms, with every corner of the vast Evolution London venue in Battersea Park transformed into 1950s Rydell High. People danced. People sang. People ran into Danny and Sandy and the T-Birds in character, had full conversations with them, were pulled into scenes, were mentioned by name, felt for the duration of the evening that they had genuinely become part of something that previously only existed on a screen.

The 2026 and 2027 productions are yet to be formally announced at the time of writing, with a Barbie experience in BarbieLand reportedly in the very final stages of planning as their next London production, and the company is simultaneously building a permanent immersive venue in Greenwich Peninsula due to open later in 2026. Which means that Secret Cinema is not a one-off or a rarity. It is a recurring, evolving, constantly ambitious attempt to do something with cinema that has never been done before, and it keeps succeeding.

Tickets sell fast when shows are announced. We genuinely mean fast. Previous productions have sold out within hours of going on general sale, so the advice is to get on the Secret Cinema mailing list immediately and be ready to move the moment the 2026 production is revealed. Because a Secret Cinema evening is not something you look back on and think that was a fun thing I did. It is something you look back on and think that was a night that I didn't think was possible. That was a night that changed what I believe an evening can be.

Keep an eye on their websites for announcements. Set an alarm if you need to. Buy the tickets before you think about it too hard. Some experiences in life are worth that kind of decisiveness.

What These Three Have in Common

A silver ring you made with your own hands. An underground bar where London hid an entire decade beneath its streets for you to discover. A film you didn't watch but actually lived in for an evening.

What connects them is that they are all experiences that do something a normal night out simply cannot. They leave a mark. Not just a memory but an actual physical change in how you understand what an experience can be. The ring sits on your finger and you look at it every day and feel something. The memory of descending those Cahoots stairs and finding a different century waiting stays with you with an unusual vividness. The Secret Cinema evening becomes a story that starts with "you genuinely won't believe this" and ends with someone pulling out their phone to look up tickets.

London is full of things to do. But these three are things to be. Things to inhabit. Things to carry with you long after the evening is over and the ordinary days have resumed and you find yourself looking at your hand and thinking I made that. I made that with my hands, in Chelsea, on a Tuesday, and it is the most beautiful thing I own.

Come and make something that lasts with us at Art Play Chelsea. Book your silver ring making workshop and we will see you soon.