Unique things to do in London

London is one of those cities where you can live here your entire life and still discover something completely new on a random Tuesday afternoon that makes you wonder how on earth you didn't know it existed. This place is absolutely packed with experiences that have absolutely nothing to do with the standard tourist trail, and if you're someone who's done the Eye and the Tower and the museum circuit and you're looking for what comes next, this one is for you.

Because here's the thing. Unique doesn't have to mean expensive or complicated or the kind of thing that requires weeks of planning. Some of the most extraordinary evenings and afternoons this city offers are hiding in plain sight, tucked into a side street or up a lift on a rooftop or behind a door that doesn't look like much from the outside but absolutely delivers once you're in. We love a London experience that makes you feel like you're in on something, like you've discovered a version of this city that not everyone gets to see.

So we put together five of our absolute favourites. Five genuinely unique things to do in London that cover creative, atmospheric, theatrical, cinematic, and completely and utterly ridiculous in the best possible sense. There is something for every mood and every kind of person on this list and we are quite confident that all five of them will make you feel brilliant about living in or visiting this city.

Paint Your Own Trainers at Art Play

📍 Shoreditch, London 🎟️From £60 Book here

Right, we are starting with this one because it is genuinely one of the most fun, most satisfying, and most unexpectedly cool things you can do in London and we want to shout about it from the rooftops. Custom trainer painting at Art Play is exactly what it sounds like and also so much more than it sounds like, in the same way that "oh we're just going for a quick drink" somehow becomes the best night of the month.

You come in, you get a pair of trainers, and you customise them entirely from scratch. Your colours, your design, your vision, your hands, your creation. The results range from bold geometric patterns to intricate illustrations to people's pets rendered on a pair of white canvas shoes in painstaking loving detail. There is no brief, no template, no expectation beyond that you have a genuinely brilliant time making something completely unique that belongs entirely to you.

"This was such a COOL thing to do. I love the trainers I painted!"

What makes this such a special experience beyond the obvious fun of it is that you leave with something wearable. Something you actually made that you're going to put on your feet and walk around London in and have people stop you and say those are brilliant where did you get them and you get to say I made them actually, which is the best sentence in the English language. We genuinely believe that. There is no better feeling than wearing something you created yourself.

It works brilliantly as a solo session, as a date, as a birthday activity for a group of friends who want to do something they've never done before, and as the kind of spontaneous Tuesday afternoon activity that turns into a story you tell for months. The sessions are relaxed, the materials are all provided, and our team are brilliant at helping you get the design out of your head and onto the shoe without it ever feeling stressful or like you're being assessed on anything.

Head to Art Play's Trainer Painting to book your slot. We're in Shoreditch and Chelsea and both venues are genuinely lovely places to spend an afternoon. Come and make something you're going to wear with actual pride.

Paint Your Own Trainers at Art Play

Alcotraz, London's Prison Cocktail Bar

📍 Hackney and Covent Garden, London 🎟️From £33

If you have not heard of Alcotraz yet then prepare yourself because this is a sentence you are going to need a moment with. Alcotraz is an immersive theatrical cocktail bar set inside a prison. You arrive, you get given an orange jumpsuit, and you are led by actors playing crooked guards into a genuinely convincing prison set complete with metal cells, a warden with real energy, and inmates behind bars who are going to make you the most personalised cocktails you have ever had in your life.

Here is the twist that makes the whole thing brilliant. You don't order cocktails from a menu. You have to smuggle your own base spirit in past the guards. You bring your gin or your rum or your whisky, you conceal it as best you can, the guards make it very theatrical about whether they're going to catch you, and then once you're inside, the inmates take your smuggled alcohol and combine it with their own liqueurs, bitters and homemade syrups to create bespoke cocktails tailored entirely to your tastes. No two experiences are the same. No two drinks are the same. The whole thing is personalised around you.

The actors stay completely in character throughout the entire experience and this is what makes Alcotraz genuinely brilliant rather than just gimmicky. You forget quite quickly that you're in a bar. There's a storyline running throughout, there are secret missions if you want to get involved, and the commitment of everyone working there creates this completely immersive atmosphere that is unlike anything else in London's nightlife scene. It runs for about an hour and forty-five minutes and it consistently rates around 4.7 out of 5 from hundreds of reviewers, with people saying things like we haven't laughed this much in ages and I left wanting to go straight back.

It's based at multiple locations including one on Hackney Road in East London and there's a Covent Garden site too. Strictly 18 plus, bring your spirit of choice, bring your sense of humour, and prepare to have one of the most memorable evenings you've had in this city. Book online ahead of time because it sells out regularly and deservedly so.

Sir John Soane's Museum by Candlelight

📍 Holborn, London 🎟️ FREE to enter (exhibitions from £25)

This one requires us to tell you a little bit about who Sir John Soane was first, and we promise it's worth it. Soane was a visionary neo-classical architect who designed the Bank of England among other things, and he spent his life filling three interconnected townhouses in Holborn with one of the most extraordinary personal collections you will ever encounter. Roman marbles, Greek vases, Egyptian antiquities, architectural models, paintings, sculpture, and in the basement, the actual alabaster sarcophagus of King Seti I, which the British Museum declined to purchase in the 1820s because they thought £2,000 was too much to spend and Soane subsequently bought immediately. When he finally got it into his house he threw three consecutive evening parties for nearly a thousand guests. The man had range.

The museum is free to visit during the day and worth it for that reason alone. But the truly unique experience is the candlelight evening, which happens on the first Tuesday of every month between six and nine in the evening. The entire museum is lit exclusively by candles, exactly as Soane would have entertained his guests during his lifetime, and the atmosphere it creates in those rooms is nothing short of extraordinary. Every object throws different shadows, every surface glows, and the sense of being transported somewhere completely outside of ordinary time is genuinely powerful.

It's so popular that they distribute tickets to the first 200 people who arrive at half past five, so get there early. The queue forms from around five o'clock and it is absolutely worth the wait.

Entry is completely free. There are also ticketed twilight tours available which include a drinks reception in the Library-Dining Room followed by an expert-guided candlelit tour, and these sell out very quickly so keep an eye on the museum's website for upcoming dates.

The address is 13 Lincoln's Inn Fields in Holborn and there is genuinely nowhere else in London quite like it.

Rooftop Cinema Club at the Bussey Building, Peckham

📍 Peckham, London 🎟️ From £14

There is something so purely, simply wonderful about sitting in a deckchair on a London rooftop as the sun goes down and watching a brilliant film with the whole city spread out below you and a cocktail in your hand and wireless headphones on, and we think everyone in this city should do it at least once a summer. Rooftop Cinema Club at the Bussey Building in Peckham is the place to do it and it is, to put it plainly, one of the loveliest evenings London can give you.

The views from the top of the Bussey Building are genuinely spectacular. You can see right across Central London, the skyline doing that thing it does at golden hour where it looks almost too beautiful to be real, and then the screen comes on and the film starts and the city just sits there in the background being gorgeous while you watch something brilliant. The wireless headphones mean you hear everything crispy and clearly with absolutely zero interference from the surrounding city, which is a small detail that makes an enormous difference to the experience.

The film programme is genuinely well curated. This summer they've got everything from recent Oscar winners like Sinners to cult classics like Pulp Fiction and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, TV watch party evenings including a Gossip Girl binge session showing three back-to-back episodes, and special events like an Arthouse Thursday series and a screening of Interstellar timed to coincide with a rare blue moon in May, which is honestly the most Rooftop Cinema Club thing we've ever heard and we mean that as high praise.

Food is stonebaked pizza from the rooftop bar, drinks are properly good, and the whole thing costs from around £14 for adults. There's a second location at Roof East in Stratford if you're in East London, but the Peckham one with those views is the one we'd send you to first. Tickets go on sale about a month at a time so check their website regularly and book as soon as something catches your eye because the popular screenings do sell out.

The Looking Glass Cocktail Club, Shoreditch

📍 Shoreditch, London 🎟️ £14 to £85.27 per person

We've saved this one for last because it is the kind of place you discover and then spend the next six months telling everyone you know about it in a slightly evangelical way, which is our personal experience and apparently the experience of everyone who has ever walked through that door.

The Looking Glass Cocktail Club is at 49 Hackney Road in Shoreditch and the first thing you need to know is that you literally walk through a looking glass to get in. Not metaphorically. There is a mirror, you step through it, and on the other side is one of the most gloriously eccentric and atmospheric cocktail bars in London. The premise is Alice in Wonderland meets decadent underground members club meets performance art venue meets the best cocktail menu you've seen in a while, and the execution is brilliant from start to finish.

The cocktails are genuinely exceptional and genuinely unusual. These aren't your standard gin and tonics with a bit of garnish. These are considered, creative, often theatrical drinks that arrive with their own sense of occasion. The atmosphere is dark and ornate and intimate in a way that makes the whole evening feel like you've been let into somewhere secret, which is a very specific feeling that London is brilliantly good at creating when it tries and the Looking Glass tries harder than most.

There's live entertainment on certain nights, performance art that weaves through the space, and an overall energy that makes you feel like absolutely anything could happen next, which is our favourite quality in a night out. It's one of those places that makes everyone in the group look at each other halfway through the evening and go right, this is brilliant isn't it. Because it is. Genuinely, surprisingly, completely brilliantly is.

The Common Thread

What all five of these have in common, and this is the thing we keep coming back to, is that they give you an experience rather than just an evening out. You walk away having done something, made something, seen something, felt something, that you didn't know existed before you went. London is so extraordinarily good at this when you know where to look and we hope this list sends you somewhere new that reminds you why this city is completely unlike anywhere else on earth.

And if you're choosing where to start, come and paint some trainers with us. Book Custom Sneaker Painting and we'll see you soon.