Inside this week’s London edition: £5 discount off tickets to Emerge! Find your local vendor to buy your copy.
Emerge is London’s Lates Festival. For two nights, Friday 27 and Saturday September 28, 40 of London’s most iconic museums and galleries will be filled after dark with some of the capital’s most electrifying entertainment. The vision for Emerge is to inspire new generations to fall in love with museums by challenging audiences’ expectations of what cultural institutions are like and who they are for.
We spoke to Festival Director Nick Stockman ahead of the weekend to find out more.
“Emerge is imagined by the young, filled with the new and open to everyone. The festival is affordable, accessible and adventurous – it will showcase both iconic spaces and young creatives together for what they are, a vital part of London’s night-time stage and, for the first time, together en masse on one ticket. In a spirit of friendly admiration, we’ve ‘borrowed’ ideas from Amsterdam, Mexico City and Moscow to give London a Lates festival to rival other major worldwide cities’ events.
The fact that the first ever Emerge is a Big Issue Festival For Good is such an important statement of intent. It’s our promise to you that Emerge wears its values on its sleeve: no single-use plastic straws, we’re meat-free and there will be gender-neutral toilets available at almost every venue. The work with our friends at The Big Issue includes this exclusive dedicated programme – sold to you by Big Issue vendors on site – and has also seen the festival work with leading arts development, training and creative regeneration charity Collage Arts to include young people via the mediums of filmmaking, photography and performance.
So to the cultural feast! Enjoy a DJ set by Jungle under Hope the Whale at the Natural History Museum, the first-ever silent disco on Tower Bridge, neo-soul star Ady Suleiman performing on the Horniman’s bandstand, plasticine workshops, body-positivism explorations, pop-up gin bars and much, much more across 11 London boroughs. Mor after-dark antics than you can shake a very large stick at: start early, take in lots of events, stay late, repeat!”