Press release archive: 2026
2026 Press releases
Today, Hayward Gallery Touring announces the title, concept and selection of participating artists in British Art Show 10: A Chorus of Strangers. Launching in Coventry in October 2026 before touring to Swansea, Bristol, Sheffield and Newcastle Gateshead, Ekow Eshun’s curatorial vision will bring together over 30 artists to provide a vital overview of the most exciting art produced in the UK during the past five years, including:
Okiki Akinfe; Alex Margo Arden; Liz Johnson Artur; Alvaro Barrington; Shiraz Bayjoo; Lubna Chowdhary; Shawanda Corbett; Jesse Darling; Ufuoma Essi; Joy Gerrard; Louise Giovanelli; Hannah Quinlan and Rosie Hastings; Kudzanai-Violet Hwami; Nnena Kalu; Jasleen Kaur; Christina Kimeze; Julian knxx; Matthew Krishanu; Alastair Mackinven; Melanie Manchot; Lindsey Mendick; Emma McNally; Dala Nasser; Jack O’Brien; Nengi Omuku; Precious Okoyomon; Hannah Perry; Mohammed Sami; Rae-Yen Song; Emma Talbot; Nicole Wermers; Osman Yousefzada.
As the UK’s largest recurring contemporary art exhibition, British Art Show 10 is produced by Hayward Gallery Touring and forms a key part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary national programme.
This summer, indie icon Rough Trade takes over the Southbank Centre for a weekend-long celebration of 50 years in the business as one of Britain’s most influential independent music institutions.
As the Southbank Centre marks the 75th anniversary of the Festival of Britain and the building of the Royal Festival Hall, this weekend takeover (17 – 19 July) will celebrate two giants of British culture and the indelible mark they have made on the UK’s artistic ecosystem. Bringing together up and coming current artists and household names who have helped define the contemporary music scene, Rough Trade 50 will offer an unmissable insight into an institution that has played a vital part in shaping the indie music landscape since its inception. Alongside a vibrant and eclectic offering of live music, the weekend will also feature a host of cross-arts performances, a record fair, and an unmissable evening with Rough Trade Books.
The 2026/2027 Performance & Dance Autumn/Winter season rounds out the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year and sets the tone for a new year of vibrant, cross-arts performances from across the world. Carrying forward the celebratory energy of the 75th programme, the Southbank Centre’s Autumn/Winter Performance & Dance programme, celebrates icons of the theatre and dance and spotlights the trailblazers and innovators who contribute to the Southbank Centre’s vision to be the arts centre of the future.
The season platforms leading performers, theatre-makers, and choreographers with an electric line up which presents radical new works alongside festive family favourites.
The Southbank Centre has today been awarded £10m from Arts Council England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) to undertake critical infrastructure repairs to the Grade I listed Royal Festival Hall.
Awarded through the Creative Foundations Fund, the grant will address urgent structural challenges, ensuring this world-class venue and the UK’s home for classical music remains fully operational, as well as helping to reduce its carbon footprint.
The critical work the grant will support includes replacing the building’s original single-glazed windows and its aging flat roof to stop water damage from flooding and improve energy efficiency. The funding will also modernise the auditorium’s rigging systems.
The Southbank Centre today announces the first names in the line-up for Harry Styles’ Meltdown, taking place 11–21 June 2026 as part of its 75th anniversary year.
Curated by Harry Styles, the festival spans the Southbank Centre’s multi-venue site, bringing together a wide-ranging line-up of artists across electronic, jazz, pop and experimental music.
As part of his curation, Harry Styles will also perform a headline show at the Royal Festival Hall on 16 June 2026, with full details to be announced soon.
The Southbank Centre today announces further details of You Are Here (3 May 2026), the centrepiece of its 75th anniversary celebrations.
Created by leading voices across film, theatre, literature and fashion – Gareth Pugh, Carson McColl, Danny Boyle and Paulette Randall, with Sabrina Mahfouz and Natasha Chivers, the landmark event will transform the Southbank Centre in a one-day, sitewide experience: an immersive fusion of theatrical performance, live music, dance, fashion and visual art that reveals the throughlines between cultural movements that have shifted Britain’s kaleidoscopic identity.
The Southbank Centre today announces a new youth-powered weekender Letters To The Future (18–20 September) spotlighting the cultural leaders of the next generation.
Internationally renowned creators, writers, activists, thinkers and multi-hyphenate stars Amelia Dimoldenberg, Olly Alexander, Mya-Rose Craig and Rebecca F. Kuang curate panel discussions tackling the biggest issues of the moment, whilst lecturer, broadcaster and bestselling author Ash Sarkar delivers the inaugural Southbank Centre Annual Lecture. Complementing these events is a rich interdisciplinary programme including talks, performances, free gigs, DJs sets, and spoken word.
The Southbank Centre today announces Grammy and Brit award-winning global superstar and founder of the Service95 Book Club, Dua Lipa, as curator of its 2026 London Literature Festival (Wednesday 21 October – Sunday 1 November). Dua will curate a series of events in the opening weekend (Saturday 24 & Sunday 25 October) as well as events across the whole festival with her Service95 Book Club.
The Southbank Centre today publishes its 2025 Impact Report, highlighting a year of bold experimentation that saw the classical music experience reimagined, barriers between art forms dissolved and a commitment to opening up its 11-acre site to more people.
Headline evidence from the report:
- 55% of events at the Southbank Centre were free in 2025
- 11,672,984 visitors to its 11-acre site
- 8,695 artists performed on its stages
- The Southbank Centre delivered work in 24 towns and cities in all four nations across the UK. This includes touring exhibitions, which were seen by 300,465 people outside of London
- The Southbank Centre engaged 328 schools and 6,860 pupils
The report, the first of its kind for the UK’s largest arts centre, outlines the Southbank Centre’s impact across 2025. It considers what it means to be the arts centre of the future and demonstrates how it is growing to meet the needs of a modern audience – from creating live, site-wide experiences to supporting young people’s mental health. The report reveals how over 11.6 million people visited its 11-acre site and stayed for durations ranging from 30 minutes and six hours.
This summer, the Southbank Centre celebrates the resilience, creativity and contributions of refugees and people seeking sanctuary as Refugee Week returns with a programme of cultural events and performances centred on the theme of ‘Courage.’ The Southbank Centre’s Refugee Week programme, which runs 26 – 28 June 2026, brings together artists with lived experience of displacement, leading cultural voices, allies and creatives with migrant heritage to reflect on what courage looks like today. It offers a powerful affirmation of community and solidarity in defiance of division and hostility with a dynamic and multi-disciplinary programme of DJ sets, film screenings, gigs, panel discussions and literary events in response to this year’s theme.
As it celebrates its 75th year, the Southbank Centre is seeking memories of the Festival of Britain from people who visited in 1951, either at the custom-built site on the South Bank – home to the Royal Festival Hall – or at one of the many regional events that took place across the nation. There is a portal for submissions on the website, and the collected stories will be added to the Southbank Centre archive, woven into the living history of the Grade-II listed brutalist site and preserved for future generations.
The Southbank Centre in collaboration with Goalhanger today unveils more programming for Goalhanger: The Rest Is Fest (Fri 4 – Sun 6 Sep 2026), a highlight of the centre’s 75th anniversary celebrations. The newly announced events include:
- New events will feature collaborations from existing Goalhanger podcasts: Anthony Scaramucci (The Rest Is Politics: US) and David McCloskey (The Rest Is Classified) join forces for Team America: World Police? (5 Sep, QEH)
- Richard Osman and Marina Hyde host an all-out battle between the sharpest minds in British podcasting in The Rest Is Quiz for one night only (6 Sep, QEH)
- The Rest Is Science (QEH) and The Book Club (Purcell Room) take to the stage for their first ever live editions (5 Sep)
- The Royal Festival Hall plays host to The Rest Is Politics: The Special Relationship (5 Sep)
- By popular demand, Sherlock & Co. adds a second show (6 Sep, Purcell Room)
- The Rest Is Classified (4 Sep, QEH) returns to the Southbank Centre following a sold-out performance earlier in January 2026.
The Southbank Centre’s longest-running festival Poetry International Festival returns (Friday 10 – Sunday 12 July) and includes a celebration of the life and work of the trailblazing poet Benjamin Zephaniah, as well as a celebration of Allen Ginsberg at 100. The festival programme brings together multi-art events, workshops and on-site activity as a key part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary celebrations as the centre marks its creation during the 1951 Festival of Britain.
The Hayward Gallery presents Chiharu Shiota: Threads of Life and Yin Xiuzhen: Heart to Heart, concurrent exhibitions from two innovative and globally celebrated artists who use ordinary materials to create extraordinary works on a monumental scale. Featuring new commissions and key existing pieces, these exhibitions explore the different ways both artists interweave textiles and found objects into deeply personal reflections on memory, identity and the human condition. Both presentations build on the Southbank Centre’s commitment to introducing international artists to new audiences and form part of its nationwide 75th anniversary celebrations, which run throughout 2026 and span events across London and the UK.
The Southbank Centre today announces Harry Styles as curator of its 2026 Meltdown festival.
Harry joins a long line of prestigious past curators including David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Patti Smith, Nile Rodgers and many more. This year marks a landmark edition of the world’s longest-running artist-curated music festival, presented as part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary year. The Southbank Centre, a place that brings different art forms together and is open to all, will see Styles take its artistic reins for 11 days and curate its annual multi-arts festival, spanning the 11-acre site (11 – 21 June 2026).
To mark 50 years of the Undercroft Skate Space, the Southbank Centre will present Skate 50 (30 April – 21 June 2026), a multimedia exhibition telling the history of the iconic skateboarding space and the communities it has fostered over the past half century. Developed alongside active members of the Southbank skate community, Skate 50 will include new commissions utilising photography, moving image and sound to delve into the stories that have shaped one of the most recognisable spaces in skate culture.
The Undercroft Skate Space is widely considered as the birthplace of British skateboarding. A space left open to the public when the Queen Elizabeth Hall was built in the 1960s, its concrete ledges, ramps, and pillars were then adopted by skateboarders in the mid 1970s. Fifty years on and it is now one of the oldest continuously used skateboarding locations in the UK, home to a community that spans five generations and a cornerstone of creative expression.
The Southbank Centre (@southbank.centre) and TikTok today announce the first-ever Crescendo cohort: ten UK-based classical music content creators selected for the new accelerator programme, in the Centre’s 75th anniversary year, supporting emerging digital talent and bringing classical music to new, digital-first audiences.
Launched through an open call in September 2025, Crescendo supports creators who are reshaping how classical music is shared, discovered and understood online – reaching new audiences through storytelling, education and experimentation.
With nearly one million posts under #ClassicalMusic on TikTok and the hashtag growing by more than 60% in 2025, Crescendo responds to a growing appetite for accessible classical music content beyond the concert hall environment.
The Southbank Centre today announces the full line-up for the return of Multitudes, its multi-arts festival powered by orchestral music, running from 16 – 30 April 2026 as part of the centre’s 75th anniversary year.
A centrepiece of the festival’s programme is Un-natural Harmony: Sounds of Lee Alexander McQueen (29 – 30 April), a major new collaboration between the London Contemporary Orchestra, Robert Ames, and John Gosling, McQueen’s longtime music director and collaborator. The multi-arts concert is a reimagining of the music which inspired Lee Alexander McQueen’s most iconic fashion runways in a live orchestral setting.
The Southbank Centre today announces poet Roger McGough as the celebrity ambassador for A Poet In Every Port, alongside the full touring route for the project bringing the National Poetry Library to 11 coastal towns across the UK. Inspired by the travelling exhibitions of the 1951 Festival of Britain, it forms a key part of the Southbank Centre’s 75th anniversary national programme.
Led by a touring version of the Southbank Centre’s National Poetry Library in collaboration with 11 partners, A Poet In Every Port brings a selection of the world’s largest public collection of modern poetry in a new mobile library, alongside free public events, workshops and poetry readings. The mobile National Poetry Library travels to each nation of the UK, from North Uist in the Outer Hebrides, to Penzance in Cornwall; Bangor in Northern Ireland to Caernarfon in Wales.
The Southbank Centre today announces that Sally Tallant has been appointed Director of the Hayward Gallery and Visual Arts.
Sally will take up the role from July 2026 and will lead a programme of work that includes directing and curating exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, the Southbank Centre’s contemporary art space. Sally will also organise visual arts installations across the whole Southbank Centre site and will oversee a national programme of work through Hayward Gallery Touring which reaches hundreds of thousands of people across the UK every year.
The Hayward Gallery, in partnership with the RC Foundation, Taiwan (R.O.C.), will present Samuel Laurence Cunnane: Blue Road. This will mark the Irish artist’s London debut and the fifth exhibition in the RC Foundation Project Space Exhibition Series, which showcases the next generation of emerging international artists.
The exhibition will take place in the HENI Project Space in the Southbank Centre’s Hayward Gallery – a space that offers the opportunity for audiences to discover exhibitions from new artistic voices for free.