Skip to main content

Young arts run free: the 50 best things to do in the UK for zilch

Whether you’re a social strategist or a stone-broke student, there’s a world of cultural freebies to be seized across the UK

To have a free day out is to beat the system. It’s the cultural equivalent of gorging yourself at an all-you-can-eat buffet, except it costs much less and you won’t go to bed praying for death because you consumed enough lukewarm spring rolls to murder an ox. Picking free entertainment is a learned skill, however. Opt for something too mainstream and your enjoyment will be dented by swarms of other people. Pick something not mainstream enough – say, the time I went to the opening of a ferry on the Isle of Sheppey as a teenager – and there’s a good chance you’ll spend your day bored, cold and eating cheese-and-pineapple cocktail sticks in a windowless indoor car park that stinks of exhaust fumes.

When it is just right, however, free stuff can expand your horizons like nothing else. Let’s imagine that you’re on the fence about, say, jazz. The expectations that come with a financial transaction are far too high to risk a full afternoon of potentially directionless skronk. But if it’s free, like the Barbican’s Women in Jazz will be in October, you have nothing to lose.

Continue reading...

from Culture | The Guardian https://ift.tt/2zEiFKL

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Dita Von Teese: ‘Even when I was a bondage model, I had big-time boundaries’

As the star dives into a giant glass of fizz for her first online extravaganza, she talks about this new golden age for burlesque, why the French Strictly gives her costume problems – and how #MeToo has changed her Dita Von Teese is looking divine. Her lips are that signature red, she’s wearing 1950s cat eye glasses, and her black hair falls in a thick wave across a Snow White skin – and all this on the unglamorous stage of a glitchy Zoom call. Only knowing Von Teese from her femme fatale image, her teasingly aloof burlesque performances, and her time in the tabloids as former wife of goth rocker Marilyn Manson , you might expect an icy demeanour, an impermeable mystique. So it’s surprising to discover quite how normal she is: chatty, self-deprecating, not very vampish. It’s easy to see traces of Heather Sweet, the “super shy” girl from small-town Michigan who transformed into Von Teese. The reason for our conversation is a new film, Night of the Teese, made with director Quinn Wils...