Totally Thames 2026

London spent centuries with its back to the river, and Totally Thames is a month-long argument for turning round. It runs the whole of September, from the 1st to the 30th, and it is spread the length of the tidal Thames rather than gathered on the South Bank.

The shape of it

The festival is programmed by the Thames Festival Trust and mixes arts events, active adventures on the water, environmental projects and heritage and education programmes. What that means in practice is that a single September weekend might offer a film installation, a rowing trip and a talk about eels.

The venues are the interesting part. Not theatres — a railway bridge, a lightship, a tunnel shaft, a Victorian pumping station, a community mooring. Each performance below is site-specific in the strict sense: it could not be moved somewhere else without ceasing to be itself.

What to look at first

Turning the Tide is the one that needs no ticket and no plan: a site-specific film installation projected onto the columns of Blackfriars Railway Bridge, running Thursday 17 to Sunday 20 September. Bridge columns are an unusual screen — the image is broken by the structure rather than framed by it, and the river moves underneath the whole time.

The Living Thames, on Friday 18 September, is the one to book: Dvořák’s American Quartet, Handel’s Water Music, Smetana’s Moldau and Strauss’s Blue Danube played with Thames field recordings, at Crossness Pumping Station — a piece of Victorian sewage infrastructure that happens to be one of the most extravagant interiors in London.

The river as a stage

Several of the September pieces come through the Trust’s Seed Funder scheme, which backs work made for the river specifically. Where the River Holds Us is a site-responsive multisensory opera about water, memory, climate and belonging. River Recital presents SS Robin turns the historic SS Robin at Trinity Buoy Wharf into an immersive environment of sound and moving image. Nadi is a contemporary dance duet performed by former Rambert dancers in the shaft of the Brunel Museum tunnel — the first tunnel ever dug under a navigable river.

That last one is worth the detour on its own. The shaft is a brick cylinder that was, briefly in the 1840s, an underground concert hall. Putting dancers back into it is less an intervention than a restoration.