Events

  Dvořák’s Symphony No 9 From the New World introduced by the performers, with screens in the hall to bring you closer to the action. Kick-start your evening with a 60-minute Half Six Fix concert with the London Symphony Orchestra. Written during his years as director of America’s National Conservatory of Music in the 1890s, Dvořák’s... Read more »

The Czech Centre London, in collaboration with the Tomáš Baťa Foundation and the Bata Heritage Centre, marks the 150th anniversary of Czech entrepreneur Tomáš Baťa's birth, founder of the global Baťa Shoe Company, with an exhibition exploring his achievements and guiding principles and their realisation in East Tilbury. It reveals how ideas about work, culture,... Read more »

Laments, confessions of undying love and the guilt-tinged miniatures of Brett Dean’s Gertrude Fragments take their place alongside lute works ancient and modern in this unmissable programme from Magdalena Kožená and Daniele Caminiti. Their recital’s individual parts combine to tell stories about the deepest human emotions, from abandonment and grief to the wild verbal gestures, ticks and... Read more »

BATAstories is a sweeping documentary driven by the voices of ‘Batamen‘ worldwide, stories from Baťa-built towns, and reflections from Baťa’s descendants. It traces the extraordinary rise of Czech entrepreneur Tomáš Baťa - the visionary cobbler’s son who transformed a small-town workshop into a global industrial shoe empire. Directed by the master documentarist Peter Kerekes, the film... Read more »

This workshop focuses on the ‘Prague-Vienna Circle’, a group of Jewish friends from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire who, having survived the Holocaust and reunited in British exile after 1945, sought to make sense of the momentous events they had witnessed. The circle comprised Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, poet and Oxford anthropologist Franz Baermann Steiner, and writer, sociologist... Read more »

The European Writers’ Festival returns this May, bringing together leading and emerging writers from 26 countries for a weekend of discussions on literature, translation and the challenges shaping Europe today. Among the featured authors is Jáchym Topol, one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary Czech literature. Emerging from the underground cultural scene of 1980s Czechoslovakia,... Read more »

Belonging is not accidental - it is designed. This panel explores how architecture shapes belonging - not just by providing shelter, but by designing everyday life. Using the Bata village at East Tilbury as a starting point, it examines how modernist ideals, industrial ambition and community planning combined to create a distinctive model of living.... Read more »