Institute of Contemporary Arts

Read the address before the programme. The most consistently anti-establishment art institution in Britain has spent fifty-eight years operating out of a Regency palace terrace built for the aristocracy, four hundred metres from Buckingham Palace, on a ceremonial road designed for processions. Nothing about that is accidental, and nothing about it has been resolved.

The building is John Nash's, from the 1820s — Carlton House Terrace, Grade I listed, stucco and Corinthian columns, the visual grammar of empire. The ICA moved into Nash House in 1968 after eighteen years on Dover Street. So the floor plan you walk is a compromise: a bookshop and bar wedged into rooms that were never meant to hold either, a theatre and two cinemas cut into the back, galleries that run long and narrow because a terrace house is long and narrow. The ceilings are aristocratic. The circulation is not. You go up and down more stairs than a building this grand should require, and the effect is that you are always slightly aware of being somewhere you were not originally invited.

What the founders were actually building

Six of them, in 1946: Roland Penrose, Peter Watson, Herbert Read, Peter Gregory, Geoffrey Grigson and E. L. T. Mesens. The stated purpose was a space where artists, writers and scientists could argue outside the traditional confines of the Royal Academy — which, at the time, meant outside the only room where British art was allowed to be decided.

That is a structural claim, not a stylistic one. The Academy had a building, a hang, and a jury. The ICA proposed that the interesting work happens in the room where nobody is being judged yet.

The Independent Group, and where Brutalism came from

Between 1952 and 1963 a loose group of artists, architects and critics met here regularly and rewired postwar British visual culture. Pop art, Op art and British Brutalism all trace back to this address — and for the Brutalism strand in particular, that is a direct line: the people arguing about concrete, mass production and what a building owes its occupants were doing it inside a Nash terrace. Structurally, that is very funny.

The film programme was radical on the same schedule. The ICA hosted the first UK screening of a Guy Debord film in 1957, roughly a decade before most of Britain had heard the argument he was making.

The stains they kept

Two details tell you what kind of institution this is.

In 1976, Mary Kelly's Post-Partum Document incorporated used nappy liners into the work and the tabloids lost the plot entirely. The show stayed up.

In the 1970s, the director of exhibitions Norman Rosenthal was assaulted by squatters during a dispute, and the bloodstain was preserved under glass rather than cleaned. Most institutions bury their worst afternoon. This one glazed it and left it in the floor. That is either a confession or a boast, and the ICA has never clarified which.

In 2024, former workers alleged that the ICA had dismissed staff over advocacy for Palestine. Those are allegations rather than findings, and they remain unresolved. It's here because a page about an institution's radical reputation shouldn't quietly skip the occasions that reputation has been contested.

Go in October

The concrete reason to put this in a diary: the ICA is a confirmed partner venue for the 70th BFI London Film Festival, running 7 to 18 October 2026. The festival's centre of gravity is BFI Southbank and the Royal Festival Hall, but the ICA's screens are where the programme's more difficult end usually lands, and its two auditoria are small enough that a sold-out room feels like an argument rather than an audience.

Outside the festival the cinema programme does not let up: the London Short Film Festival, the London Indian Film Festival with its long-running Too Desi Too Queer strand, the Japan Foundation Touring Film Programme, and retrospective seasons — a recent one gave over the screens to Nagisa Ōshima's work from his own production company, the anti-establishment 1960s material rather than the respectable later canon. That is the house taste, stated plainly.

Why go

Because it is the rare London institution where the building and the programme are in open disagreement, and neither has backed down in fifty-eight years. Come for a film, arrive early, and use the bar — it looks out over The Mall, which means you drink while watching the ceremonial route the whole institution exists to talk back to.

And because it anchors a stranger corner of Near's London than the map suggests. St James's is a neighbourhood Near otherwise covers through Berry Bros. & Rudd, a wine merchant trading since 1698 — so within a five-minute walk you get three centuries of establishment and the institute founded to argue with it. For the rest of the argument, The Gilbert & George Centre and Studio Voltaire are where London's artists built their own rooms rather than waiting to be hung in someone else's.