September in London belongs to people coming back from somewhere. October is when the city gets on with things. The schools are back, the summer crowds have thinned from the South Bank, and the calendar fills with the sort of events Londoners themselves bother to attend. Two set the tone this year. The BFI London Film Festival reaches its 70th edition, running 7 to 18 October, and opens at the Royal Festival Hall with the European premiere of Simon Stone's Elsinore. The galas draw the red carpets and the queues, but they aren't the point. Most of the big titles will be at your local cinema within months. A ticket is better spent on something that may never get a British release: a documentary, a debut, a film from a country whose cinema rarely reaches Leicester Square. At BFI Southbank or Curzon Soho the director is often in the room, and the audience has usually read the programme notes. (bfi) (sundayguardianlive) Then Frieze London and Frieze Masters run side by side in the Regent's Park from 14 to 18 October, with almost 300 galleries between them. Frieze London is a trade fair with an entry fee, and it behaves like one: expensive, crowded, occasionally thrilling. If you only have the stamina for one, choose Masters. Antiquities hang beside twentieth-century canvases, and fewer people are photographing themselves in front of them. If you'd rather not pay at all, Frieze Sculpture is free in the park's English Gardens until 1 November. The real dividend of Frieze week is in Mayfair and St James's. Commercial galleries there tend to save their strongest shows for the week the world's collectors are in town. Walking between them costs nothing, and nobody expects you to buy anything.
The overlap in the middle of the month is the moment to aim for. Stay in Marylebone or Fitzrovia and you can walk to the fair in the morning and be in a Soho cinema by evening. That is more than can be said for the hotel clusters around Kensington or the City, which are convenient mainly for other hotels. The parks justify an afternoon on their own terms. In Richmond Park the red deer rut usually carries on into October. The stags bellow, clash antlers and ignore the occasional visitor who has misjudged how close is close enough. The Royal Parks ask people to keep well back, and they mean it. Hampstead Heath is less dramatic but better connected to a drink afterwards. The Holly Bush, tucked up a lane off Heath Street, is exactly the sort of pub October was made for: low ceilings, a fire, and no pretence that anyone came for the beer garden.
What visitors most often get wrong is the last week. Half-term generally runs from 26 to 30 October in England. The South Kensington museums then fill with families working through a checklist, and matinee prices tend to follow demand. The clocks also go back on the 25th, and the afternoons shorten noticeably. If you have a choice, come earlier. (icelolly) For the rest of the year London performs for its visitors. In mid-October it is putting on a show for itself, and it will sell you a ticket.