Art Galleries in London: 43 events this week (18 Aug to 24 Aug)

London is one of the great gallery cities, with a depth and spread that few places match. The art galleries here run from the vast national collections on the river and in the West End to the blue-chip commercial rooms of Mayfair and the artist-run spaces of the East End. The result is a scene where a single afternoon can take in an old master, a contemporary installation, and a debut show by an artist nobody has heard of yet, much of it for free.

The national institutions set the scale. Tate Modern and Tate Britain, the National Gallery, the National Portrait Gallery, and the Courtauld carry the headline collections and the big ticketed exhibitions, while the Royal Academy, the Barbican, the Hayward, and the Whitechapel programme the more adventurous shows. Their permanent collections are largely free, with the major temporary exhibitions usually ticketed, so it pays to know which is which before you go.

The commercial and independent galleries are where the breadth really opens up, and most of them are free to walk into. Mayfair and St James hold the blue-chip dealers, the kind of rooms that show museum-grade work without a ticket. East London around Hackney, Bethnal Green, and the streets off Vyner Street has the densest run of independent and artist-run spaces, and south London clusters around Peckham and Camberwell. Openings tend to fall on weekday evenings, which makes a gallery crawl one of the cheaper and more rewarding ways to spend time in the city.

A few practical notes. The permanent collections at the national museums are free, but their headline shows carry a separate ticket and the popular ones sell timed slots that fill at weekends, so weekday and morning visits are quieter. Commercial galleries are free, run regular weekday hours, and many close on Sundays and Mondays, so check before travelling. Exhibitions run for fixed windows and come down without much fanfare. The listings below show the gallery shows on across the city now.