If you've been waiting for a good excuse to spend a long weekend in London, this autumn might be it. The city's cultural calendar is unusually crowded between October and November, with a historic tapestry arriving at the British Museum, two film festivals, a guest-curated literature festival and a theatre season with serious star power.

Film fans get a double bill this year. The long-running London Film Festival returns to BFI Southbank from 7–18 October, opening its gala with Elsinore — an Oscar-tipped drama with Andrew Scott as actor Ian Charleson, whose final Hamlet came as he was dying of Aids. Also on the programme: Luca Guadagnino's Artificial, a Sam Altman biopic starring Andrew Garfield, and Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun with Jenna Ortega. Hot on its heels, streaming platform Mubi stages its first ever London festival at the Hackney Picturehouse, 13–15 November, with a 4K-restored Donnie Darko, a 15th-anniversary screening of Drive, and a queer WWI romance called Coward followed by a Q&A with its cast and co-writer Angelo Tijssens.

Over at the Southbank Centre, the London Literature Festival (21 October – 1 November) has been curated by Dua Lipa this year. Her line-up is genuinely strong: Zadie Smith talking about White Teeth, Patti Smith discussing her memoir Bread of Angels, Malorie Blackman marking 25 years of Noughts and Crosses, and a writing masterclass with Pulitzer winner Hisham Matar.

October is effectively art month. PAD London lands in Berkeley Square from 13–18 October with more than 60 exhibitors — the UK's only fair devoted to design, decorative arts and collectible jewellery. For something less pricey, The Other Art Fair at the Truman Brewery (8–11 October) puts 150 independent artists under one roof alongside workshops, DJ sets and, naturally, a bar.

Theatre is the other big draw. Keira Knightley returns to the stage after 15 years in The Lives of Others at the Adelphi from 14 October — an adaptation of the Stasi thriller, directed by Robert Icke. Kristin Scott Thomas headlines Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard at the Harold Pinter Theatre, and Rent is back in the West End with Stranger Things actor Gaten Matarazzo as Mark.

Even if you can't snag tickets to the Bayeux Tapestry's British Museum debut, you could fill a week without repeating yourself. The smart play is to pick one strand — film, art, books or theatre — and build your trip around it, booking the big-name shows well in advance and leaving room for the smaller stuff.