Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends

National Portrait Gallery Review 13 October 2026

Tim Walker celebrates queerness in all its variety in his new exhibition, Fairyland: Love and Legends, at the National Portrait Gallery. There are 250 specially created portraits, bringing together familiar faces and people whose stories deserve to be better known. There is plenty of glamour and fun, with room for quieter moments of remembrance too.

There are photographs of queer trailblazers such as Peter Tatchell, alongside others who helped change how we live and love. Some of the early activists are photographed in the style of Tudor portraits, giving them the grand treatment once reserved for royalty and aristocrats. There is something rather lovely about seeing their lives and achievements honoured in this way.

The Rebel Dykes have a room of their own, with striking portraits and a film about their lives together. Their stories bring home how much friendship and community have meant in the fight to be yourself.

The room devoted to HIV and AIDS brings together the people who cared for others and those whose music helped them through. Nurses and healthcare professionals are celebrated alongside performers including Marc Almond, Holly Johnson and Jimmy Somerville. Multicoloured fairy lights around the room are echoed in a photograph of an empty hospital bed. Those little lights take on a different feeling here, bringing warmth to an image of absence and reminding us how closely joy and sadness can sit together.

There is plenty of camp along the way, with colourful rooms, dressing up and wonderfully theatrical photographs. A set of toilet cubicles has pictures on the doors and feet just visible underneath—a detail that makes you stop and look again. The care and imagination put into the rooms give you as much to take in as the photographs themselves.

A separate room for adults takes us into more intimate territory, with photographs that give fairy tales and nursery rhymes a queer twist. Desire has its place here, alongside the activism, friendship and performance.

What comes through is a sense of affection for the people Walker photographs. There is room for flamboyance and vulnerability, for those who fought for change and those finding their own way today. It is a celebration that also remembers what it has taken to get here.

Exhibition	Tim Walker’s Fairyland: Love and Legends
Dates & Times	9 October 2026 – 7 February 2027
Venue & Booking	National Portrait Gallery

Disclosure: I was given a press ticket for this