Show HN: Built a site to find London's best art exhibitions (happenz.org)

22 points by bozkan 1y ago ↗ HN

I live in London, and I got tired of endlessly searching for things to do every weekend, I struggle to make good plans (which my wife isn’t happy about). We like most seeing new exhibitions etc, and I hate Timeout London as it’s full of crap and restaurant promos imho. I decided to scrape all exhibition, museum event pages with help of AI, and automated it. Built a website, which lists live art events and exhibitions (only in London for now) and wanted to share it with you. Hope you find it useful, and please let me know if I missed any places (which I’m sure I did)

10 comments

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tene80i 1y ago ↗

Very cool! Can you share more about how you built it? I’ve seen a lot of skepticism about AI in scraping but this seems to work well.

bozkan 1y ago ↗

I'm glad you liked it! I asked ChatGPT to give me the URLs of exhibition directories of London's best museums and exhibitions. Then followed a content-based approach using BeautifulSoup and OpenAI GPT-4o structured outputs, targeting what kind of info I wanted to scrape: link, date, event title etc.

I was lucky that most museum websites were easy to scrape. Unfortunately it didn't work great for all of them, there I did some manual touches.

camrush 1y ago ↗

slick design mate, and quite useful! I live in London too. You can add Victoria Miro, an art gallery close to Angel.

bozkan 1y ago ↗

oh thanks! I'm adding it now :)

kabero 1y ago ↗

hmm simple but interesting, any plans for other cities/countries?

bozkan 1y ago ↗

thank you! not now, but I will later. Maybe I can focus only on London and add other verticals, like concerts etc.

acomjean 1y ago ↗

I like it.

Though It seems to pick up other cities as well (I saw one NYC one Paris).

Eg: https://gagosian.com/exhibitions/2025/bennett-miller/

bozkan 1y ago ↗

thanks a lot for noticing it! one of the cons of web scraping, I should've checked.

kmos17 1y ago ↗

Great job, love the simplicity. On mobile would be nice if the choice of places was collapsible or maybe in a modal? Another place to add is Camden Art Center https://camdenartcentre.org

bozkan 1y ago ↗

oh thank you, great feedback! Tbh I haven't checked that much on mobile, left all the design to AI :) but that's correct, on mobile it takes too much space. Adding Camden Art Center now.