London events in June

Austin, Texas’ SXSW festival is renowned across the world for being the place to discover the next big thing. In previous years, superstars like Billie Eilish, Dua Lipa and Chappell Roan have all given early performances at the Texas event and now, following an expansion into Sydney, the multi-venue fest is coming to London for the first time. The inaugural SXSW London will take over various venues in Shoreditch, including Shoreditch Town Hall and Village Underground, bringing with it the hottest new acts from across the globe for more than 70 music events. The conference arm of the event will also make the journey across the pond, with 420 talks and panels delving into the most pressing issues across business, tech and more. And there’ll also be 250 film screenings, including plenty of international premieres. The line-up is yet to be announced, but will be revealed in the coming months.

Nicholas Hytner’s joyously OTT genderfluid A Midsummer Night’s Dream returns to the Bridge Theatre in 2025 with a cast that includes JJ Feild as Oberon/Theseus, Susannah Fielding as Titania/Hippolyta, Emmanuel Akwafo as Bottom and David Moorst returning to the role of Puck/Philostrate.

It’s been a while since Vicky Park played host to any new live events, but the ever popular summertime venue is welcoming a brand new festival in the early days of summer 2025. Scheduled for two consecutive weekends in June, Lido festival will take place in the Tower Hamlets park’s Lido Field.

Legendary trip-hop outfit Massive Attack headline the first day with support from Air, FORENSICS and Tirzah. Having released his acclaimed second album in September, Jamie xx brings his club residency The Floor to the first Saturday of the festival, with his bandmate Romy, collaborators Sampha and John Glacier, Arca and Panda Bear on the line-up.

Northern hardcore festival Outbreak then hosts a residency to open the second weekend, with Turnstile, Alex G and Danny Brown on the bill. On Saturday June 14, Vicky Park will be throwing it back to Brat summer, with a headline set from Charli xcx as part of the pop icon’s Partygirl night, featuring appearances from 070 Shake, A.G. Cook, Kelly Lee Owens, The Dare and The Japanese House. And on Sunday June 15, London Grammar will bring their ethereal sounds to east London, alongside Celeste, Róisín Murphy and The Blessed Madonna.

More details will be announced in due course, so watch this space!

RECOMMENDED: More great London festivals this summer

Alecky Blythe and Adam Cork’s critically-acclaimed documentary musical London Road will return in 2025 as part of the final season of work from outgoing NT boss Rufus Norris, who directed the show originally. Casting is TBA.

With its 30th edition taking place this summer, the Southbank Centre’s Meltdown Festival has long since established itself as a key date in London’s cultural calendar. Each year, the Southbank invites one celebrated artist to curate the festival, with such luminaries as David Bowie, Yoko Ono, Grace Jones, David Byrne, Nick Cave, Anohni and Chaka Khan have previously taken on the exciting tast. This year it’s the turn of Mercury Prize-winning rapper, Top Boy actor and previous Time Out cover star Little Simz. She’s promising a boundary-pushing line-up for the eleven day festival, featuring plenty of local organisations and grassroots collectives, plus the one-of-a-kind performances that have characterised Meltdown over the years. As usual, it’ll culminate in a headline show from the Brit Award-winner herself. Meltdown 2025 will take place in mid-June, with further line-up announcements due in the spring. 

Find more great London festivals here.

Musical theatre fans, get ready for outdoor dancing and sing-a-longs with some of the West End's biggest stars: West End Live is back! It's the initiative that turns some of the most expensive forms of entertainment in London into the cheapest fun going. Each year, casts of some of London's best West End musicals emerge blinking into the open-air for a weekend of free alfresco performances in Trafalgar Square, accompanied by fun photo ops, merch stalls, and bags of showbiz atmosphere.

This year’s line-up will be announced in May. 

Sophie Podolski’s work will be presented solo for the first time in the UK at this exhibition, with the display spanning the poet, writer and artist’s drawings, etchings, archival materials and texts. Although she died tragically at 21, Podolski made a huge impact on literature and culture and celebrated radical creativity and personal freedom through her work.

After a knock-out event last year, pop festival Mighty Hoopla has just announced its 2025 line-up, and it’s just got even more raucous. Known for showcasing the best of pop and queer culture in the UK, the two-day weekender launched in 2016 with a mission to celebrate pop classics and give a platform to established and emerging LGBTQ+ performers. 2025 will see resurgent pop icon Kesha and noughtiesa hitmaker Ciara headline, with support from Kate Nash, Pixie Lott, Jojo, Loreen, Vengaboys, Erika Jayne and a special surprise guest. 

A reworked version of Jamie Lloyd’s Evita will transfer to the London Palladium in summer 2025, with massive US star Rachel Zegler making her West End debut as Eve Perón. We loved producition show when it last showed in London in 2019 – it’s Andrew Lloyd Webber’s best musical and his finest collaboration with his most famous lyricist Tim Rice, while Lloyd’s direction takes the cake. Get ready to cry for Argentina. 

It’s been an exciting fixture in London’s musical calendar since 2013, and it’s back with a line-up of some of the biggest stars on the planet. Taking place across weekends in June and July, Hyde Park will host an upmarket festival vibe complete with food, drink and a posh VIP area. Look out for Gen Z pop hero Olivia Rodrigo, followed by US country singer-songwriter Zach Bryan, folk-pop artist Noah Kahan, 2024 breakout star Sabrina Carpenter, Neil Young, Stevie Wonder and the final ever live show from Jeff Lynne’s Electric Light Orchestra.

Munch your way through dishes from the great and the good of the capital’s restaurant scene at this sprawling culinary festival in the picturesque surroundings of central London’s Regent’s Park. Guy Ritchie’s gastropub Lore of the Land, Japanese-Korean joint Akira Back, masters of Pan-Pacific cuisine Los Mochis and cool Hackney wine bar Bambi are among the restaurants peddling plates and appearing at the event for the first time this year. If you’re not in a food coma by the end, there’ll also be kitchen masterclasses, chef talks and tastings to get involved with. Our advice? Have some Rennies on hand. 

After getting her breakthrough as part of the renowned artist group BANK, Milly Thompson went on to carve out a place for herself in the art world as a painter, sculptor, video artist and writer in her own right. A selection of her work from 2010 onwards will be on display here, showing her trademark blend of irony and sincerity as the pieces tackle the hegemonic force of luxury consumer culture on women, the libidinal power of the middle-aged female body, and more.

You might have heard of the Great Exhibition, an extravaganza of world riches and inventions that drew six million visitors to Hyde Park in 1851. 2025’s answer to the Great Exhibition will return for the second time this summer, with many of London’s most esteemed museums taking part. For one weekend in June, Exhibition Road in South Ken will be closed to cars and come alive with cutting-edge experiments, mind-bending technology, music, dance, art, live science shows and parades.

No one out there looks like Yoshitomo Nara. The Japanese artist has created an aesthetic that is entirely his own over the course of his four-decade career, a lifetime filled with big-eyed, cartoony punk rock figures and weird, haunting but adorable animals. Now he’s getting his dues with a major exhibition at the Hayward Gallery. His first show at a public institution in the UK, it will apparently feature not only drawing and painting but installation work too. A mixture of childlike innocence and aggressive rebellion, Nara’s work is mysterious, unsettling, adorable, political and totally unique – it will be a genuine highlight of the summer.

This June, Tate Britain will stage Edward Burra’s first retrospective in over a decade, and the first in London in 40 years. The 20th Century painter is best known for his vivid and surreal scenes of cafés, clubs and cabarets, capturing life in the Roaring Twenties. In more than 80 paintings, the exhibition will look back at Burra’s life, including his time spent in the cultural scenes of Paris and Harlem, and his personal experience of conflicts in Europe. A ticket to Edward Burra will also allow entry to Ithell Colquhoun, also at Tate Britain, as the exhibitions are running in tandem. 

The RA’s annual showcase of all the artists you need to know about right now will return this June. Now in it’s 257th year, the world’s oldest open submission exhibition (which means anyone can enter their work to be considered for inclusion) is curated by a different member of the Royal Academy each year. The artist tasked with the big job in 2025 is British-Iranian architect Farshid Moussavi. The great thing about the Summer Exhibition is that it’s open to all, and the selectors pick from thousands of entries. That means that your mate’s mum’s weird little whittled sculptures of George Michael might be shown alongside something by Antony Gormley. 

Somehow, inexplicably, ‘The Anatomy of Painting’ will be the first major museum exhibition in London dedicated to the work of Jenny Saville. I say inexplicably, because since the 1990s – when she was part of Saatchi’s infamous, groundbreaking ‘Sensation’ exhibition – Saville has been one of the most important, influential and distinctive painters in the country. She is the natural successor and heir to Bacon and Freud, a vicious, extreme, passionate painter of flesh, whose work tears bodies apart and rebuilds them in shocking, beautiful ways.

Young painter Rachel Jones has become one of the most powerful voices in contemporary abstraction, using her hyper-colourful visual language – filled with references to mouths and teeth – to explore ideas of identity. We’ve reviewed her many times, and even had her as one of ‘Future of London Art’ stars back in 2023. And now, she’s going to be the first ever contemporary artist to have a solo show in Dulwich Picture Gallery’s main exhibition space.

Just as it has done since 1974, the Lambeth Country Show will bring countryside pursuits to Brockwell Park. Over its history, certain traditions have developed, like getting a glimpse of Vauxhall City Farm’s alpacas, downing a massive carton of Chucklehead’s super-strong cider and joining the long queue to see the pun-derful entrants in the vegetable sculpture competition. Look out for sheep-shearing, sheepdog and owl displays, an on-site mini farm and lots, lots more. Live music will be heard from two stages over the weekend, too. 

This literary festival focuses on one of our era’s most exciting genres: crime. Now firmly part of London’s literary calendar, each year it hosts a top-notch line-up of crime and thriller authors in a rich programme of talks, panels and interviews. Over 80 authors and specialists will explore themes such as ‘unlikeable characters’, how to bring crimes to the silver screen and Agatha Christie for the Knives Out generation. Notable names appearing this year include Michael Connelly, Steph McGovern, Jeremy Vine, Vaseem Khan, Linwood Barclay, Karin Slaughter, Richard Armitage, Dorothy Koomson and Ruth Ware. 

As well as putting on mega stars – with this year’s lineup including Sabrina Carpenter, Olivia Rodrigo and Zach Bryan – every year BST Hyde Park also hosts Open House, an eight-day-long event that’s mostly free to attend. On this year’s Open House lineup is House Gospel Choir, Dub Pistols, Trojan Sound System, South London Samba and many more. Plus, if you feel like getting raucous there’s a Bongo’s Bingo party. There are plenty of kid-friendly events, such as West End Kids and Brainiac Remixed. And other than the music, BST is hosting eight open-air cinema nights, showing flicks including The Goonies, Wicked singalong, The Fall Guy and Dune Part 2. 

With over 100 stalls, a traditional Victorian fairground, a beer tent by Fuller’s, a dog show, tug of war, a charity raffle and live local bands, Kew’s midsummer fete is a lot more than simply a way to chill out on the village green this month. Entry is free, but all your well-spent cash will be going to some worthy local charities. 

London is a famously green city. A lot of that open space, though, consists of private squares and gardens, most of which we never get to see. London Square Open Gardens Weekend is here to address that, prising the keys out of the capital’s secretive gatekeepers to fling open more than a hundred secret green spaces. The event exclusively reveals some of the city’s least-seen spaces: historical, traditional, contemporary and experimental, across all four corners (and the middle bit) of London. They include formal gated garden squares, rooftop terraces with commanding views of the city skyline, community allotments and wildlife havens.