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Timing is everything: An expat’s guide to London’s best months for visitors
For this native Briton, there’s only one place to be in June and July: the home of Wimbledon, the Royal Academy and the Lord’s Test.
By Nick Bryant
Glastonbury Festival is a summer tradition.Credit: Getty Images
Travel is not just a question of where to go, but when to go. Germans might disagree, but New York is the place to be at Yuletide. Sydney is the superlative city to bring in the New Year. Rather than spending springtime in Paris, my preference would be India, where Holi, the festival of colours, mounts even more than the usual assault on the senses – a subcontinental shock and awe. Britain, my native land, blossoms in midsummer. So when the mercury drops Down Under – though I love the rhythms of Australian life, I have never quite adjusted to the rhythms of its topsy-turvy seasons – I board a flight to Heathrow.
Before telling you why I love going back there, perhaps I should explain why I left in the first place. The weather I found oppressive. The class system, too. America, where I studied for a year as a student and spent so much of my early career as a correspondent, felt liberating and, in those days, more future-focused. Then, after falling in love with a Sydneysider, my eyes were opened to a country which combined much of what I loved about Britain and much of what seduced me about America, while at the same time editing out the bad bits, such as born-to-rule snobbery and supermarkets selling semi-automatic guns. Australia – which I now realise is far more than an amalgam of the US and the UK, and enriched by its deep Indigenous heritage and immigrants from all over the world – is where I call home. Britain, though, is the place to be in June and July, its maximal months.
Summer is when the Old Dart most resembles assumed Britain, and I admit to now finding the clichés rather comforting. Strawberries and cream at Wimbledon. Pimm’s on the banks of the Thames during the Henley Royal Regatta. Picnics on long, solstitial nights on the lawns of Glyndebourne, the stately summer home of grand opera. Punting on the Cam and Cherwell. To visit Oxford or Cambridge during graduation season feels like wandering onto the set of Brideshead Revisited, or its modern-day equivalent, Saltburn (which could easily have been subtitled Brideshead Revisited Revisited).
The Lord’s Test at the “home of cricket” is a must-visit for cricket tragics.Credit: Getty Images
To set foot in the Royal Enclosure at Royal Ascot must feel like having a walk-on role in My Fair Lady. That’s a sanctum I have never breached nor ever wanted to. Indeed, it is precisely the kind of bastion of plummy privilege that prompted me to leave Britain in the first place. These days, however, I better appreciate the spectacle of period-drama Britain, toffs, top hats, tails and all. The real thing, moreover, is often superior to those screen adaptations. Witness the Trooping the Colour ceremony in June, the parade along The Mall and inspection of troops on Horse Guards Parade to mark the monarch’s official birthday. Not even The Crown comes close to matching its production values or grandeur.
Summer brings to the fore what, in the Blair days, was dubbed “Cool Britannia” (now the term “Britannia” sounds disquietingly imperial and hence “Cool Britannia” has an oxymoronic ring). There’s the musicfest/mudfest of Glastonbury Festival. Hyde Park, in its summer concert series, regularly provides a stage for some of the great marquee names in music – last year featured Guns N’ Roses, P!nk, Billy Joel and “The Boss”, Bruce Springsteen and The E Street Band.
June and July feature the most crimson of red-letter days in the sporting calendar. Aside from Wimbledon, there’s the Lord’s Test. A day at the game’s most glorious cathedral should be on every cricket tragic’s bucket list. So sacred is the Open Championship, which this year will be held at Royal Troon in Ayrshire, that the words “British” and “golf” are considered entirely superfluous.
Alas, the Premier League football season reaches its denouement in May, but this summer England and Scotland will be barracking for their national teams in the Euro 2024 championships. You presumably know about 1966 and all that: the failure of the English men’s team to lift a trophy since The Beatles were in their pomp. So if Gareth Southgate’s men win the Euros, expect a Latin American-style orgy of passion – ever since the death of Diana, a country famed for concealing its innermost feelings has been prone to exaggerated emotional responses. If history offers a form guide, however, England will lose in a last-ditch penalty shoot-out, in which case expect a sorrowful deluge – another English summer ritual.
The BBC Proms showcase eccentricity.Credit: Alamy
Confessedly, some of the trappings of this jingoistic passion play might be off-putting. The flag of St George, which will be unfurled at so many pubs and affixed to so many cars, has become the ensign of English nationalism. And England nationalism has become synonymous with Brexit, that grievous act of national self-harm (only in England and Wales did a majority vote to leave the European Union). So perhaps we should try to consciously uncouple sport from politics and think of it more as a festival of English footballism, a concept that is far more unifying and fun.
Period-drama Britain. Cool Britain. Sporting Britain. That’s quite a trifecta already. But let’s not forget eccentric Britain. The BBC Proms, which are held each summer at the Royal Albert Hall, are the most glorious of British curios. During this eight-week classical music festival, norms of concert etiquette are cast aside as many of the “promenaders” form a moshpit in the arena of the auditorium, while others take up standing space in the gallery just underneath the Albert Hall’s giant dome. Part of the entertainment is to watch the playful ding-dong between these two tribes. “Heave,” shout the “prommers” in the arena, whenever, for instance, a grand piano is wheeled onto stage. “Ho,” respond those up in the gods. It can feel like a Pythonesque pantomime, but it serves also as a reassuring reminder that Britain remains disproportionately populated with quirky oddballs.
The Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition is billed as “the world’s most joyful art experience”.Credit: Alamy
In Mayfair, a stone’s throw from Fortnum & Mason, the Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts is another emphatically British cultural phenomenon. As with The Proms, the rulebook is cast aside. Art is displayed floor to ceiling. In contrast to the minimalism of galleries like the Tate Modern, the feel is of an antiques fair piled more randomly with treasures. Hurling British understatement out the window, the Royal Academy likes to boast that it puts on “the world’s most joyful art experience”, and I reckon they might be onto something.
Primarily because of Brexit, Britain in recent years has dug its own reputational ditch. It seems to change prime minister every few months – a lettuce had a longer shelf-life than the 49-day tenure of the hapless Liz Truss. Water companies are pumping raw sewage into the rivers and seas. In the post-Elizabethan age, the royal family does not look so resilient. Yet summer usually offers something of a tonic, especially when the sun shines and even when the skies are, what I have long tried to convince my wife, “bright grey”. Come June and July, my country is more right than it is wrong.
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