Seventy classic cars park up across three King’s Cross squares on 26 and 27 September, with a hundred vintage traders, the country’s largest open-air charity shop and a crowd that has spent weeks deciding what to wear.
The cars get top billing and they are not really the point.
Look at what happens at the gate instead. People arrive in outfits they have been assembling since the last one, and they arrive early, because the good rails are picked over by noon. There is a Best In Show prize, which is the organisers acknowledging what everyone already knows: this is a dressing-up event with seventy pieces of automotive history parked in the middle of it.
The cars are worth your time regardless. Expect restored icons alongside rarer collectors’ pieces, custom bicycles, and ride-ins from mods and rockers, the two tribes that spent the 1960s attacking each other on Brighton seafront and now share a square in N1 quite happily.
What’s on the rails
More than a hundred handpicked fashion specialists, selling vintage and secondhand designer across Granary Square, Lewis Cubitt Square and Coal Drops Yard. The weekend opens Sustainable Fashion Week 2026, so there are repair workshops running alongside the stalls, which is a more interesting proposition than another rail of the same 1970s shirts.
The largest open-air Charity Super.Mkt in the country sets up here too, which is where the genuine bargains live once the specialist traders have priced their stock for a London crowd. If you are working through the city’s secondhand circuit properly, it slots in alongside our pick of the best vintage shops in London.
Eating, drinking and the rest of it
Vinyl DJs play across both days, running from 1940s swing through to early 2000s. Food and drink come from street food traders and a bar built into a Routemaster. Well-behaved dogs are welcome, which is not true of most things in King’s Cross.
The London x London Take: This is the best-looking event in the London calendar and it has earned its decade at King’s Cross, but go in knowing what you are paying for. The ticket buys you the setting, the cars and the crowd. It does not buy you cheap clothes, because the traders here are specialists who know exactly what a mid-century Harrington is worth to the sort of person who turns up in a tie. The Charity Super.Mkt is where the actual finds are, and it is the first thing most people walk past. Our advice is to do the whole site once without buying anything, eat, then go back to the two or three stalls that stuck. And come Sunday afternoon rather than Saturday morning if you want traders willing to move on price, or Saturday morning if you want the pick of the stock. You cannot have both.
Need to know
- What: The Classic Car Boot Sale
- Where: Granary Square, Lewis Cubitt Square and Coal Drops Yard, King’s Cross, London N1C 4DQ
- When: Saturday 26 and Sunday 27 September, 10am to 6pm
- Price: £8 in advance, £6 concessions with ID, under-12s free
- Booking: Humanitix
- Nearest station: King’s Cross St Pancras
- Dogs: Welcome
More in the same line in our guide to London’s best car boot sales, and the rest of the month in what to do in London in September.
