Carnival turns 60, Tyler and Twenty One Pilots take Victoria Park, the Royal Philharmonic plays Battersea after dark, and there’s a Test match at Lord’s going into its final day. Here’s everything worth leaving the house for over the August bank holiday weekend, 29 to 31 August.
This is the biggest weekend in London’s summer and it is genuinely stacked: three days, a million people heading west for carnival, two festivals inside one park in Southwark, an eight-quid seat at the Proms if you’re prepared to stand, and a food festival in the grounds of a Tudor palace. Here’s what we’d actually go and do, roughly in the order we’d do it. Our guide to the rest of the week covers the run-up if you’re out before Saturday.
Notting Hill Carnival (Saturday 29 to Monday 31 August)
Notting Hill, Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park, W10 and W11
Sixty years on from Rhaune Laslett’s 1966 street festival, the organisers are calling this one the Diamond Jubilee. Saturday is Panorama, the national steel band competition at Emslie Horniman’s Pleasance Park, junior heats at 5pm and the senior competition at 8pm. Sunday brings J’Ouvert from 6am and the children’s parade. Monday is the main event, the adults’ parade stepping off around 10.30am with the sound systems running to early evening. At 3pm on Monday the entire route falls silent for 72 seconds, one for each person who died at Grenfell Tower, and everything stops, music, stalls, conversation.
Sunday and Monday are free and unticketed. Panorama, the Calypso Monarch finals and the grandstand seats all need tickets. Worth knowing about Panorama: the bands play a ten-minute arrangement entirely from memory, and it’s the most significant steelpan competition anywhere outside the Caribbean. Notting Hill Gate, Ladbroke Grove and Westbourne Park all get extremely busy and can run exit-only, so Royal Oak or Queen’s Park with a walk in is the smarter approach. Our full carnival guide has the timings, the history and the practical detail.
Carnival 60: Ian Watts at Outernet (to Wednesday 2 September)
Outernet, Tottenham Court Road
Ian Watts first photographed carnival in 1976, as a teenager, and never stopped. Outernet is running his archive across its wraparound screens, opening in recent colour and travelling back into black and white. At that scale it lands nothing like a print on a wall.
Free, no booking, ten minutes. Go before you head west rather than after, it changes what you notice on the route.
Trailer Happiness takes its rum shack onto Portobello Road (Saturday 29 August to Tuesday 1 September)
Trailer Happiness, 177 Portobello Road, W11 2DY
The Portobello rum bar is handing its keys to Mount Gay for carnival and moving the operation outdoors, a street-side shack with slushie machines turning out frozen piña coladas and frozen daiquiris to people who are not going to stop walking. Handcrafted punches too, a Bridgetown rum punch, a Portobello spiced punch and a mango daiquiri, plus free branded bandanas for anyone ordering at the bar.
The street bar is free walk-up through the day. The official afterparty, Lockdown, runs downstairs on Sunday 30 August from 5pm to 2am with a watermelon cooler and a banana old fashioned added to the list, and that one is ticketed through Eventbrite.
All Points East, Victoria Park (Saturday 29 and Sunday 30 August)
Victoria Park, Grove Road, E3 5TB
The east London festival closes out its run this weekend with two of the biggest bills it has ever put on. Tyler, The Creator headlines Saturday with Daniel Caesar, Baby Keem, Danny Brown, Faye Webster, Ghostface Killah and Clipse under him. Sunday belongs to Twenty One Pilots, billed as a UK exclusive, with Wunderhorse, Gang of Youths, Ren, bbno$, PVRIS and Nova Twins. Tyler is actually playing two nights back to back, Friday and Saturday, with a different support bill each time.
From £95 for Saturday and £102.15 for Sunday, with a two-day ticket at £177.90. Tickets and day splits here. Note it wraps on the Sunday and doesn’t run into the bank holiday Monday.
RALLY Festival, Southwark Park (Saturday 29 August)
Southwark Park, SE16 4BD
Blood Orange headlines a one-day bill that also takes in Smerz, Daniel Avery and Optimo, which is a sharper, more leftfield lineup than a park festival of this size usually manages. It’s the first of two festivals filling Southwark Park across the weekend.
Around £79 through DICE, over-18s only, noon to 10.30pm. There’s a free ticket ballot for residents living on the streets bordering the park, which is a genuinely decent thing for a festival to do.
Body Movements, Southwark Park (Sunday 30 August)
Southwark Park, SE16 4BD
The park turns over on Sunday to London’s queer DIY dance festival, which started as a gathering in Hackney Wick and now fills five stages. Romy, Eris Drew and Octo Octa, and a back-to-back from co-founder Saoirse with Shanti Celeste take the main stage, with Horse Meat Disco and House Gospel Choir both making their debut here this year.
Ticketed, with community, student and Pay It Forward options. Doors at midday, music to around 10.30pm.
LIDO Festival: Maribou State, Victoria Park (Monday 31 August)
Victoria Park, Grove Road, E3 5TB
Victoria Park gets a second weekend of use on the Monday, when Maribou State headline a LIDO Festival day that also brings Kelis, a Theo Parrish back-to-back with Moodymann, Folamour and LTJ Bukem. This one was originally scheduled for 13 June and moved, so if you bought tickets back then they still stand.
From £59.95 plus fees, booking here. A bank holiday Monday in a park with Moodymann on is not the worst way to refuse to accept summer is over.
Battersea Park in Concert (Friday 28 to Monday 31 August)
Battersea Park, Albert Bridge Road, SW11 4NJ
Four nights of open-air orchestral programming with the crowd on picnic blankets and camping chairs. The Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra takes Saturday with Pop Symphonic and Sunday with Movies and Musicals, which ends on fireworks. Monday closes the weekend with Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Orchestra and the Amy Winehouse band, marking twenty years of Back to Black.
From around £48. Bring your own picnic or pre-order a hamper from Pique, with pop-up bars and food traders on site and pre-bookable wine tastings with Domaine des Jeanne on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. Tickets and the full programme here.
The Proms, Royal Albert Hall (Saturday 29 to Monday 31 August)
Royal Albert Hall, Kensington Gore, SW7 2AP
Three nights, three completely different propositions. Saturday is the Oslo Philharmonic under Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla doing Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Sunday is Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust, played by Les Siècles on period instruments, which means roughly the gut-strung, narrow-bore orchestra Berlioz was actually writing for in 1846. Monday is Alan Menken’s Disney music with the National Youth Music Theatre and the BBC Philharmonic.
This is the bargain of the weekend: around 1,000 standing Promming tickets go on sale online at 9.30am on the day of each performance at £8, two per person. Seats run £19.34 to £71.36, or up to £89.72 for the Disney night. Full listings here. There’s also a free BBC Young Composer concert at the Royal College of Music on Sunday afternoon.
Cats at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre (Saturday 29 and Monday 31 August)
Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, Inner Circle, NW1 4NU
Someone finally noticed that a musical about cats prowling a junkyard at night might work better outdoors than in a West End auditorium, and the result runs in Regent’s Park until 19 September. Saturday has a 2pm matinee and a 7.45pm show, Monday has the evening performance only.
From £15 plus a £2.50 transaction fee. Nothing on the Sunday, the theatre is dark. Performance dates and tickets, and take a jumper, it turns cold in that park once the sun goes.
Gauchoworld Day, Hackney (Saturday 29 August)
Goldsmith’s Row, Hackney, E2
The East London creative platform founded by Dean George is taking its Goldsmith’s Row space out onto the neighbouring basketball court for a first full-day street party. A run club opens proceedings, then a community flea market, DJs, chess competitions and food and drink take the court until early evening. Dean’s mum is on patties and sorrel, which is apparently non-negotiable at a Gauchoworld event.
Free, 10am to 7pm, no booking. It’s the inaugural one, so expect it to be busy and a bit chaotic in the way first editions usually are.
Free ice lollies and a climbable frame at King’s Cross (Saturday 29 August)
Lewis Cubitt Square, King’s Cross, N1C
King’s Cross is giving away 100 limited-edition Araw ice lollies, designed for the neighbourhood and shaped like the things in it, a canal boat, a dinosaur, Coal Drops Yard. The flavours are more interesting than the shapes deserve: coconut, raspberry and lychee in the canal boat, pandan mango trifle in the dinosaur, ube Basque cheesecake in the Coal Drops one. They normally cost £3.50 each.
Free, first come first served, and 100 goes quickly. While you’re there, Playframe, the bright yellow climbable installation that started life at the Venice Architecture Biennale, is in the same square until 31 August, so this is the last weekend for both.
St Kat’s Jazz Festival, St Katharine Docks (Friday 28 to Monday 31 August)
St Katharine Docks, 50 St Katharine’s Way, E1W 1LA
Four days of live jazz around the marina, played out among the moored boats with Tower Bridge just up the road. It’s the sort of thing you can wander into without a plan, stay for two sets and leave again, which on a bank holiday weekend is exactly the right amount of commitment.
Free, no booking, all four days. The dockside restaurants and bars run through the whole thing, so it doubles as somewhere to eat once you’ve had enough.
Hampton Court Palace Food Festival (Saturday 29 to Monday 31 August)
Hampton Court Palace, East Molesey, KT8 9AU
More than 150 independent producers set up in the palace gardens for three days, with a new live cookery stage for 2026 called the Regina Kitchen. There’s a silent disco and traditional fete games alongside it, which makes this the most straightforwardly family-friendly thing on the list.
Included with palace admission, £32 adults and £16 children at weekend rates, which also gets you the palace and the gardens. 10am to 6pm daily. Historic Royal Palaces members go free but still need to pre-book, and there’s a £1 ticket scheme for anyone on means-tested benefits.
England v Pakistan, third Test at Lord’s (Saturday 29 to Monday 31 August)
Lord’s Cricket Ground, St John’s Wood Road, NW8 8QN
Days three, four and five of the final Test of the English summer land squarely on the bank holiday weekend, and it’s Pakistan’s first Test at Lord’s against England since 2018. Play starts at 11am each day.
Tickets here, gates from 9am for non-members. The trick worth knowing: day five tickets are traditionally released cheaply on the morning itself, and only sold at all if the match is still live, so Monday could be the bargain of the weekend or nothing at all.
Cotton Beach Club Ibiza at alto by San Carlo (Saturday 29 August)
alto by San Carlo, The Rooftop, Selfridges, 400 Oxford Street, W1A 1AB
Ibiza’s Cotton Beach Club takes the Selfridges rooftop for a bank holiday one-off, a joint Mediterranean and Balearic menu, roaming caviar and cannoli service, and DJs, sax and percussion as the afternoon slides into the evening.
À la carte, tables from 4pm, booked through SevenRooms. There’s a second date on 26 September if this one’s gone.
The Big Brunch at Freight Brixton (Saturday 29 August)
Freight Brixton, 33 Brixton Station Road, SW9 8PB
The Saturday rooftop series changes genre every week and bank holiday Saturday is old school hip hop. Over-18s, and it commits to the theme rather than just putting a playlist on.
£33 with an hour of bottomless drinks. Doors at noon, bottomless noon to 1pm, entertainment to 4pm, which leaves the whole evening free.
Coq au Vin: KFC and La Vieille Ferme (Friday 28 to Monday 31 August)
Kachette Annex, 1 Kingsland Road, Shoreditch, E2 8AA
Fried chicken matched to wine, played oddly straight: popcorn chicken with sparkling rosé, hot wings with red, tenders with white or rosé. It works, because salt and fat and acid always have. We’ve got the full story here.
£15 a head for a 90-minute slot, and it has sold out, so it’s walk-ins only now and Eventbrite is holding a limited number on the day. Noon to 9pm Friday to Sunday, noon to 5pm Monday.
Zula Burger at Tempo (Sunday 30 August)
Tempo, 252 Paradise Row, Bethnal Green, E2 9LE
The Istanbul-founded burger spot leaves its own Marylebone kitchen for one night on Tempo’s terrace, three burgers on the menu, two from Zula and one from Tempo, each paired with a wine. A South East Asian wine bar doing burgers for an evening is a stranger and better idea than it sounds.
One night only, so worth booking rather than turning up hopeful.
Human Traffic screened inside a 110-year-old cargo ship (Sunday 30 August)
Theatreship, South Quay, Canary Wharf, E14
There is a 1913 cargo ship moored on the Millwall Cutting whose former hold is now a 100-seat cinema. Rip It Up: Rock the Boat is screening five British youth-culture films in it, each paired with a live band, and Sunday brings Human Traffic with London electronic trio Domina playing first.
Ticketed. The season closes on Tuesday 1 September with This Is England, if you’d rather end the weekend on something heavier.
Candlelight: Disney Love Songs, Southwark Cathedral (from Saturday 29 August)
Southwark Cathedral, London Bridge, SE1 9DA
A string quartet, several thousand candles and a setlist pulled entirely from Disney soundtracks, Can You Feel the Love Tonight, A Whole New World, Remember Me. It works because it doesn’t oversell itself, and because a cathedral does most of the heavy lifting.
From £19.50. The run opens on bank holiday Saturday and continues to Halloween, so there’s no rush if the weekend is already full.
The London x London Take: carnival is the obvious answer and it’s the right one, sixty years in there is nothing else in London that comes close for sheer atmosphere. Go Sunday for the calmer version, Monday for the full thing. But if you want the sleeper pick, it’s the Proms on Sunday night: eight pounds, standing, Berlioz on period instruments, and you can still be in the pub by ten. There is no better value in London this weekend, carnival included, and carnival is free.
