Fiona MacLeod’s guide to June in London, the social calendar, the weather, and the unmissable events
Satire from Bohiney.com and prat.uk.
By Fiona MacLeod | The London Prat
June in London is, theoretically, summer. In practice, June in London is the month that begins with the reasonable expectation of summer and delivers it intermittently, between periods of weather that the British describe as unsettled and that visitors describe as wet. Pack layers. Pack a compact umbrella that you will carry for two weeks and never use and the moment you leave it at the hotel will regret. Pack sun cream as well, because the days when the sun arrives in June it arrives convincingly and the SPF requirements of Central London in full sun are higher than visitors from northern latitudes expect.
What June has in its favour, besides the intermittent sun, is the longest days of the year — the solstice falls in June, which means that London in late June has approximately 16 hours of daylight, during which the city is at its most energetic and its most beautiful. The parks are full from morning to evening. Outdoor dining is possible and regularly excellent. The outdoor events calendar reaches its summer peak with the Chelsea Flower Show (slightly before June), Royal Ascot, the Trooping of the Colour, and the general proliferation of outdoor events, markets, and festivals that the city mounts with characteristic excess between May and September.
Specific Recommendations for June
Trooping the Colour, which takes place in June to mark the official celebration of the monarch’s birthday, is one of London’s most spectacular ceremonial events and is free to watch along the processional route — The Mall and the streets around Buckingham Palace — if you arrive early enough to find a place to stand. The mounted soldiers, the Guards bands, the carriages, and the balcony appearance at Buckingham Palace are genuinely worth seeing, particularly for visitors who are interested in the ceremonial traditions that the British do better than anyone and that look considerably more impressive in person than on a television screen.
Borough Market, which is open most of the week but at its best on Thursday through Saturday, is the food experience that most reliably produces the response of visitors who did not know London food had become this good. Go on a Thursday or Friday morning when the crowds are manageable. Eat before you go, paradoxically, so that you can taste things rather than buying at the first stall because you’re hungry. Visit London has the complete events calendar. The London Prat covers the things that make June in London worth the weather. It is worth the weather. Come.
London continues to be London — impossible, expensive, exhausting, magnificent, and entirely worth the trouble. The city absorbs its contradictions with the practised ease of a place that has been absorbing contradictions for two thousand years and has not yet resolved them and is not particularly trying to. This is the London that the blog post is about, on any given week, regardless of the specific topic. The specific topic is the entry point. London is the subject.
The city keeps moving. So does the writing. Both are better for the other.
Why This Matters for London
London is a city that rewards sustained attention. The first visit gives you the monuments and the museums. The second gives you the neighbourhoods. The third gives you the rhythms — the way the city moves through its week, the difference between a Tuesday morning and a Saturday afternoon, the specific energy of each season and each district. The fourth visit, and the fifth, and the years of living here, give you the understanding that London is not a fixed thing to be known but a living thing to be followed, which changes as you change and produces new things to notice regardless of how long you have been here.
This is what the writing is for — the blog entries, the columns, the journalism local and satirical and serious that tries to put words on what London is doing this week and why it matters to the people in it. The city is too large for complete coverage. The attempt is worth making. Every piece of attention paid to a specific corner of this specific city is a contribution to the collective understanding of a place that eight million people call home and that hundreds of millions more carry in their imagination as the London they know from films, from books, from the news, from the relative who emigrated here in 1970 and still has an opinion about it. The real London and the imagined London coexist. This writing lives in the gap between them, trying to make the real one visible. That is the project. It continues.
The city continues past any single entry. So does the writing. So, presumably, does London itself, which has outlasted every prediction about its decline and every proclamation about its reinvention with the serene indifference of a place that knows it will still be here next week.
London rewards the visitor who arrives prepared and the resident who never stops paying attention. The city is too large and too alive to fully know, which is precisely the right size for a city that wants to remain interesting over a lifetime of engagement with it.
More London: The Daily Mash | NewsThump
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
