London events in June

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.

In an era where almost all cinema screenings are digital, this BFI mini-festival is dedicated to celebrating the beauty of physical film. It'll be raiding its deep archives to show off some rarities of every format from 8mm to IMAX to Pathé’s forgotten 28mm gauge. The fest kicks off with Star Wars (1977), screened in its original form for the first time in decades. Its closing night will show an unearthed copy of Twin Peaks' original pilot episode, presented by its star Kyle MacLachlan. And in between are treasures including a 1929 Surrealist masterpiece by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, a compilation of documentaries by sisters Ruby and Marion Grierson, and workshops where visitors will learn how to handle and cut film. There'll even be a projectionist's booth in the main foyer, in a tribute to the good old days of cinema. 

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. The first weekend sees Gen Z pop hero Olivia Rodrigo headline alongside The Last Dinner Party and Girl In Red, followed by two dates from US country singer-songwriter Zach Bryan, supported by Dermot Jennedy, Mt. Joy and Gabrielle Aplin.

Step into the stories shaping our world at the World Press Photo Exhibition 2025! This renowned exhibition showcases award-winning photojournalism from across the globe, capturing urgent, intimate and unforgettable moments from the past year. From the frontlines of conflict to the quiet strength of everyday life, these images demand to be seen.

Get your tickets for just £11.50 to see the World Press Photo Exhibition 2025, only with Time Out Offers.

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. 

As soon as June hits, London is packed with parades, parties and protests for Pride Month to mark the anniversary of the 1969 Stonewall riots. The London Pride parade is traditionally the focus of festivities,with over a million people take to the streets of London for the celebration each summer, but there are plenty of other LGBTQ+ events taking place both before and after it. Click through for our roundup of the best events happening across the season. 

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.

This year's 33rd edition of indie film festival Raindance isn't just a pitter-patter, it's an absolute thunderstorm of new cinema. After a few straitened post-pandemic years, the line-up is back up to speed, and a whopping 90 percent bigger than in 2024. Check out the full programme here.

There's more change afoot when it comes to the venues. In previous years, it's been hosted by much-loved indie cinemas across London. But for 2025, it'll be hosted exclusively by West End venue Vue Piccadilly, with an opening gala at Vue Leicester Square and a party at the Waldorf Hilton’s swish Palm Court.

The opening film is Christopher M. Anthony’s debut feature Heavyweight, a boxing drama starring Nicholas Pinnock. The fest closes on Camilla Guttner’s The Academy, set at an art school. In between, there's a teeming line-up of international feature films and documentaries. And aspiring film-makers and camera heads are catered to by the festival's industry hub, Canon Lounge, which will have talks, workshops and panels galore.  

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.

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. 

Think clowning is a dying art that’s limited to circus big tops? The London Clown Festival will make you think again. The event returns for another year in its biggest incarnation yet, with an eclectic line-up of British and European clown work that will run at first Soho Theatre and then on to Jacksons Lane for the last few shows. As you might imagine, it’s a thoroughly contemporary affair that won’t simply consist of people dressed like Ronald McDonald squirting flowers at each other: shows vary from Sasha Krohn’s elegant The Weight of the Shadow – a piece that examines the turmoil of a psychiatric patient over a single day – to monstrous bouffon Red Bastard, in his first London dates in eight years.

For full listings, go to the official Clown Festival website. 

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. 

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.

Sarah Kane’s final play 4.48 Psychosis is one of the most famous productions in Royal Court Theatre history, not least for the circumstances under which it was originally staged: just 18 months after her death, the bleak piece – which is in many ways closer to a poem than a play, with no discernible characters – was memorably described by the Guardian’s Michael Billington as ‘a 75-minute suicide note’. 

This revival comes precisely 25 years on, in the Court’s tiny Upstairs theatre where the play originated, and sees director James Macdonald reunite with his original creative team and the original cast – particularly notable because one of them was RSC co-artistic director Daniel Evans.

Despite how faithful it is to the past in many ways, the plan is not to simply restage a quarter century old production, but reinvent the play anew and perhaps banish the spectre of Kane’s death from proceedings. The play is, after all, endlessly malleable and open to interpretation.

Inevitably this will sell out incredibly quickly as the decision to stage upstairs means supply will inevitably outstrip demand. As an RSC co-production – perhaps the cost of securing Evans’s services – it will go on to the more spacious Other Space in Stratford, with a final performance taking place, rather extraordinarily, at 4.48 in the morning.

Roll up ageing ravers, curious young clubbers and anyone who just fancies hitting a dance floor and still being home in time for Emmerdale. This hour-long virtual reality experience promises to transport you back to the height of the Acid House era during 1989’s Summer of Love. Having premiered at the London Film Festival back in 2022, the hour-long experience takes over the The Pit at the Barbican for ten weeks this summer. The handiwork of filmmaker Darren Emerson and is soundtracked by some of the era’s biggest bangers, from Joey Beltram’s ‘Energy Flash’ to Orbital’s ‘Chime’. Sadly, there’s no discount for anyone old enough to remember Shoom. 

Put a bit of jazz pizazz into your Friday nights with this concert series, held in a new Battersea venue. World Heart Beat Gardens is an intimate 200-seater concert hall that's been built for optimal acoustics (and nope, it's not outdoors as the name might suggest). It's perfect for filling your ears with the sounds of some jazz greats, from 1920s classics from the Julian Joseph trio to new compositions by Henry Spencer to soulful sounds from Grammy Award-winning tenor sax giant Jean Toussaint.

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 soon.

Every summer, London pop radio station Capital packs an eye-watering number of huge names into Wembley Stadium for their annual all-day megashow. Mariah Carey will be leading the bill this year, alongside the likes of Benson Boone, KSI, Lola Young and Busted vs McFly. Zara Larsson and Dasha will also be taking to the stage, plus Reneé Rap and Jessie J. The Summertime Ball usually sells out straight away, so be quick off the mark if you fancy sampling this taster menu of pop talent.

Where would London’s music scene be without pirate radio? There would be no jungle, UK garage, or grime music, for one thing, and legendary stations like Kool or Rinse FM would never have existed. To celebrate the radical influence of pirate radio that still impacts London’s music scene today, the Barbican is putting on a month-long programme of broadcasts, talks, workshops, club nights and screenings that will explore the history and impact of community radio, and Black British music. 

Highlights from the programme include plenty of musical sessions and parties, such as: a month-long residency by Reprezent Radio, broadcasting live from a custom-built studio in the Barbican’s foyer, with special guests including DJ Spoony, Norman Jay and Daddy Ernie; and a one-off club night hosted by Rinse FM at the Barbican’s ClubStage.

On the more intellectual side of things, the Barbican Cinema will screen a series of archive films exploring the world of pirate and community stations, including youth radio documentary Airwaves of Rebellion: Youth, Identity, and the Fight for Community Radio and 1970s LGBTQ+ thriller Young Soul Rebels. 

On top of this there will be panel talks curated by Tobi Kyeremateng from Them Ones Presents, with speakers including Richie Brave, Laura ‘Hyperfrank’ Brosnan and Aniefiok Ekpoudom. And a music and memory sharing session will be hosted by DJ Bid, formerly of Rock-to-Rock Radio, that will allow members of the public to request songs and share their memories from them in an open forum.

Want to discover the next Francesca Hayward, or Wayne McGregor? The ROH's Next Generation festival showcases incredible young dance talent from the top youth dance companies and dance schools from around the world. This year's lineup includes ZooNation Youth Company, Finnish National Youth Ballet Company, Paris Opera Junior Ballet, the Royal Ballet School and Rambert. 

In 2024 we had the Black Sabbath Ballet. This year, The Who is stepping into the world of pointe shoes, pirouettes and very tight leggings. We know it doesn’t sound very rock and roll, but trust us, this isn’t your typical ballet.  With the blessing of Pete Townshend, Sadler’s Wells has reworked the cult 1979 film Quadrophenia into a brand-new dance production. Set to an orchestral arrangement of the record, the show will be by directed by theatre director Rob Ashford and choreographed by Paul Roberts, who is well known for his collaborations with pop artists, from the Spice Girls to Prince. Rising star dancer Paris Fitzpatrick will play Jimmy. There will be Harrington jackets, bad hair cuts, and plenty of attitude. 

Erstwhile Daily Show legend Trevor Noah returns to London for a comparitively ‘intimate’ string of dates at the Apollo after playing The O2 last time in 2023. We’re promised the South African stand-up will be performing all new material: this may even be the show’s name, although the poster for these dates features Noah standing in front of the postcode for the Apollo (W6 9QH) which would be a fun name. He’s only got the odd North American date scheduled for the rest of the year, so expect this run to be fairly significant to him. We don’t know exactly what’s on offer, but expect humourous storytelling with a politicial edge.