Joe Rivers

When it comes to running routes in Sydney, we're spoilt for choice. That's why we have put together a list of the best runs you can do in Sydney, with any one of these 13 options  guaranteed to get your blood pumping (and not just because you're embroiled in hard cardio action). Lace up and conquer these lakeside, seaside and parkside runs in Sydney – for views as well as a workout. And don't forget your core – swing by one of these free outdoor gyms around Sydney after. Keen on a little less intensive cardio workout? Check out our guide to the 9 best and easy day hikes you can do in Sydney. 

The cooler climate brings with it a wave of international bands and acts that are heading our way thanks to Byron’s Splendour in the Grass festival. It’s also the best time of the year to catch one-off parties and big names at Sydney Opera House and Carriageworks as part of Vivid’s music line-up. Don’t let the temperature drop stop you from catching this season’s best live music. Here are our picks of the best gigs to see in Sydney from June till August. RECOMMENDED: The best gigs in Sydney this week.

In 2016, sisters Sarah and Sophie Kelman took the plunge and, inspired by their love of flowers, opened Wild Forager in Freshwater. But the siblings, in the words of Sarah, “didn’t just want to be a flower shop.” Thanks to Wild Forager’s floor-to-ceiling windows and gorgeous outdoor displays, the flowers are certainly the first thing you notice, but Sarah’s background in education – she’s a former primary school teacher – means she gets almost as much of a kick from passing on her extensive knowledge. “People want to live with nature and they want to understand why it’s so important,” explains Sarah. “We want to inspire people to interact with nature and to create their own personal sanctuary.” That ethos extends beyond the plants and flowers on sale, with a wide selection of carefully chosen homewares from across the globe (the “forager” side of the name). These are all ethically-sourced, with Wild Forager choosing only to partner with brands that share their passion for beauty and sustainability. It’s a business with services from everyday bouquets to wedding arrangements and consulting; Sarah maintains Wild Forager’s priority is “trying to create beautiful, kick-arse flowers.” Whilst that may be true, the shop packs in candles, cards, lotions, pots and more into its convenient high street location, meaning it’s easy to envisage the combinations of flora and items that best suit your home. Sarah’s passion for her work shines through to the extent that, when asked to name he

White House Flowers is something of a Manly institution, having served the Northern Beaches and beyond for more than a decade. The florist has a prime location on the intersection of Pittwater Road and Denison Street, less than a minute’s walk from the world-famous Manly Beach. Founder Kye Carqueville was just 19 when White House started, and remains as creative director to this day. Far from being simply a shop where passing punters can pick a pretty plant or posy, White House now offers a number of services, from bespoke curation at intimate dinner parties to lavish arrangements for the most sophisticated of weddings. “Artistic, sculptural and dramatic” are the three words used by the florist’s Mel Anderson to describe the White House style. Even the briefest look at the store’s website or effortlessly chic Instagram page back that up. Arrangements are built on texture and volume as well as colour and beauty, and this is borne out in the range of bouquets available to buy online. “We offer tips for courtyard and balcony design, and in-home top tips for plant design and maintenance,” explains Anderson, which is ideal for the Northern Beaches lifestyle, where apartment-style living meets the ocean and the great outdoors. The guiding principle of White House is passion – it’s the word Mel uses most often when describing the people she works with and how they approach what they do. Many of the White House staff don’t come from traditional floristry backgrounds; former butchers,

She was one of the biggest drawcards for this year's Vivid festival despite having released only one, moderately successful full-length album, but then again most artists aren’t Tahliah Barnett, better known as FKA Twigs. Carriageworks was packed out on Sunday night, with a high concentration of vibrant and idiosyncratic looks (given the lengths FKA Twigs goes to in designing her visual aesthetic, it’s no surprise so many people want to make an effort). But as we've seen before with Vivid gigs at Carriageworks, you had to be tall enough and in the thick of it to really see what was happening on stage. As the throngs of FKA Twigs devotees waited, haunting, formless sounds played through the walls of speakers at an almost glacial pace. Then, when the lights went down, Twigs intoned lines from 'Mary Magdalene', suddenly appearing alone in front of the curtains. Unexpectedly, she performed a solo dance piece, heavily influenced by tap, which showcased her prowess in movement – something that proves to be a key theme throughout the evening. By the time song two comes in, she's already on her second outfit; a kind of distressed, white bridal gown, topped with huge, cream headwear featuring strands of material poking out at all angles. FKA Twigs created a mood that’s pitched somewhere between gothic and virginal as she ran through the opening numbers of her set. Her quartet of dancers matched her grace and fluidity of movement. The show was painstakingly and exquisitely choreograph

Say the name Neneh Cherry to most people and they’ll recall her explosively thrilling debut single, ‘Buffalo Stance,’ or perhaps her collaboration with Senegalese vocalist Youssou N’Dour, the plaintively haunting ‘Seven Seconds.’ These previously ubiquitous hits were released in 1988 and 1994 respectively but, given she’s comfortably sold out two consecutive nights at Carriageworks as part of Sydney Festival, it’s fair to say Cherry still has a loyal following. Hopefully those in attendance have been keeping track of her career since those more commercially successful days, as she’s taken a musical left turn since then. In the last decade she’s released three albums: a collaboration with Scandavian jazz trio the Thing, and a pair of records produced by Four Tet – 2014’s Blank Project and last year’s Broken Politics – the latter of which she’s in Sydney to promote. The audience in Carriageworks’ Bay 17 are quietly reverent. After a polite smattering of applause while the performers make their way to the stage, there’s near silence as the band set up and a brief instrumental unfolds, replete with vibraphone, harp, handpan and recorded noises from the jungle – agitprop hip-hop this ain’t. Photograph: Victor Frankowski As Cherry and her band run through the tracks from Broken Politics, a pattern soon emerges. This music is designed with rhythms that speak to you on a primal level. Even the more melodic instruments have a strong percussive element to them, and the whole sound is

No one particularly enjoys the first Monday after the Christmas break. Many people have had a full two weeks off, meaning it’s a day for attempting to remember your password, trudging through emails, and at least one more coffee than usual just to try and recall what it is exactly that you do for a living. In short, not an easy task for a band to rouse a crowd who could be forgiven for wanting to spend the dreary evening curled up in front of Netflix. But it was the challenge for Google-savvy Glaswegian synth poppers Chvrches, at the Opera House for the last leg of their Australian tour promoting their third record, Love is Dead. Initially, it seems like a task that Chvrches might not be well equipped for. Lead singer Lauren Mayberry strode the stage, pausing during instrumental breaks to twirl in her black tutu, but the rest of the band remained almost motionless, as if using the banks of keyboards and drums as a wall between them and the audience. The first acknowledgement of the audience was an emotionless greeting of, “Hello, we’re a band called Chvrches,” and that Netflix marathon started to sound ever more appealing. But after the first quarter of an hour, they really started to hit their stride. Lauren’s vocals became more confident and powerful, Iain Cook and Martin Doherty stopped hiding behind their consoles, and it soon became clear that the group were having a whale of a time. Social media posts from earlier in the day had revealed Chvrches “never in [their] lives

When a band decides to tour a classic album, it’s often an admission of defeat – reaching for former glories that can’t be repeated, it smacks of an exercise in self-indulgent nostalgia. However, that doesn’t seem to be the case for Bloc Party. Single album tours normally come when an artist is winding down their career, but Bloc Party are only five records into theirs, and the collection they’ve chosen to return to is their debut, Silent Alarm – which is a mere 13 years old. Not to mention that Silent Alarm has an incredible propulsive energy to it, so it seems this tour is more of a pick-me-up so the band can regroup, rather than a cynical cash-in. Perhaps surprisingly, given that Silent Alarm only grazed the top 30 upon its release, Bloc Party comfortably pack out the 5,500 capacity Hordern Pavilion for two consecutive nights on November 29 and 30. They’ve elected to play the album in reverse order, meaning we’re off to a slow start with the uncharacteristically ponderous ‘Compliments’. Things don’t really get going until the frenetic ‘Luno’, which, seems to be played at an even faster speed than on record. From that point, the rapturous crowd chant back every word of every song and, in some cases, even sing along to guitar hooks too. On stage the musicianship is effortless. The band recruited a new rhythm section in 2015 (Matt Tong and Gordon Moakes left to be replaced by Louise Bartles and Portland indie-rock band Menomena’s Justin Harris), yet everything here is seamles

On Sunday night at Carriageworks, indie ingenue-turned-art-rock vamp St Vincent eschewed the formalities of a support act and instead elected to screen her short film before her gig. Annie Clark directed and co-wrote The Birthday Party as part of the XX horror anthology which debuted at Sundance in 2017. Given her burgeoning reputation as a visual artist, it’s no surprise that St Vincent has turned her hand to film. She’s due to direct an upcoming female-fronted adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, and there are definite parallels between the film and her music, from the themes of trouble in suburbia and keeping up appearances to the interspersion of jet-black comedy. After the film, St Vincent walked onto the edge of the stage without fanfare and, simply backlit, took us through a tender version of ‘Marry Me’, from her 2007 album of the same name. No band was visible throughout the set and for the first 45 minutes there was no backdrop either. Your attention was entirely focused centre stage where St Vincent was wearing her MASSEDUCTION signature outfit: a neon pink PVC bodysuit with matching thigh high boots.   St Vincent in her MASSEDUCTION neon pink get-up Photograph: Anna Kucera       Her fifth album, MASSEDUCTION, features more of an electronic influence than her previous work and is also paired with striking video clips – blocks of colour, analogue electronics and hints of something not quite right behind the artifice of the American Dream. Howeve

In 2016 Solange Knowles released her third album, A Seat at the Table – a career-defining record exploring themes of femininity, race and self-empowerment in the Black Lives Matter era. On June 1, as the musical headliner for this year’s Vivid Sydney festival, Solange brought her idiosyncratic brand of funk-laced R’n’B to the city’s most iconic venue. This was Solange’s first Australian performance in over four years (not counting her DJ set at the opening of the Pitt Street Mall H&M in 2015), so understandably there was an excited hubbub in the stalls before she came on stage. In the lead up to her shows, social media had been abuzz, with numerous fans flying from interstate to see the gig, many of whom were people of colour, excited to see a celebration of blackness in a world-famous venue. The night opened with an extended version of ‘Rise,’ and within ten minutes she had the entire audience on their feet and dancing to her calling card, ‘Cranes In The Sky.’ “This is church!” she exclaimed, before delivering a note-perfect rendition of the Grammy-winning track. Photograph: Daniel Boud   Thanks to pyramids either side of the stage, the earth-shattering basslines and a giant orb suspended above the musicians, there was more than a touch of P-Funk about Solange’s whole stage set-up. With her and the band all dressed in white and the stage lit simply in a single hue, Solange delivered a masterclass in vocals and dance, drawing excited yells from the crowd whenever she let l