Prepare yourself for a spectacular month with our selection of the best events, exhibitions and things to do in London during August 2024
August in London is here and there are plenty of reasons to be excited about it. But, the main one? Notting Hill Carnival is back again, taking over the streets of west London for the bank holiday weekend.
When you’re not having a riotous time dancing to tinnitus-inducing dance hall with a pocket full of Red Stripe, there are plenty of other ways to get your fill of live music this month. All Points East, Field Day, Body Movements and Boiler Room Festival will all be pitching their tents and blasting music across various parks in London. UK Black Pride is also back this year with its ‘biggest and boldest’ event yet.
Fill your peepers up with even more culture as big fixtures on the summer arts and theatre scene like Greenwich + Docklands International Festival come back for another year of experimental fun.
Before September hits, let’s hope there’s enough sun for a London lido swim, lazy days in the city’s parks, beer-garden pints, outdoor-cinema sessions and all the other alfresco pleasures that summer in London has to offer.
August is a month for long holidays, a time for winding down, lying around and discovering that mint Cornettos are just as delicious as you remember. But it’s also a time for making memories, so make the most of your days off with the help of this Big List of things to do in August in London 2024.
1. Dance in the W11 streets at Notting Hill Carnival
For a lot of Londoners, Notting Hill Carnival on the August Bank Holiday Weekend flashes by in a blaze of feathers, Red Stripe and tinnitus. To those who make it happen, it’s a year-round operation to create one of the biggest and oldest street parties in the world. This Carnival weekend, it’s expected that more than two million people will flock to west London to dance in the streets of W11. It’s free to join family day on the Sunday and the Monday which is for the hard partiers. It’s a celebration of freedom and Caribbean culture, with an iconic parade showcasing the best of mas, soca, calypso, steel bands and soundsystems. What are you waiting for?
2. Watch spectacular free outdoor theatre at GDIF festival
You can always rely on the annual free Greenwich + Docklands International Festival of outdoor theatre and performance art spectaculars to announce itself with a proper ‘how are they going to do that?’ piece of programming. This year the festival will return with a theme of All Change, with its 17-day programme focusing on both activism and climate change. It’s already obvious that the big 2024 showstopper is likely to be Australian physical theatre company Legs on the Wall’s ‘THAW’ (Aug 24-25), an epic eight hour aerial performance staged on a two-and-a-half-tonne block of ice suspended high in the air by a crane.
3. Ditch Edinburgh for the Camden Fringe
Edinburgh isn’t the only place with a bursting, brilliant fringe, and indeed as the Scottish capital’s iconic event becomes ever more expensive, the once scrappy outsider Camden Fringe looks ever more like a serious alternative for the London-based. Returning for its eighteenth edition, it’s smaller than Edinburgh by a long shot, but still boasts hundreds of events all over Camden, taking in everything from the expected stand-up sets and experimental theatre to kids’ shows, dance, and even magic. Runs tend to be for a night or two rather than the entire month, and prices are bargain basement by London standards, usually less than a tenner.
4. Indulge your most base carnivorous desires at Meatopia
If you’re a carnivore with a big appetite for BBQ, Meatopia has your name written all over it. The boozy food fest is a veritable utopia for meat lovers, with 50 chefs invited down over four days to cook up a storm. This year’s line-up includes Texas BBC specialists MELT, Ben Tish – who’ll bring a taste of Sicily to the event – and Cavita’s Adriana Cavita, who’s an old Meatopia fave.
5. Listen to heavyweight line-ups at All Points East
Over the last six years, All Points East has garnered a reputation for building some of the most exciting and interesting festival line-ups in the UK. Its headliners are often indie or dance-focused big-hitters, while its undercards are packed with cult heroes and rising stars you can say you saw first. Look out for sets from acclaimed producer, rapper and DJ Kaytranada, homegrown hip-hop hero Loyle Carner, cult star and TikTok fave Mitski, indie sleaze party-starters LCD Soundsystem and a double-hitter of the Ben Gibbard-fronted The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie.
6. Explore the Big Fun Art Adventure
A major influx of owls is coming to Haringey this summer. No, not the flying kind, but 30 giant sculptures all painted in bright colours and designs. The installation is part of North London Hospice’s latest fundraising event, the Big Fun Art Adventure, which is creating a walkable trail of art across the area. Some of the owls on display will be painted by famous faces, like Matt Lucas and Rob Biddulph, and when the trail closes in October, the sculptures will go under the hammer to raise money for the hospice. Find the route on an app or paper map, if you prefer.
7. Watch the Globe’s thoughtful, funny take on Shakespeare’s dumbest comedy ‘The Comedy of Errors’
‘The Comedy of Errors’ can sometimes feel like a less successful dry run for the more grown-up ‘Twelfth Night’, but Sean Holmes’s deft Globe production steers an almost effortless path through it, however. He makes it a fun, uncluttered production that avoids gimmickry. It puts storytelling at the centre and it’s about as easy as is ever going to be to follow the plot about two sets of identical twin brothers, with the same names as each other, who are separated as children and grow up in different, rival city-states, now causing merry heck as they end up in the city of Ephesus at the same time as their long-lost father Egeon faces execution there. Basically, the plot is still pretty much a mess, but this show’s a hoot.
8. Listen to Alan Bennet and then party into the night at Queen’s Park Book Festival
Too many book festivals don’t have enough festival. It isn’t that there’s too much emphasis on books (how could there be?), but most of the time, there’s just not enough partying, drinking and grooving with your fellow bookworms. Not Queen’s Park Book Fest. Held, as always, in the public park, it’ll combine literary celebs with stand-up comedy, local history and lectures on pressing issues of the day. And crucially, each day is capped off by a party into the night. This year highlights include legendary playwright and author Alan Bennett, ‘Monty Python’’s Michael Palin, former Green Party leader Caroline Lucas, restaurant critic Jay Rayner, and much more.