John Hitchcox
July is one of my favourite months because, for once, I get to enjoy some of the places I’ve spent years helping to create.At the top of the list is Olympia. After what has been a marathon of planning, construction and a few sleepless nights, I’m looking forward to experiencing it as everyone else will, meeting friends for lunch, trying the new restaurants (I’m determined to work my way through them all), catching a concert, and simply watching one of London’s great landmarks come back to life. The greatest compliment for any developer is seeing people enjoy a place without giving a second thought to what it took to create it.Whenever I escape London, you’ll find me at The Lakes by YOO in the Cotswolds. Summer is when it really comes into its own: morning walks around the lakes, paddleboarding with the family, long lunches that mysteriously become even longer dinners, and watching children disappear for hours while their parents finally get a chance to relax. After four decades of creating places, I’ve learnt that the best destinations aren’t about the buildings, they’re about the memories people take home with them.
- John Hitchcox
Food: Johnny Boys
Credit: Hot Diners
Stoke Newington has just got a whole lot more fun and his name is Johnny Boy's. Tucked into 3 Northwold Road, this is chef Julian Denis's love letter to the SoCal diners of his childhood, the real, family-run neighbourhood joints where Mexican, Jewish, Greek and Japanese cooking all collided over a Formica tabletop. And that mash-up is exactly what lands on your plate: with breakfast burritos loaded with bacon, sausage or chorizo, chilaquiles verde with a perfectly fried egg, crab tostadas with pea salsa, and a patty melt that pairs caramelised onions with Swiss, American cheese and Russian dressing on rye. The drinks list leans gloriously Mexican too, with a Michelada built on beer, clamato and Tapatio, a mezcal-and-horchata Carajillo, and an Orange-Bang Sour that sounds as fun as it tastes, all backed up by ice-cold Modelo, PBR and a short, sensible wine list. The space itself is bright, colourful and unapologetically the kind of room that makes you want to slide in, order too much, and stay a long while. Dinner runs from Wednesday to Sunday with breakfast and lunch joining the party at weekends. Just make sure you go hungry, go often and go for the doughnuts if nothing else.
Bar: Cato, Covent Garden
Credit: Bar Taylor
Descend, if you dare. Cato on Mercer Street is named for Cato Alexander, the freedman who basically invented the celebrity bartender in 1820s New York and this new drinks spot in Covent Garden is built as two distinct love letters to that legacy. Up top, The House of Julep is the tavern: warm, sociable, leaning hard into the cocktail that made Cato famous, poured from mint and herbs grown on an in-house system right there on the ground floor. Then there's the basement. Step down into Cato proper and the mood shifts entirely. It’s darker, stranger, more intense, in a good way. Right now they're running "Colour Has Flavour," a menu built around the wild idea that what a drink looks like changes what it tastes like: seven colours, fourteen cocktails, every single ingredient sourced from British soil and spirit, global flavour filtered through a resolutely local lens. It's modern bar science dressed up as theatre. Open from 3pm through to 1am on weekends, you should start upstairs with something classic and finish downstairs with something that make your brain and tastebuds flourish in equal measure.
Wellness: Canary Wharf Lido
Credit: Secret London
There are wellness events, and then there are weekends that make you rethink how you’re living altogether. The Longevity Show,arriving at Tobacco Dock on 26th and 27th June feels very much like the latter. Set inside one of East London’s most atmospheric warehouse spaces, it brings together the biggest names in health, science and modern wellbeing for two days dedicated to feeling better, thinking sharper and living longer. Expect everything from yoga, Pilates and cutting-edge diagnostics to IV drips, expert panels and immersive experiences designed to leave you genuinely inspired rather than simply informed. The speaker line-up alone is worth clearing your calendar for. Davina McCall, Fearne Cotton, Joe Wicks, Grace Beverley and Dr Rangan Chatterjee are all set to appear, alongside leading voices from the worlds of performance, nutrition and longevity science. Wana know the best bit? You can use code HOTLIST20 for 20% off all ticket types. Boom!
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Exhibition: Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography
Credit: Glasstire
A century of America, told one face at a time. Opening at Dulwich Picture Gallery on the 28th July, "Portrait of a City: A Century of American Photography" pulls together 34 of the most influential photographers working between 1907 and 2012. Alfred Stieglitz, Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Berenice Abbott among them, to trace how New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco were built, inhabited and constantly reimagined by the people who walked their streets. This isn't a tidy chronology of skylines; it's a hundred years of immigration, industry, protest and counterculture read through the human face, with photographers turning the camera on ordinary lives to capture a nation perpetually in flux. Drawn from the celebrated Savings Bank Foundation DNB Collection in partnership with Lillehammer Art Museum, the show runs until early October which allows plenty of time for a quiet weekday wander through eight decades of American identity, one portrait at a time. Friends of the gallery go free; everyone else, consider this your excuse for a proper South London art pilgrimage.
Art: Ana Mendieta
Credit: Tate
Earth, fire, water, blood; Ana Mendieta turned all of it into art and from the 15th July, Tate Modern gives her the first in-depth UK show of her work in over a decade. Mendieta, a Cuban-born American artist working through the 1970s and into the early 80s, is best known for her Silueta Series, ghostly imprints of her own body carved into sand, set alight and traced in flowers. Works so fleeting they only survive now as photographs and film. This exhibition brings together her most iconic pieces alongside newly remastered films, early paintings and late sculptural works, many of which have never been shown in the UK before and the show doesn't stay politely behind glass either because it spills out beyond the gallery walls, echoing Mendieta's own restless relationship with the natural world. Questions of displacement, identity and belonging run through everything here, and they land with just as much force now as they did fifty years ago. Tickets are £18 and the gallery stays open until 9pm on Fridays and Saturdays. This exhibition runs all the way through to January so there's no excuse not to go. Members get in free and can also catch a curator's tour the day before it opens to the public. Visceral, urgent, unmissable.
Experience: Luminescence
Credit: Luminescence
Some buildings get a lick of paint each year if they’re lucky but Westminster Cathedral is getting reborn in light this month. From the 1st July, Luminiscence arrives at one of London's most architecturally extraordinary buildings, designed by John Francis Bentley and dressed in over a hundred varieties of marble, and turns the entire interior into a living canvas. This is a 50-minute, 360° projection-mapped concert: sweeping visuals cast across domes, mosaics and soaring columns, a specially commissioned script by BAFTA and Olivier-winner Tim Whitnall, narration from London-born national treasure Hugh Bonneville, and live choral performances by the Lux Aeterna choir bringing Beethoven, Verdi, Vivaldi, Debussy and Bach to thunderous life inside one of the city's most resonant acoustic spaces. The genuinely spine-tingling part, though, is exclusive to this run, the cathedral's mosaic-adorned domes were never finished, left bare for over 120 years after the money ran out and Luminiscence has digitally resurrected the architect's original vision, letting audiences see for the first time what was only ever imagined. Having already drawn over two million spectators worldwide and sold out its UK debut in Manchester, this London residency runs through to the 27th September, with tickets from £32.50. A slice of every ticket goes straight back into preserving the cathedral itself which is incredible. Just moments from Victoria station, this isn't sightseeing but rather something closer to a séance with the building itself.
Event: BST Open House
Credit: On In London
Here's the best-kept secret of the summer: half of Hyde Park's biggest draw is completely free. Open House is BST Hyde Park's midweek, free-to-enter sister programme, running on selected days right through July and it is doing far more than warming up the main stage. Outdoor cinema presented by British Airways screens a different film most evenings, with Jaws one night, Wicked: For Good the next, Jurassic World: Rebirth after that, all the while daytime hours are stacked with Wimbledon screenings, free yoga and HIIT sessions, tennis and cricket taster sessions with coaches from Lord's and enough family programming (Chickenshed Theatre, Little Angel Theatre, Plant City's real digger trucks for the kids who dream big) to fill an entire day out without spending a penny. Then it tips into proper spectacle: catch Sir Mo Farah leading a 3km community run before a live Q&A on the main stage, watch the Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra take on cinematic classics hosted by Myleene Klass, or get ringside for the PDC Hyde Park Darts Championship, where Luke Humphries, Fallon Sherrock and Nathan Aspinall go head to head alongside a lineup of TV faces. Evenings bring DJ sets, live bands and choirs drifting across the park as the sun goes down. Dogs are welcome, the vibe is unapologetically communal, and the best part is simply turning up; no ticket, no faff, just Hyde Park doing what it does best on a long summer evening.
Kids: A World Elsewhere
Credit: ATG
Once upon a time, in a candlelit playhouse by the Thames, a boy named Cass discovered that his imagination was the wildest place he'd ever been. A World Elsewhere opens at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on the 25th July and it's the new Shakespeare-inspired family show from the Olivier Award-nominated team behind Rough Magic, built for absolutely everyone aged 5 to 105. Cass finds real life tricky, so he escapes into stories his Gran reads him, fighting alongside kings, flying with witches, weathering shipwrecks and ghosts, until one day the stories stop making sense and a strange darkness starts creeping in. Lost somewhere between a tragedy like Hamlet and a comedy of his own errors, Cass has to find his way back out and dragging the whole family along for the ride is half the fun. Expect songs, daft jokes, proper heart and that particular magic only candlelight and live performance can conjure. It runs through to the 30th August, and is two hours including an interval, with tickets from £18. There are relaxed, audio-described, captioned and BSL-signed performances dotted through the run for families who need them. Bring the grown-ups, bring the kids, bring anyone you love.
Art: Richard Dadd: Beyond Bedlam, Royal Academy
Credit: Royal Academy of Arts
From the 25th of the month, the Royal Academy gives Richard Dadd his first major UK retrospective in over fifty years. Dadd trained at the Royal Academy Schools in the late 1830s, found early acclaim for his intricate Shakespearean fairy paintings and then set off on an ambitious tour through the Eastern Mediterranean that would shape his imagination and craft for the rest of his life. It was on his return to England that everything changed: Dadd began experiencing severe delusions, leading to the killing of his father, and he spent the next 42 years as a patient in Bethlem and later Broadmoor hospitals. What makes this exhibition extraordinary is what happened next, because rather than stopping, Dadd kept working, encouraged by his doctors to keep painting throughout his confinement, producing some of his most celebrated pieces from within those institutional walls, drawing on memory, observation and an imagination that never seemed to dim. "Beyond Bedlam" brings together over 60 oils, watercolours and drawings spanning his entire career, organised chronologically from his Royal Academy years through his travels to his decades at Bethlem and Broadmoor, with major loans from Tate, the V&A and the Yale Center for British Art. Curated by Nicholas Tromans, the show runs to until late October, Tuesday to Sunday 10am–6pm, with tickets from £15 and it’s free for under-16s. Nearly forgotten until the 1970s, Dadd's work has since influenced everyone from Angela Carter to Cornelia Parker to Queen, whose song "The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke" takes its name from one of the paintings on show. A rare chance to see a singular, hard-won body of work in full.
Charity of the Month: Create Week
Credit: Create Arts
Sometimes the most generous thing you can do costs nothing but ten minutes of your time. Create Week runs from the 1st to 7th July and is a nationwide celebration run by Create, the UK charity dedicated to bringing the creative arts to people who are excluded by disability, disadvantage, illness, imprisonment, poverty or social isolation. Create works with young patients, disabled children and adults, young and adult carers, prisoners and isolated older people, using art, music, drama and storytelling to build confidence, ease anxiety and forge connection where it's needed most. And Create Week is their open invitation for the rest of us to join in. Each day brings a different free, accessible activity (think mindfulness zines, creative writing, origami, diorama-building), designed to take as little as ten minutes and need almost no materials, so there's genuinely no excuse not to have a go. You can take part solo, gather friends, family or colleagues for your own mini event, or simply share what you make online using #CreateWeek to help spread the word and if you fancy a small incentive, there's a free draw to win £100 of art supplies courtesy of London Graphic Centre. More than 30 organisations are backing this year's edition, including Age UK Islington and The Reading Agency, all rallying around one simple idea: that creativity isn't a luxury, it's a wellbeing essential everyone deserves access to. So pick up a pencil, a camera, a lump of clay, whatever's nearest and in doing so, help shine a light on a small charity doing genuinely transformative work all year round.