The Events, Festivals and Moments You Need in Your Calendar for the Rest of 2026

The events calendar for the second half of 2026 is, by any reasonable measure, good. The summer festivals have recovered their pre-2020 form, several major cultural institutions have programmed their strongest autumn seasons in years, and a cluster of new event formats have emerged to fill the space between the large and the very large.

At the larger end, Wilde\rness Festival in Oxfordshire in August remains the most consistently excellent multi-day event in Britain that does not bill itself exclusively on music. The combination of arts programming, talks, late-night debates, food and outstanding natural setting makes it genuinely different from the field-and-stages model, and it has managed to grow without losing the thing that made it worth attending in the first place.

The events worth attending are the ones that could not happen anywhere else or at any other time.

For food events, the year's most anticipated is the Manchester Food and Drink Festival in October, which has been making the case for northern England as a serious culinary destination for twenty years and is correct about it.

In the literary calendar, the Hay Festival in Wales remains the place where the most interesting conversations about books, ideas and public life happen in something approaching real time. The fringe events and late-night sessions are often more interesting than the main stage, and the town itself is the kind of place that makes you want to stay longer than your booking allows.