Hampstead’s Three Best Sundays
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London. This is London Walks. Streets Ahead.
Story time. History time.
And today, a little public service announcement time.
If you’ve ever thought about doing the Hampstead Walk – and if you haven’t, why haven’t you? – the next three Sundays are your moment.
Because the 2026 Hampstead Summer Festival gets underway tomorrow, Sunday, June 21st.
And that changes everything.
Not the walk itself. The walk’s always magnificent. The crown jewel of London Walks. Primus inter pares. First among equals. If London Walks were a stately home, Hampstead would be the drawing room with the best paintings and the deepest sofas.
But these next three Sundays?
Special.
Because Hampstead in festival mode is Hampstead turned up to eleven.
And Hampstead is already turned up to about nine-and-a-half on a normal day.
It’s London’s most beautiful village. And into the bargain, its most improbable village.
A place where poets, psychoanalysts, painters, prime ministers, comedians, rock stars and billionaires have all, at one point or another, thought, “yes, this’ll do.”
John Keats lived here.
Sigmund Freud lived here.
John Constable lived here.
George Orwell lived here.
D. H. Lawrence lived here.
Peter Cook lived here.
Boy George lived here.
Ricky Gervais lives here.
Anthony Minghella lived here.
Ridley Scott lived here.
Sacha Baron Cohen lives here.
Liam Gallagher has called it home.
That’s not a neighbourhood.
That’s a roll call.
Romantic poets. Psychoanalysts. Prime ministers. Painters. Rock stars. Film directors. Comic geniuses.
All in one postcode.
Or, put another way: Hampstead isn’t just where London’s famous people live.
It’s where London goes when it wants to be interesting.
And where we go when we want to be interested.
No.
Strike that.
Make it, where we go when we want to be fascinated. Let alone charmed, and delighted.
And for a couple of weeks every summer Hampstead throws itself a party.
The Hampstead Summer Festival is a comparatively recent invention, but it feels as though it could only have happened here. Very Hampstead in spirit: community-minded, artsy, slightly highbrow, a little homemade, faintly convinced civilisation can still be held together by bunting, chamber music and homemade jam.
It began as a fundraiser for the Keats Community Library and the Hampstead School of Art.
Worthy causes. Proper local institutions. And over the years it’s grown into one of those quintessential London neighbourhood festivals. Intimate and grand at the same time.
And this year?
Three Sundays.
Three different moods.
Three perfect pairings with the Hampstead Walk.
Let’s start with tomorrow, June 21st.
Tomorrow’s the opener.
And the timing, frankly, is almost suspiciously good.
Our Hampstead Walk sets off at 10.30.
A couple of glorious hours later you’re done.
And where do you finish?
Practically on the slope down toward Keats House.
A gentle stroll downhill. One of the loveliest little descents in London.
And at one o’clock?
Michael Palin cuts the ribbon and opens the Festival Art Fair.
Could there be a more Hampstead sentence than that?
A walk through London’s most storied village followed by Michael Palin opening an art fair in the garden of the house where Keats wrote “Ode to a Nightingale.”
That’s not an itinerary.
That’s a sonnet.
Keats House, of course, is one of London’s great literary shrines. The place where Keats lived and wrote some of his greatest poetry. Not where he died, mind you. That was Rome. But Hampstead was where the great flowering happened.
A house so steeped in poetry you half expect the wallpaper to rhyme.
And tomorrow it’s the beating heart of the festival.
Local artists.
Paintings.
Sculptures.
Children’s art activities.
A wine bar.
Food.
A proper gala opening.
In other words, do the walk and you roll straight into the festival launch.
Like it was planned that way.
Sometimes London smiles on you.
Tomorrow, Hampstead positively beams.
And then there’s the middle Sunday.
June 28th.
The in-between Sunday.
The Festival’s Garden Party.
And if the first Sunday is about art, and the middle Sunday is about whimsy, the last Sunday is about food, music and street life.
This one – the middle Sunday, June 28th – is pure Hampstead whimsy.
Back to Keats House.
Back to those beautiful gardens.
And this time it’s a family affair.
A magician.
Face painting.
Rhyme-time.
Birds of prey.
Mystical fairies.
Giant chess.
And ballet.
That is such an exquisitely Hampstead line-up it almost reads like parody.
Falconry, fairies and pliés.
Tea and cake.
A glass of wine.
Children charging about on the grass.
Parents pretending they’re supervising.
And the same beautiful dovetail.
Do the walk first.
Then drift downhill to Keats House.
By then the Garden Party is in full swing.
And once again the walk has done what a good walk should do.
It’s tuned you to the place.
You’re no longer arriving as a stranger.
You’re arriving as an insider. Somebody who knows the place. Somebody who’s in on the secret.
That changes everything.
And then there’s the final Sunday.
July 5th.
The grand finale.
The Big Fair.
This is when Hampstead really lets its hair down.
Heath Street closed to traffic.
A hundred-plus stalls.
Music.
Crafts.
Street performers.
Local charities.
And, crucially, food.
Lots of food.
And the timing here is just as neat.
Because our Hampstead Walk ends in Church Row, Hampstead’s grandest street. All elegant façades, old brick, old money and old stories.
One of the finest streets in London.
And from there?
You’re only a couple of minutes away.
Straight round to Heath Street where the fair is in full cry.
And by then you’ll have earned it.
A good long walk through lanes and lore, poets and painters, scandals and stories, uphill and down dale.
You’ll have worked up an appetite.
And there it is waiting for you.
Food stalls.
Coffee.
Cakes.
Savouries.
Street food.
Music in the air.
Street life all around you.
The smell of something sizzling.
Children tearing about with sticky hands.
A festival lunch in the open air.
And the fair rolls on through the afternoon.
No rush.
No timetable.
Just drift into it.
That’s the beauty of it.
The walk gives you Hampstead’s story.
The fair gives you Hampstead’s flavour.
Quite literally.
And that, really, is the point.
A London Walk is never just the walk.
Not if you do it right.
Not if you think about the setting.
The timing.
The trimmings.
The before and after.
The little extras that turn an outing into a day.
And Hampstead is one of the richest places in London for that sort of thing.
Because the walk explains the place.
It gives you the deep structure.
The hidden geology.
The old lanes.
The great houses.
The scandals.
The poets.
The dreamers.
The glorious eccentrics.
Why Hampstead is where it is.
Why it became what it became.
Why, standing on the Heath, London suddenly feels both vast and intimate at the same time.
Why this village on a hill has been pulling in talent, money, genius and oddity for three centuries.
And then after the walk?
Festival time.
A glass of something.
A mooch.
A browse.
A bite.
A sit in the sun.
A bit of people-watching.
And believe me, Hampstead during festival fortnight is premier league for people-watching.
Writers pretending not to be writers.
Actors pretending not to be recognised.
Painters looking faintly disappointed nobody’s noticed they’re painters.
Dogs who look as if they’ve got better agents than their owners.
It’s one of the great London spectacles.
So yes.
The Hampstead Walk is wonderful any Sunday.
But these next three?
These next three are the pick of the litter.
The flower at full bloom.
The village in festival dress.
London at its most… London.
And if you know London Walks, you know this:
timing matters.
Sometimes a walk is just a walk.
And sometimes it’s the key that opens a whole day.
These are three of those times.
Hampstead.
Three Sundays.
Summer festival.
Sunshine, lots of it, almost certainly.
What more could you want?
See you on the hill.
And sometime or other tomorrow, see you here as well.