HIGH SUMMER – August 2026

This was the summer Britain came home. Twenty five million of us looked at the airport queue, thought better of it, and pointed the car at somewhere like Morecambe instead, searches for which rose 106 per cent, a sentence nobody would have printed two years ago. Wimbledon ran fourteen days without a drop of rain for the first time since 2019, 550,151 people came through the gates, and a punnet of strawberries with a glass of Pimm’s now costs £16.30, which the country paid without blinking because paying for summer is half the ritual. Somewhere in the middle of all that we made High Summer, the August issue, £8.50, and it is packed the way a good picnic hamper is packed, nothing in it that was not chosen to be enjoyed outdoors.

What you get is the whole escape mapped properly. The staycation surge town by town, Brighton mid renaissance with saunas on the shingle and Fatboy Slim on the beach, the coolcation exodus to Norway and Iceland after one July heatwave grounded 3,100 flights in a day, and the Riviera rationing itself, odd and even number plates on the Amalfi coast road and Capri banning the megaphone outright. Then the Look, with the Princess of Wales in scarlet and grass green across finals weekend and tennis core promoted to national dress code. The Season’s diary from Ascot to Henley to Goodwood, with the Glastonbury shaped hole where the last weekend of June should have been. Nolan’s Odyssey passing half a billion dollars, five new London hotels worth losing sleep over, rosé’s biggest season on record, and the £2.85 punnet given the coverage it earned. Fair warning on the tone, this issue thinks abroad is overrated and does not hide it, so anyone who booked the Amalfi for August will find it insufferably pleased with itself.

Being straight with you, we went to press on 31 July. Which means the month’s biggest headline of all, the sky going dark over Europe on 12 August, happened after this issue was printed, and that is exactly why Issue 02 exists on this same shelf. Buy this one for the summer everyone planned. Buy the other one for the evening nobody did.

It is for anyone who spent August on British shingle and wants the case for it made in print, and for anyone still deciding between Penzance and Reykjavik next year. Read it in a deckchair with something cold, the hamper travels well.