Things To Do In Hackney This Weekend
Saturday 6 and Sunday 7 June 2026
Your weekly Hackney Local Guide to the best of the borough, written by someone who actually lives here.
The weekend in a nutshell
Some weekends you have to go looking for things to do in Hackney. This is not one of them. Hackney Art Week is in full flow, the borough has a new mayor that everyone has an opinion about, and the sun is meant to put in a proper appearance on Sunday. If you have been waiting for an excuse to spend two days doing nothing but wandering, eating and poking your head into rooms you would normally walk past, here it is.
The headline is Hackney Art Week, which runs from 4 to 14 June and turns roughly 60 venues across the borough into a free, sprawling festival of more than 130 artists. This Saturday and Sunday are the first proper weekend of it, and the programme has front-loaded a lot of the good stuff into these two days. Dalston, London Fields, De Beauvoir, Clapton, Stoke Newington, Haggerston and Hackney Wick are all involved, and almost all of it costs nothing to walk into. More on where to point yourself below.
On the weather: Saturday is the cooler of the two days, with highs around 18C and a chance of a shower in the morning before it brightens up. Sunday is the one to save your outdoor plans for, with sunshine and patchy cloud and temperatures pushing 22C. So do your galleries, markets and canal walks on Sunday if you can, and treat Saturday morning as a coffee-and-cover sort of start.
What are locals actually talking about? Two things. First, the May election, which saw Zoe Garbett of the Green Party elected as Hackney’s mayor, ending a long run of Labour control of the Town Hall. Whatever you make of it, it is the biggest shift in local politics in years and it is dominating every doorstep conversation and corner-shop queue from Stoke Newington to the Wick. Second, the food. The pizza-by-the-slice arms race has reached Dalston Lane, there is a serious new pub at Newington Green, and Hackney Wick keeps quietly opening kitchens worth the bus fare.
One practical heads-up before you make plans: there is engineering work on the Overground on Sunday morning, with no Weaver line trains from Liverpool Street out to Enfield Town, Cheshunt and Chingford until 10.15, which affects Hackney Downs, London Fields, Rectory Road, Stoke Newington and Clapton. If you are heading out early on Sunday, build in a few extra minutes or grab a bus. Full details in the Travel section at the end.
The weekend at a glance
Short on time? Here is the quick version. The longer recommendations follow underneath.
| Best event | Hackney Art Week, borough-wide, free. The Dalston Cultural Quarter Takeover on Ashwin Street is the easiest way in. |
| Best free event | The Dalston Cultural Quarter Takeover, Saturday and Sunday, open studios, a ceramics market and a street sound system. |
| Best family event | Hackney City Farm in Haggerston, plus the Sunday afternoonlive music session at Grow in Hackney Wick. Both free, both easy with kids. |
| Best food experience | The ESEACC dumpling pop-up and Asian art programme at the Old Bath House, part of Art Week, Saturday and Sunday. |
| Best night out | Dalston after dark. The Shacklewell Arms, the Queen Adelaide queer takeover and the late bars on Kingsland Road. |
| Best date night | Cafe Cecilia by the canal in London Fields, then a slow walk along Regent’s Canal. Book ahead. |
| Best hidden gem | Abney Park in Stoke Newington, a Victorian cemetery turned woodland that most of London has never heard of. |
| Best budget activity | A coffee-and-canal Sunday. A flat white, a wander down the towpath and a free gallery or two. Under a tenner. |
| Best new opening | All Kaps, the New York-style slice shop on Dalston Lane, slices between three and five pounds. |
| Best local discovery | The Sandwich Walk, a surreal free art installation on Wilton Way you can stumble across on the way to coffee. |
25 unmissable things to do in Hackney this weekend
A genuine mix of what is on, from the festival headliners to the markets and walks that make a Hackney weekend what it is. Where something is part of Hackney Art Week I have said so, because the full programme and any timed slots are on hackneyartweek.com and worth a glance before you set off.
What’s happening in Hackney Wick
The Wick is having a good year, and this weekend it earns its place on the itinerary. The canalside between Fish Island and the Olympic Park is where Hackney’s warehouse-and-water culture is most itself, and it is at its best when the sun is out, which means Sunday.
Start at Grow, the canalside venue that runs a free live music session every Sunday from 1pm to 4pm. This week, as most weeks, conga player Williams Cumberbache leads it with guest musicians, and it is the kind of thing you go to for an hour and leave three hours later. Bring the dog, bring the kids, bring nothing but yourself.
For food, All My Friends in the old shipping-container row is worth a special mention because Dough Hands has taken over the kitchen. This is properly good pizza, made with regenerative flour, sold by the slice or as 20-inch pies, and eaten with a canal view and a cold one. It is the new opening I would steer most people towards in the Wick right now.
Beyond that, the Wick rewards aimless wandering. The brewery taprooms around Fish Island open up at weekends, the street art turns over constantly, and the creative studios that fill the warehouses occasionally throw their doors open. Hackney Art Week’s closing party lands here later in the run, at Unlock, with composer Gabriel Prokofiev, so if you fall for the area this weekend you have a reason to come back. For now, treat it as a Sunday afternoon: pizza, canal, a pint and live music at Grow.
Live music this weekend
Hackney’s grassroots music scene is the reason a lot of people moved here and the reason a lot of people stay. Line-ups shift right up to the day, so treat this as a guide to where to point yourself and check each venue’s own listings for the exact act and door time. Here is how the rooms break down.
MOTH Club, Hackney Central. Gold tinsel ceiling, ex-servicemen’s-club decor and one of the best small rooms in London. Ben Watt and Tracey Thorn of Everything But The Girl are doing an intimate seated residency here this June, so check the dates. Tickets for the bigger names go quickly, smaller gigs are often around 10 to 18 pounds.
The Shacklewell Arms, Dalston. The pub-back-room that broke half the bands you love. New and emerging guitar music most nights, free or cheap entry, sticky floors in the best way. Go for the band you have never heard of.
EartH, Dalston. Evolutionary Arts Hackney, a former cinema turned two-room venue. Bigger touring acts and a beautiful crumbling concert hall. Worth booking ahead, expect 20 to 40 pounds depending on the act.
Oslo, Hackney Central. Bar-and-venue upstairs from a busy ground-floor bar, right by the station. Indie, pop and DJ sets, easy to combine with dinner first.
Paper Dress Vintage, Hackney Central. A vintage shop by day, a small live venue and bar by night. Eclectic, friendly and cheap. One of the most charming nights out in the borough.
Servant Jazz Quarters, Dalston. A tiny basement off Kingsland Road for jazz, folk and leftfield songwriting. Intimate to the point of front-row-every-row. Lovely for a date.
Colour Factory, Hackney Wick. A dance-led space in the Wick with a proper sound system, leaning house and electronic. The place to land if your live music turns into a late one.
Nightlife guide
If you want a big night, you want Dalston, with Hackney Wick and the Hoxton end of Kingsland Road as your back-up. Here is where I would aim.
Dalston remains the engine room. Kingsland Road and the streets off it hold the highest concentration of late bars and small clubs in the borough, and you can build a whole night without a cab. This weekend the Queen Adelaide is the obvious anchor, with its Hackney Art Week queer takeover running Friday to Sunday: DJs, exhibitions, tarot and tattoos, tied to Pride Month and exactly the kind of generous, scruffy, brilliant party Dalston does best. Around it you have the Shacklewell Arms for bands-into-DJs, Ridley Road Market Bar for a sweaty disco basement, and a clutch of Turkish-late-night spots for the 2am refuel.
In Hackney Wick, Colour Factory is your house-and-techno option with a sound system to match, and the canalside bars keep going later than you would expect on a warm night. Over in Hoxton and the Shoreditch fringe you will find the gallery-bar-club crossover crowd, which is a different energy again. My honest advice: pick one neighbourhood and work it properly rather than trying to bounce across the borough, especially with the Sunday-morning Overground works meaning the night bus or a walk home is more likely than the train.
Theatre, comedy and culture
Even with Art Week eating most of the cultural oxygen this weekend, the borough’s permanent venues are worth your time.
Hackney Empire, Mare Street. A jaw-dropping Frank Matcham theatre from 1901 that somehow survived everything thrown at it. Comedy, music, drama and variety across the year. Even a cheap seat gives you the full effect of the room.
Arcola Theatre, Dalston. On Ashwin Street, in the thick of the Art Week takeover this weekend, so you can pair a show with the street programme. Bold, affordable theatre and a bar that hums before curtain-up.
Rio Cinema, Dalston. The Art Deco screen on Kingsland High Street, and a festival venue this week. New films, repertory and the famous late-night strands. A proper Dalston institution.
The Castle Cinema, Homerton. Community-owned, beautifully restored and home to Homerton’s nicest pre-film drink. Catch a matinee and make an afternoon of it.
For comedy and spoken word, keep an eye on MOTH Club and the back rooms of the bigger pubs, which run stand-up, quizzes and literary nights most weeks. With Hackney Writers’ Festival events also appearing in the borough’s libraries this month, the page-and-stage crowd is well served too.
Family-friendly things to do
Hackney with kids is easier than people think, and most of the best options are free. Here is where I would take a family this weekend, with a lean towards Sunday’s better weather.
Free things to do in Hackney this weekend
You could fill both days without spending a penny beyond coffee and a bus fare. Here are more than twenty genuinely free things, most of them local rather than touristy.
Best food and drink this weekend
Five places locals actually use, chosen to cover the bases. I have skipped the obvious tourist names in favour of where I would genuinely send a friend.
New opening: All Kaps, Dalston Lane. New York-style pizza by the slice from the team that set up shop near Papo’s bagels by Hackney Downs. Order the pepperoni or the garlic-cream Goomba. Slices between three and five pounds, which makes it the best-value bite in this list.
Hidden gem: Cafe Cecilia, London Fields. Down a side street off Broadway Market, overlooking Regent’s Canal, with a short, confident menu that changes with the seasons. Whatever the eel or the deep-fried bread pudding is doing that day, order it. Mid-range, around 30 to 45 pounds a head, and worth booking.
Date night: The Golden Tooth, Newington Green. The new pub and dining room from the people behind the much-missed Papi, at the Newington Green end of Green Lanes. Oysters, sharing plates and proper Sunday roasts in a room built for lingering. The most exciting new opening in the wider area.
Neighbourhood favourite: Bambi, Hackney. Recently reopened and expanded into a restaurant-and-club hybrid, with a DJ on the decks and a kitchen led by Jamie Thorneycroft. Whipped ricotta with hot honey, trout tostadas, then dinner slides into drinks and dancing. Go when you want the night to keep going.
Budget: Dough Hands at All My Friends, Hackney Wick. Slice-shop pricing, canalside setting, regenerative-flour pizza. A whole 20-inch pie shared between friends is one of the cheapest good lunches in the borough. Pair with the Sunday session at Grow next door.
Best brunches this weekend
Hackney takes brunch seriously, for better and worse. A few honest pointers rather than a queue-for-ninety-minutes trap.
For a proper sit-down weekend brunch, the cafes around Broadway Market and London Fields are the obvious draw, and they get busy from 10am, so either go early or accept the wait as part of the ritual. In Stoke Newington, Church Street has a run of independent cafes that do a calmer, more local version of the same thing, ideal if you want eggs without elbows. Over in Clapton, the spots around Chatsworth Road and Lower Clapton Road lean neighbourhood rather than scene, which is exactly why regulars like them.
If you want bottomless, you will find it across Dalston and Hackney Central, usually around 30 to 45 pounds for a couple of hours of food and free-flowing drinks. My advice is to treat bottomless as a destination in itself rather than a precursor to a busy day, and to book, because the good ones sell out on a sunny Sunday. And if you just want the cheap, brilliant version, a fresh bagel from the arches by Hackney Downs eaten on a bench costs less than your coffee.
Coffee crawl of the week
A walkable Saturday route that strings together the borough’s coffee heartland, roughly an hour and a half of strolling if you do not dawdle, longer if you do it properly. Start in London Fields and finish in Dalston.
The whole thing works in reverse on Sunday too, though remember Broadway Market is a Saturday market, so swap it for Columbia Road if you are doing this on the Sunday.
Best pubs, beer gardens and bars
Hackney drinks well, from canal pubs to wine bars to the kind of corner boozer that has not changed in forty years. With Sunday looking sunny, the gardens are the move.
For canalside pints, the towpath between Haggerston and Victoria Park has a string of pubs and bars that fill up the moment the sun appears, so go early to bag an outside table. For a traditional pub with a proper garden, the back-street boozers of Clapton and Stoke Newington are your friends, less polished than the canal spots and all the better for it. Newington Green’s new arrival, the Golden Tooth, gives the area a serious food-and-drink anchor, and is the one I would book if I wanted a long Sunday lunch that turns into early-evening drinks.
For wine, the small natural-wine bars of Dalston and London Fields are where the borough shows off, usually with a short plates menu to match. For cocktails and a later start, Dalston again, where the bars stay open well past last orders elsewhere. And for craft beer, the Hackney Wick taprooms are the obvious pilgrimage, best combined with the Sunday session at Grow and a canalside slice. Pace yourself, the gardens have a way of swallowing an entire afternoon.
Markets worth visiting
Markets are the backbone of a Hackney weekend, and the borough is spoiled. Here is what is on which day, so you can plan around it.
Hidden gems of the weekend
The things you would only know about if you lived here, or read this guide.
One unusual event: Walking Scores for Hackney, the participatory Art Week walking project that hands you instructions and lets chance decide the rest. Free, gentle and quietly memorable.
One secret venue: Servant Jazz Quarters, a basement off Kingsland Road so small the performers are practically in your lap. Book, turn up, be transported.
One underrated restaurant: Cafe Cecilia, hiding down a side street off Broadway Market with a canal view and a menu that punches far above its postcode.
One independent shop: The record shops and bookshops of Stoke Newington Church Street, a stretch that has resisted the chains better than almost anywhere in inner London.
One overlooked walk: The Middlesex Filter Beds at Lea Bridge, a Victorian waterworks reclaimed by nature, tucked beside the River Lea and almost always empty. Pair it with Springfield Park for the view.
Community corner
Hackney runs on its volunteers and community spaces, and this weekend there are easy ways to get involved rather than just consume.
Hackney Art Week is, at heart, a community project: it was founded by two local residents to create opportunities for artists and to keep creative space alive in a borough where rent does its best to push it out. A run of limited-edition prints released during the festival raises money for Hackney Giving, the local fund that backs grassroots groups, so buying one is a low-effort way to put money back into the borough. The Dalston Eastern Curve Garden, the community-run green space off Ashwin Street, is also worth supporting simply by turning up, spending a little and seeing why locals fought so hard to protect it.
Beyond the festival, Hackney City Farm and the borough’s community gardens are always glad of volunteers, the libraries host community groups across the weekend, and the new council administration has made a point of asking residents to get involved in shaping local spaces. If you have an hour spare and want it to count, those are the doors to knock on.
Local news round-up
What residents are actually talking about, kept to the things that matter locally.
A new mayor at the Town Hall. Zoe Garbett of the Green Party was elected Mayor of Hackney in the May election and took office in mid-May, with the Greens also taking overall control of the council. It is the first time the borough has had a Green mayor, and the new administration has set out early priorities around housing, faster repairs and a review of who owns land and buildings across Hackney. Expect this to shape local decisions for the next four years.
Investment coming to Ridley Road. The long-running plan to upgrade Ridley Road Market and the surrounding Ashwin Street area continues, with funding aimed at better trader facilities, improved public spaces and protections for the market’s character. It is good news for one of the borough’s most important institutions.
Dalston’s town-centre future. The wider Dalston Plan sets out how the area grows while protecting what people value, from Ridley Road to the Eastern Curve Garden, and addressing antisocial behaviour around Gillett Square. Worth following if you live or spend time in Dalston.
New openings keep coming. On the food front, All Kaps has brought slice-shop pizza to Dalston Lane, Four Legs has opened at Newington Green, the Golden Tooth has given Green Lanes a serious new pub, and a new neighbourhood pub is taking shape on Stoke Newington Church Street. The independent scene is, for now, holding its ground.
Travel and transport
The one thing to know before Sunday, plus the usual advice.
Overground, Sunday morning. There are no Weaver line trains from Liverpool Street to Enfield Town, Cheshunt and Chingford until 10.15 on Sunday, with a reduced service after that. This affects Hackney Downs, London Fields, Rectory Road, Stoke Newington and Clapton. If you are travelling before mid-morning, allow extra time or use the buses, which run as normal.
Wider engineering works. Further weekend works are expected across parts of the Underground, Overground and DLR on both days, so check before you travel. The recent Tube strike disruption earlier in the week has now passed.
Getting around locally. Honestly, the best way to do Hackney at the weekend is on foot or by bike. The festival venues, markets and canal are clustered closely enough that walking between them is part of the pleasure, and you will see more of the borough than any train will show you. If you are coming from further out, Hackney Central, Dalston Junction and Dalston Kingsland are your main gateways, traffic and works permitting.
Weekend offers and deals
A few honest ways to make the weekend go further, without pretending every venue is running a sale.
The single best deal in Hackney this weekend is Hackney Art Week itself, where the overwhelming majority of exhibitions, installations and street events cost nothing. That alone can carry a full day. On top of that, the markets reward the patient: turn up to Columbia Road around 3pm on Sunday and the flower traders cut prices to clear stock, and the food stalls at Broadway and Netil often discount towards close.
For brunch and bottomless deals, the Dalston and Hackney Central spots are where to look, typically 30 to 45 pounds for a couple of hours, and booking online usually beats turning up. If you are planning a sit-down dinner at one of the busier restaurants, reserving a table in advance through a booking site is the simplest way to avoid a wait and sometimes unlocks an off-peak offer. Beyond that, the canal, the parks and the walks are free every day of the year, which remains the borough’s best-value attraction.
If I only had one day in Hackney
Make it Sunday, when the weather is on your side, and build the day around independent Hackney. Here is how I would spend it.
That’s your weekend
This is one of those weekends where the hard part is choosing. Hackney Art Week has handed you a borough full of free, genuinely good things to do, the weather is playing along by Sunday, and the food and drink scene keeps giving you new reasons to leave the house. My one piece of advice: do not over-plan it. Pick a neighbourhood, start with coffee, follow the noise and let the day take you. That is how Hackney is meant to be done.
Next weekend gets even bigger. LIDO Festival lands in Victoria Park from 12 to 14 June, with CMAT, Maribou State and Bombay Bicycle Club across the three days, and it is the kind of thing the whole borough plans around. Hackney Art Week also runs to the 14th, so the festival’s final weekend overlaps. We will have the full guide to both this time next week. Until then, get out there and enjoy it.
Hackney Local Guide. Written locally, checked carefully, published weekly.
