Okay, it’s official: schools are out – or very nearly – and is anyone else wondering how to fill the next seven weeks of disrupted schedules? Whether you have primary or secondary-age children to entertain, or you’re a grown-up with a bit of annual leave to use, there’s an eclectic mix of things happening around the borough this summer – many of them free.

From rooftop beaches and roaming spacecraft to contemporary art, family films, comedy and Pride, here are a few of the things we’d like to fit into our summer diaries.

Catch a family film

David Lean Cinema is teaming up with Croydon Family Hubs for a series of Thursday morning Family Film Club screenings over the holidays.

The programme begins with Zootropolis 2 on 23 July, followed by animated fantasy Arco on 30 July, Minions & Monsters on 13 August and Toy Story 5 on 20 August. All four screenings begin at 11am and tickets cost £6.

Find out more and book through the David Lean Cinema website.

Images courtesy of David Lean Cinema

Head to the beach – without leaving Croydon

The beach is returning to the rooftop of Centrale for a third summer, opening daily from 7 to 31 August.

Costa del Croydon will once again bring sand, splash zones, activities, entertainment and refreshments to the top of the shopping centre, with views across south London thrown in. There are two free sessions each day, from 11.30am to 3pm and 3.30pm to 7pm.

New for this year is The Beach Club, a series of adults-only Thursday evening sessions featuring DJs, live entertainment, cocktails, street food and themes ranging from dancehall to drag.

Costa del Croydon is free, with advance booking available alongside a limited number of walk-in spaces. Find out more on the Centrale and Whitgift website.

See Grayson Perry in Croydon

While everyone else had their hopeful football faces turned towards their televisions on Wednesday evening, we were at the opening of a new Grayson Perry exhibition at the Museum of Croydon.

The Essex House Tapestries: The Life of Julie Cope brings two enormous tapestries to the museum, telling the story of Julie Cope – a fictional Essex everywoman created by Perry.

The works follow Julie’s life from her birth during the Canvey Island floods of 1953 to her untimely death on a Colchester street. Drawing on English ballads and folktales, Perry uses her imagined biography to explore what he calls the “trials, tribulations, celebrations and mistakes of an average life”.

On loan from the Crafts Council Collection, this is the first time the tapestries have been displayed in a London public museum. They really do need to be seen in person to appreciate their scale, detail and humour.

The Essex House Tapestries: The Life of Julie Cope runs at the Museum of Croydon until 19 September 2026 and is free for Croydon residents. Find out more.

Image detail: A Perfect Match, Grayson Perry, 2015. On loan from the Crafts Council Collection: 2016.18. Acquired with Art Fund support (with a contribution from The Wolfson Foundation) and a donation from Maylis and James Grand. Courtesy the artist, Paragon | Contemporary Editions Ltd and Victoria Miro. © Grayson Perry

Find a little Creative Health

While you’re at the museum, it’s also worth popping next door to see Creative Health, which explores how art, culture and creativity can support our health and wellbeing.

At the heart of the exhibition are case studies from 14 community groups across the borough, broadly arranged around seven themes including young people, music, dance, dementia, visual art and the outdoors. There are interactive elements too, from weaving to a rainbow wall where visitors can add their own thoughts about finding calm in the storm.

If you’re looking for a bit of joy and inspiration this summer, we thoroughly recommend a visit. Creative Health runs until 22 August 2026 at the Museum of Croydon on Level 1 of Croydon Clocktower. The museum is open Wednesday to Saturday, 10am – 4.30pm. Read our previous feature to find out more.

Accept a creative mission

We’re also super curious about The Curiosity Rover, which lands in Surrey Street this afternoon before travelling around Croydon throughout the summer.

Part art studio, part community hub and part roaming spacecraft, the Rover is the creation of Croydon-born artist Sam Furness, founder of Creative Quests. Visitors can collect a series of creative missions designed to help them explore the borough and see familiar places through fresh eyes.

A mission might ask you to write a poem, make a drawing, take a photograph or record a message. Some will take only five minutes, while others may send you deeper into Croydon’s streets. The challenges are deliberately open to interpretation, making them accessible to adventurers of all ages.

The Rover launches at Surrey Street Market from 4pm to 7pm today, Friday 17 July. It will then appear at locations including North End, Ruskin Square, Croydon Clocktower, The Queen’s Gardens and Surrey Street until 13 September.

See the full list of dates and locations on the Culture Croydon website.

Image courtesy of Culture Croydon, by The Highest Finca

Celebrate Croydon Pride

Don’t forget that Croydon Pride returns on Saturday 15 August. After the parade, this year’s main celebration will take place at Boxpark rather than Wandle Park – and we’re personally looking forward to it being more central, as well as offering a little more shade and shelter from whatever the British summer decides to throw at us.

The programme promises live singers, dancers and drag performers, alongside Boxpark’s food traders and bars. Pride will run from 1pm to 11.30pm, with further events expected at venues around the town centre.

Entry is free, but you need to register for a ticket in advance. As Boxpark has a fixed capacity, ticket holders may still need to queue if the venue becomes full.

Play your cards right

Everyone’s favourite board game café, The Ludoquist, has created a special children’s menu for the summer and is running family gaming sessions throughout the holidays – useful for rainy days, very hot days or any day when you’d prefer somebody else’s table to be covered in game pieces.

For grown-up gamers, the café is also hosting a sci-fi quiz on Saturday (18 July). If you know your Trek from your Wars, your Babylon 5 from your Stargate and your robots from your Transformers, this may be the quiz for you. Entry costs £2 per person, with teams of up to five.

Keep an eye on The Ludoquist website for its summer programme.

Step into a prefab paradise

Turf Projects’ summer exhibition, Prefab Paradise, invites visitors to journey through imagined worlds and speculative futures.

Created by artists Amy J Wilson and Meitao Qu, the installation combines miniature dioramas with immersive digital technology. A central human habitat is surrounded by rainforest, grassland, ocean and desert biomes, which visitors can explore from a first-person perspective using digital goggles and projection.

Drawing on everything from Cold War experiments and proposed megastructures to the underwater city of Rapture in the videogame BioShock and the familiar Windows XP desktop landscape, the exhibition asks whether utopia can ever be one fixed idea.

Work created with Art Press and Croydon School of Art students through model-making, digital world-building and 3D printing workshops also forms part of the installation.

Prefab Paradise runs until 26 September at Turf Projects, 46–47 Trinity Court in the Whitgift Centre. Entry is free. Find out more.

Venture just over the border

If art is your thing – as it is ours – it may also be worth travelling just over the borough boundary to Bethlem Gallery for its new exhibition, Unfurling: Coming Out of Isolation.

The exhibition is part of a year-long collaboration between Bethlem Gallery and Fountain House Gallery and Studio in New York. It features work created through online sessions bringing artists from the UK and New York together, alongside collaborations and pieces inspired by the process.

Unfurling: Coming Out of Isolation runs from 22 July to 5 September. Bethlem Gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday, from 9.30am to 5pm, and admission is free. Find out more.

Image detail: Karen Gormandy, The Garden of Shame. Courtesy the artist, Bethlem Gallery and Fountain House

Pick up some comics and zines

The South London Comics and Zine Fair returns to Stanley Arts for its fifth instalment on Sunday (19 July).

The free event brings together small-press zines, comics, graphic novels and picture books, with exhibitors ranging from established publishers to people tabling their work for the first time.

Alongside the stalls, there will be a free programme of talks and panels, a communal drawing table, a library and information hub, and a dedicated room of first-time exhibitors hosted by WIP Comics.

The South London Comics and Zine Fair takes place from midday to 6pm at Stanley Arts. Find out more.

Image courtesy of South London Comics and Zine Fair

Laugh your way through a weekend

If comedy is more your thing than art and illustration, Stanley Arts is hosting a new two-day comedy festival on Saturday 25 and Sunday 26 July.

Created by Daniel Kitson, Stand Up at Stanley features 28 work-in-progress shows spread across four performance spaces. Many of the comedians will be preparing to take their shows to the Edinburgh Fringe, making this a chance to see new material while it is still being tested, tweaked and occasionally held together with string.

The line-up includes Rose Matafeo, Nish Kumar, Mark Thomas, Lou Sanders, Rob Auton, Laura Smyth, Elis James, Alison Spittle, Celya AB and Daniel Kitson himself. Tim Key and Sam Campbell will headline the Main Hall on Saturday and Sunday evening respectively.

Work-in-progress tickets cost £8 in advance, with evening shows priced at £15. Once on site, anyone holding a full-price ticket can book additional work-in-progress shows for £5, subject to availability.

See the full timetable and book through the Stanley Arts website.

That should keep us busy for at least two of the weeks. We’ll see you somewhere between a rooftop beach, a roaming spacecraft and a room of giant Grayson Perry tapestries.

Posted by Julia