Six classic car events to put in your June 2026 diary

Table of Contents

• The opening weekend: Tatton Park and MotoFest
• London Concours: three days in the City
• Cholmondeley Pageant of Power
• Bo'ness Hillclimb Revival
• National Mini Day at Beaulieu
• Heveningham Concours
• And the auction calendar isn't asleep either

June is the month the season finally hits its stride. The Concours of Elegance and Goodwood circus are still a few weeks off, the Pebble Beach contenders are still being polished, and there's a calmer, more local rhythm to most of the field. The big June fixtures tend to be the ones that reward turning up early with a flask, not the ones that need a six-month wait for a wristband.

We've added the full June calendar to our club events page over the last fortnight. Here are the six we'd ring-fence the diary for.

The opening weekend: Tatton Park and MotoFest

The season's first proper mass-participation date is Saturday 6 June at Tatton Park in Cheshire. The Classic & Performance Car Spectacular has grown into one of the largest open shows in the North West, with more than 2,000 cars across 90-plus club stands spread across the parkland by the hall. It has the unfussy character that the polished concours circuit has slightly lost — owners turning up in cars they actually drive, conversations that wander into restoration weeks rather than auction estimates.

The same weekend, Coventry shuts the ring road for MotoFest Coventry. It's free, it's city-centre, and the classic display runs alongside circuit demonstrations on a closed-road street stage that no other UK event quite replicates. If you're in the Midlands, the temptation is to try and do both. We'd pick Tatton on the Saturday and MotoFest on the Sunday and live with the mileage.

London Concours: three days in the City

The first big-budget event of the month is the London Concours at the Honourable Artillery Company, running 9 to 11 June. The half-acre lawn in the middle of EC1 is one of the unlikeliest concours backdrops in Europe, and the three-day format means each day carries a separate marque or class theme — Porsche, Jaguar XK and a supercar showcase across this year's calendar. Tickets aren't cheap but the curation is consistently among the strongest in the country, and the venue's bar and food set-up keeps it feeling more like a garden party than a public exhibition.

For anyone who's only been once, the trick is to ignore the gala day and book midweek. Wednesday afternoon is the quietest, and most of the owners are still there talking to anyone who looks genuinely interested.

Cholmondeley Pageant of Power

The Cholmondeley Pageant of Power has earned its place as one of the genuinely different fixtures on the British summer calendar. The grounds of Cholmondeley Castle in Cheshire host three days, 12 to 14 June, of cars, bikes and powerboats taking turns on a half-mile parkland sprint and the estate's lake. It is unapologetic about being a family event as well as an enthusiasts' one. The supercar paddock, F1 demonstration laps and a hovercraft battle in the same afternoon programme is the kind of mix that shouldn't work and somehow does.

If you have children old enough to behave but young enough to still find an F1 car genuinely loud, this is the one we'd lean towards.

Bo'ness Hillclimb Revival

For Scotland, Bo'ness Hill Climb Revival on Saturday 13 June is a fixture worth a long drive. The Bo'ness hill outside Linlithgow is Scotland's oldest permanent motorsport venue — Jim Clark drove it, and the meeting still keeps a generous Clark tribute element each year. Timed runs by pre-1968 cars and motorcycles, a static show of road classics on the paddock lawns, and the Firth of Forth visible on a clear day from the top of the climb.

The atmosphere is closer to a Scottish village fair with a motorsport problem than to a manicured concours. We mean that as a compliment.

National Mini Day at Beaulieu

Beaulieu's Simply series is one of the better marque-rally formats in the country, and National Mini Day on 14 June is the biggest single day in the calendar this year. It is also the Mini Cooper Register's 40th birthday, which the club is marking with a dedicated Concours d'Elegance class alongside the standard parkland gathering of every era of Mini. Expect Mk1 Cooper Ss, late ADO15 saloons, Innocenti and Cooper Works conversions, the Issigonis era restomods, and the inevitable lash-up of Minis turned into pickups, race cars and beach buggies.

For anyone with a passing interest in the model — even outside the owners' community — this is the year to make the trip.

Heveningham Concours

The month closes properly with the Heveningham Concours of Elegance on Saturday 27 June. Held in the Capability Brown landscape at Heveningham Hall in Suffolk, the concours sits inside a country fair, and the gathering of roughly 50 of the world's finest motor cars is paired with a fly-in of historic propeller aircraft on the grass strip beside the field. The mix of the two — vintage automotive and pre-war aviation in the same eyeline — is the thing that keeps people coming back to a venue that's an awkward drive from anywhere.

If London Concours is the urban high-curation gala, Heveningham is the rural one. Both are worth doing once; together they bookend the kind of month-long stretch you can't quite replicate anywhere else in Europe.

And the auction calendar isn't asleep either

If you have any spare diary capacity at all, the auction houses are unusually busy this month too. H&H Classics return to Kelham Hall on 17 June with a 1965 Ferrari 330 GT 2+2 and a 1950 Jaguar XK120 Roadster among the headline lots. Anglia Car Auctions' two-day classic sale in King's Lynn from 20 June is led by a left-hand-drive 1959 Aston Martin DB4 Series 2 with a quarter-of-a-million-pound estimate. And the Dore & Rees Concours des Légendes at Wilton House over 19 to 21 June is the marquee fine motor cars sale of the month.

The full list is on our auctions page, which we refreshed at the same time as the events calendar. Between the two there are around forty UK fixtures in June worth looking at. Six is just a starting point — you'd struggle to do them all even if you tried.

See you in the paddock.

— James Williams