Gallery: a June selection (2026)

What is one to say about June, the time of perfect young summer, the fulfilment of the promise of the earlier months, and with as yet no sign to remind one that its fresh young beauty will ever fade.

Gertrude Jekyll

To be honest, it has been hard to find ‘perfect’ days this past June. It started too cool and too dull, then in the space of a few days transformed itself to an extreme heatwave. Temperatures hit 35 Celsius and the high humidity made life in London pretty tough. Fortunately it ended with some pleasantly moderate summer days, but another heatwave is apparently already on the way. Such is a our changing climate, unfortunately, and England wasn’t built for heat.

But the weather didn’t keep me at home, apart from on a couple of the very hottest days. I continued with my usual U3A activities and joined a new photography group, although we won’t have our first meeting until after the summer break, in September. My table tennis group challenged the other group in our U3A to a mini tournament. Unfortunately we lost (unsurprising perhaps as they’ve been playing for quite a bit longer) but we all had lots of fun and vowed to do it again. Time to get practising!

Other regular activities included my aquarobics class as well as a meeting of my main photography group in which we started to plan our September exhibition.

We had several meals out, including lunch with the small team running Plan Zheroes, thanking them for stepping up and taking over everything now Chris is no longer at the helm.

Some June highlights

Highlights this month included our short weekend break in Whitstable. It was lovely to be by the sea just as the heat started to build, but tough to return to a sweltering London. I’ll share more of Whitstable in future posts. However I couldn’t resist including a couple more sunsets here, one from each of the other two evenings we spent there, plus a few more other random shots to whet your appetite!

Another highlight was our tour behind the scenes at Charing Cross tube station, which I’ve described in a previous post.

We made our annual visit to the Astronomy Photographer of the Year exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich. In addition to being wowed by some of the images we had the opportunity to touch what the museum proclaimed, ‘the oldest object you will ever touch’. And with good reason; the chunk of the Gibeon meteorite on display is 4.5 billion (4,500,000,000) years old. A sign explained that the meteorite is believed to have hit the earth in prehistoric times. It was found in hundreds of fragments in Namibia. And we touched it – how cool is that?!

I went on a U3A outing to Reading, to see the excellent replica of the Bayeux Tapestry in the museum there (yes, the real thing is coming to London but is likely to be overcrowded and difficult to view properly). We had a really good guide who spent well over the allotted hour telling us the fascinating history of the replica and taking us through all the scenes.

At the cinema we saw Disclosure Day (which I thought was really good though I’ve seen mixed reviews). And I joined the Kew Gardens membership scheme, so we visited twice to see the current Henry Moore exhibition, with thirty of his sculptures installed throughout the grounds.

Finally, on one of the hottest days we had tickets for a VR experience showcasing life aboard the International Space Station, so we braved the Tube to Camden. The VR space was thankfully air-conditioned and we enjoyed ourselves, although it was less immersive than other VR events we’ve been to as it was a series of short 360 videos rather than a continuous experience.

Technical notes

I bought a new Panasonic Lumix compact camera this month, as my old one had a bad habit of switching to video without me asking for it. Because I insist on having a viewfinder and the newest compact Lumix model doesn’t have one (I hope Panasonic rethink that for the next one!), I bought a refurbished TZ90 and am very happy with it so far. I tried it out when I received it on some shots in the garden, and on a short walk around the Trafalgar Square area of London. I also took it to Whitstable as well as on the second visit to Kew. The remaining photos in the slideshow below were all taken on my phone.

As always most of my photos have been edited in Photoshop Elements, many also with Nik Color Efex and one with Nik Silver Efex.

And again as always, I’m linking my selection to Ju-Lyn’s and Brian’s Changing Seasons challenge, and to Natalie’s Monthly Wrap-up.

Please use the arrows to navigate the slideshow if you want to see all the images.

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