The Counter: Which Dining-Forward UK Weekend Getaway Is Right For You?

The Counter is a weekly column from award-winning restaurant writer and broadcaster Jimi Famurewa. Sign up to get The Counter first, sent to your inbox every Wednesday.

Hello team.

How are your heatwave-induced derangement levels? London’s ability to collectively lose its mind in the face of a prolonged period of warm weather always manages, somehow, to be both comfortingly predictable and freshly ridiculous in new and unexpected ways. Park bins overflow with pizza boxes, picky bits detritus and drained Buzzballs. Lime bike pelotons of half-naked friends wobble their way to beer gardens and restaurant terraces. Arsenal fans, sunburned and wine-flushed, have essentially been triumphantly drunk for more than a week.

If you are anything like me then, at this point – as people settle in, retrieve tower fans from storage cupboards and dust down annual debates about climate change/Britain’s lack of air conditioning – you will be thinking longer term. You will be thinking, specifically, of making plans for the sort of weekend getaway that promises cooling coastal breezes, a bracing body of water, covetable plates of exceptional food, and a bit of a necessary change of scenery. But where to head? Having spent much of the last decade or so trying out all manner of different gastronomy-forward short trips, I feel oddly well-placed to act as a kind of London staycation genie.

Here, then, are a handful of some of my favourite, relatively capital-adjacent spots, with intel on where to stay, what to do and, of course, where to eat. Some were initially based on complimentary press invites. Many more are the product of repeat trips with family or friends when I have happily spent my own money. All of them will make you feel that, spiritually and physically, you are very far from London’s overheated, madding crowds.

The helter-skeltering, occasionally contentious cultural regeneration of Margate is so well-established that to tentatively call it Hackney on Sea feels almost boomer-ish. But the decade-plus of undulating migratory flow from London down to parts of the Kent coast – which frequently shifts from a glut to a trickle, and has more recently diverted artists and creatives to Dover – has yielded a relatively mature and varied scene. Operations like The Wellington, Sete and Sargasso all appeal, and have traceable DNA to the likes of The Marksman, Bistrotheque and Brawn. Yet I’m especially fond of stalwarts such as Cliffs and Forts, plus the charmingly off-beam bar, Off Licence. Visit the Shell Grotto, stay at the Fort Road Hotel and, if you can, detour to Broadstairs for ice-cream in Morelli’s immaculately preserved time warp of a 1930s gelateria.

If last year felt like the high tide-mark for the popularity of the Cotswolds – that amorphous, sprawled mass of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire countryside that’s especially appealing to wealthy Americans – then summer 2026 will surely only repeat and intensify that pattern. So where to start and where to skip? Look, I do not claim to be an expert on every pretty limestoned corner of the region. It is probably worth researching some of the standard moves (The Cow and The Double Red Duke; a gawp at all the muddied Porsches and Land Rovers at Daylesford; a wangled invite to Soho Farmhouse if possible) and ticking off which feel most palatable. But, after a recent trip, I’m now going to be endlessly recommending a stop-off at The Cotswold Guy: an intoxicatingly cottagecore farm shop and cafe in the handsome, relatively serene village of Guiting Power. The fluffy house-made doughnuts are gobsmackingly good. The hulking, peppery sausage rolls are Beckham-approved. And the bacon-dusted tater tots taste like high-grade Frazzles. Even better: there’s a bookable apartment upstairs.

Stark, arid and littered with rusted vehicles marooned on the shingly shoreline – the area around Dungeness (often erroneously described as Britain’s only official desert) is maybe not for everyone. But, having been there at least once a year since 2021, I think I’m living evidence of the particular spell that this beguilingly bleak connective patch of Romney Marsh and the East Sussex coast can cast. It’s especially good, I think, for newish parents after a mix of kid-friendly activities – there is a miniature railway, a wild animal reserve at nearby Port Lympne and faded seaside kitsch in Dymchurch – and design-forward spaces, sprinkled with serious culinary intent. Stay at one of Cabu’s faintly Nordic beachside cabins (think a less intense Soho House), rove out towards The Fig and The Gallivant in Rye, and make sure you get peerless seafood and golden-fried smashed potatoes at the Dungeness Snack Shack.

Look, it’s very hard to sincerely recommend a trip to the North Norfolk coast without inadvertently channelling the absurdist, self-important drone of Steve Coogan’s alter ego. But it can’t be helped. Having perhaps once felt a little remote and unglamorous for a London getaway (a train from Liverpool Street to Sheringham takes around three hours), this haunch of coastal East Anglia seems to be finally getting the traction it deserves. Work your way down from the vast, picture-perfect span of Holkham Beach and, from local rhubarb and custard lollies to fish and chips at No1 Cromer, there is all sorts to tempt you. But I’d particularly nudge you towards the rugged, refined food (and characterful lodgings) at The Maltings in Weybourne, people-watching the wax jacket brigade in Holt and, if you can bag a reservation, the private spa rooms and outrageously good, fittingly porcine breakfasts at The Pigs in Edgefield.

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