Country Life 2 July 2025

Country Life 2 July 2025 celebrates the British seaside lido, the life you'll find in graveyards and the history of picnics.

Country Life Cover 2 July 2025
Country Life's cover for 2 July 2025, featuring the view across Pedn Vounder Beach towards Porthcurno in Cornwall, photographed by Carlo Irek / 4Corners Images.
(Image credit: Future)

Here's a look at some of what you'll find inside:

Come on in, the water’s lovely

The seaside lido is enjoying a fresh wave of popularity a century and more after its first appearance on the British coast. Kathryn Ferry dives in

Spreads from Country Life 2 July 2025

(Image credit: Future)

Winging it

Watch out, watch out, there’s a thief about! Mark Cocker warns that no undergarment is safe from the resurgent red kite, a bird soaring back from near extinction

Travel

• Christopher Wallace checks in to a new opening in Marrakech, Morocco’s Mecca for luxury hotels

• Teresa Levonian Cole blazes a trail in the Spanish Pyrenees

• Pamela Goodman gets on her bike to explore the Welsh border country

Spreads from Country Life 2 July 2025

(Image credit: Future)

Life’s a pretty picnic

Deborah Nicholls-Lee shares a hamper-full of tasty morsels from the long and varied history of alfresco dining on canvas

Ricardo Afonso’s favourite painting

The musical-theatre actor chooses an ‘otherworldly’ work that stirs complex emotions

The legacy

Amie Elizabeth White salutes Sir James Clark Ross, the vastly experienced naval officer who discovered Antarctica in 1841

In God’s acre we trust

Laura Parker learns how the absence of interference over centuries enabled our wildlife-rich graveyards to become a ‘Noah’s Ark of species’

Spreads from Country Life 2 July 2025

(Image credit: Future)

Keeping a low profile

The countryside is littered with storm-damaged trees that simply refuse to die. Jack Watkins celebrates great arboreal survivors

The good stuff

Hetty Lintell puts her best foot forward with a selection of sandals

Interiors

Arabella Youens commends an elegant townhouse kitchen and Amelia Thorpe picks out rhubarb accessories to brighten the home

London Life

• Will Hosie assesses the cost of our partying in the parks

• How the style set are reaffirming that west is best

Lost, but not forgotten

George Plumptre applauds the masterful restoration of the Arts-and-Crafts garden at Knowle House in East Sussex

Spreads from Country Life 2 July 2025

(Image credit: Future)

Arts & antiques

Laura Dadswell believes her pair of 18th-century Venetian mirrors is the fairest of them all, as she tells Carlo Passino

And much more

Country Life is unlike any other magazine: the only glossy weekly on the newsstand and the only magazine that has been guest-edited by HRH The King not once, but twice. It is a celebration of modern rural life and all its diverse joys and pleasures — that was first published in Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee year. Our eclectic mixture of witty and informative content — from the most up-to-date property news and commentary and a coveted glimpse inside some of the UK's best houses and gardens, to gardening, the arts and interior design, written by experts in their field — still cannot be found in print or online, anywhere else.