Waggonfest beer and food festival

The Waggon and Horses on Lawrence Street is hosting Waggonfest, its first beer festival over a Bank Holiday weekend. It kicks off at 12 noon on Friday 28 August and runs through the long weekend, with the pub filling up with Yorkshire breweries, barbecue and live music. If you're in York for the holiday, it's a straightforward spot to settle into for a few days.

The festival is the idea of landlady Karen Crombie, who took over the pub last year and wanted to do something a bit different for the Bank Holiday. The Waggon and Horses is already a known quantity for real ale fans in the city — it was named The Press Best Pub 2024 and is part of York CAMRA's Ale Trail, so a beer festival fits right in. The Waggonfest programme feeds into that trail, too, which makes it easy to work into a wider crawl if that's your plan.

On the beer front, the focus is on Yorkshire breweries, so you'll find a good spread of regional ales on tap. Alongside the beer, there's barbecue and live music throughout the weekend, so it works as a full afternoon or evening out rather than just a quick pint. It's the kind of thing that's easy to drop into for an hour or stay at for the whole afternoon.

It all starts at 12 noon on Friday 28 August at The Waggon and Horses, Lawrence Street, York, and runs across the Bank Holiday weekend.