OPINION - Londoners, put the diary down. It's time to start being spontaneous

Listen carefully and you can hear it: as summer winds down, millions of Londoners are letting out collective a sigh of relief. As the days become shorter, our calendars feel lighter, and suddenly there’s a bit more room to breathe.

Summer is my favourite season, but in London it can turn into a planning marathon: dinners to book, festivals to attend and warm evenings to savour. There’s nothing like summer in London - but it’s also a bit manic.

I’m lucky enough to have worked and lived in cities around the world, and it will come as no surprise that I still think London is the best on the planet. But it has one major flaw: we, as Londoners, have totally lost the art of spontaneity.

One city I lived in was Berlin. I’ll never forget the end of an evening with one of my first German friends, when I automatically whipped my diary out to book in another meet up. They looked confused. “Just call,” they said. “I never plan anything more than a week in advance, I don’t know how I’ll feel. Let’s do it spontan.”

And that’s in organisation-mad Germany. A spontaneous approach to plans is a mindset that I’ve seen embraced the world over, from Melbourne to São Paulo, but one that feels almost radical when you’re standing in London. We are a city of social planners like nowhere else I’ve ever experienced, and I believe it’s to our detriment.

When I came home from nine months abroad a few years back, friends whisked me straight to the pub. As the night ended, talk turned to when we’d meet next. The answers were depressingly familiar: “Ooh, let me check - maybe Tuesday in 3 weeks?”

Some of this isn’t our fault. London’s restaurants, theatres and galleries are world class, and if you want a table or a ticket you need to book ahead. In fact, almost half of UK diners now book restaurants a full week in advance - so much for spontaneity, sometimes it’s literally immpossible.

But even where we do have choice, our diaries run the show. A simple catch-up can become an Olympic sprint of WhatsApping: cross-referencing gym classes, birthday dinners and book clubs until the stars align - sometime next month.

But how often has that date rolled around and, come lunchtime, you’ve thought: I’m not in the mood tonight, I’d rather curl up at home. You either cancel awkwardly, or go out when you’d really rather not. When we plan too far ahead, we are held hostage to fortune.

Gen Z in particular report significant anxiety around the idea of unplanned social interactions

Studies show spontaneity is good for us, and most of us feel better for it. A 2024 survey found more than half of Brits prefer impromptu plans because they’re more exciting, but a third say hectic schedules stop them from doing more of it.

Still, the opportunities for spontaneity are becoming rarer - perhaps through our own doing. One in three adults now panic when their phone rings unexpectedly, and among 18–34-year-olds nearly a quarter never answer calls at all, so my German friend would be left hanging. Gen Z in particular report significant anxiety around the idea of unplanned social interactions, such as bumping into someone in the street. If even picking up the phone feels daunting, no wonder a last-minute pint can feel difficult to arrange.

Covid definitely made things worse. As we saw less of each other, every interaction had to be planned. The chance encounter died, and the journey out of the pandemic came with mandates that we book ahead for restaurants and culture.

Even now, the city hasn’t quite recovered, and many of these behaviours have become habit. Fridays, once the natural night for after-work drinks, are now the quietest office days in the city, despite attempts by TfL to reverse that trend. Thursday might have taken Friday’s crown, but the real loss is an atmosphere that is harder to measure - that unspoken sense of momentum when the whole city seemed to tip towards the pub, the gig, the night out, together, and nobody needed to check their calendar first.

So much of modern life is already planned, tracked and optimised by technology, down to our steps and sleep. When we start running our social lives the same way, we lose the very thing that makes them worth having - the thrill of the unexpected.

The best memories I have of London weren’t scheduled: the last minute shows, the after-hours detours, the stranger’s flat that turned into a night of new friends. Leaving space in your calendar isn’t idleness; it’s an invitation. Yes, book the play you’ve been dying to see or the restaurant you’d regret missing. But leave a few nights free too.

As the autumn wind picks up, throw caution to it - and keep the door open to doing it ‘spontan’.

Tom Gill is a freelance writer