1000 optimists walk into a park. Then a 'war on fun' begins

As I made my way over to Hyde Park on Saturday, I wasn’t exactly sure of what I might find. 

For a few weeks I’d been on the trail of London’s optimist movement, a burgeoning but loosely defined group that orbits the tech and start-up scene. While a recent YouGov poll found that over half of Londoners think the city has got worse over the past decade, these are people who claim to be more upbeat. 

But last Friday, the movement hit a roadblock. The Hyde Park event I was attending was the sweetly named “optimistic picnic”, billed by organisers as the “most optimistic gathering London has ever seen”. By Friday afternoon that feeling had started to unravel. Royal Parks warned that the event could not go ahead without a licence. Meanwhile, accusations were swirling on X, spread by strange, pseudonymous accounts — which some attendees theorised could be a Russian influence operation — posting that masked men had taken over this otherwise peaceful corner of the park. 

Organisers encouraged the 1,072 listed attendees to show up anyway. I was already thinking of attending before the drama, way before the picnic became such a battleground. That so many Londoners were drawn in by the vague idea of optimism seemed to say something about the mood of the city, and I wanted to understand whether the people at the centre of this movement had much sway. 

Then I met the “nightmare destroyer”, and I realised just how little I knew.

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