Chelsea returns to the Royal Hospital from 18 to 22 May 2027, with the first two days reserved for RHS members and the public admitted from the Thursday.
The Royal Horticultural Society’s Great Spring Show moved into the grounds of the Royal Hospital Chelsea in 1912 and has been held there every May since, in the old soldiers’ garden beside the river. It is still formally the Great Spring Show, though nobody has called it that in a century. Crowding became so severe by the 1970s that the Society opened the gates at eight in the morning, and in 1988 it capped attendance at 40,000 a day, a reduction of 90,000 across the week.
What separates it from every other flower show is that the gardens are built and then destroyed. Designers spend a year and a considerable budget raising a mature garden on flat ground in three weeks, it is judged, several hundred thousand people file past it, and then it is taken apart and the plants are sold. The Floral Marquee at the centre works the other way, nurseries showing what they have spent decades breeding.
The 2027 show runs from Tuesday 18 to Saturday 22 May at the Royal Hospital. Members of the Royal Family attend, as they have almost every year since the show arrived. The medals awarded on the Tuesday morning decide which gardens the rest of the week talks about, and a gold at Chelsea is the highest thing a British garden designer can win.