Nobody Expected A Cricket Tour Game To Reveal Canberra’s Coolest City Escape
When England’s Ashes tour game in Canberra hit the headlines this week — with former captain Alec Stewart backing the team’s decision to “stick to their guns” over preparation — most people were talking about squad selections, bowling workloads, and tour politics. But buried in that same storyline is something travel lovers should be paying attention to: Canberra is suddenly on the global stage again.
And here’s the plot twist — while the cricket world debates tactics, the Australian capital has quietly become one of the most surprising mini city escapes you can build an entire trip around, even if you originally came just for the match at Manuka Oval.
If the Ashes chatter has put “Canberra” back in your news feed today, let’s turn that into an excuse to slip out of the stadium and into the city. Here’s how a test warm‑up game can turn into a five‑part urban escape you didn’t see coming.
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1. From Manuka Oval To Midnight Walks Around Lake Burley Griffin
You step out of Manuka Oval under a bruised pink sky, the floodlights still buzzing behind you, the chatter about England’s “sticking to their guns” fading with every step. Ten minutes later you’re no longer thinking about batting orders — you’re standing at the edge of Lake Burley Griffin, and Canberra has gone soft and cinematic.
The lake is where the city unclenches after big events. Cyclists glide past in hi‑vis streaks, runners pad along the water, and the skyline is just low enough that the sky feels huge. Start at Commonwealth Place and walk towards Kings Avenue Bridge. The water mirrors the lights of the National Carillon and the distant outline of Parliament House, turning the whole scene into a kind of living postcard that no broadcast camera quite captures.
If you’re in town on a match day, this is the perfect decompression loop: 30–45 minutes of slow walking, replaying key overs in your head while the city quietly shows you why locals love living here. Come just after stumps and you’ll catch that liminal time when the crowd disperses and Canberra belongs to the joggers, dog walkers, and a few wandering cricket tragics in slightly sunburnt replica shirts.
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2. A Museum Crawl That Feels Like A Time‑Out From The Ashes
With cricket making headlines and commentators like Alec Stewart dominating the sports pages, Canberra can sound like a single‑sport town this week. But wake up the morning after the game and swap the scorecards for galleries, and the city changes tempo completely.
Start at the National Gallery of Australia, where the building itself feels like a brutalist bunker hiding an entire universe of art. One moment you’re in front of a Jackson Pollock, the next you’re stepping into James Turrell’s Skyspace, watching the Canberra sky framed like a painting. If you’re here while a big touring exhibition is in town (which often overlaps with the Australian summer and cricket season), you’ll find yourself sharing the space with locals, diplomats, and visiting fans who misread “rain delay” as “museum opportunity.”
From there, walk or e‑scooter to the nearby National Portrait Gallery. This is where Australia’s story is told through faces — athletes, politicians, artists, First Nations leaders. It’s an oddly grounding experience if you’ve spent the previous day in a crowd chanting for wickets. Suddenly, the drama of one tour game feels small compared with the long arc of stories that built the country hosting it.
Pro tip: On hot match days, use the museums as your air‑conditioned half‑time — dip in for an hour before or after play, then resurface just in time for the evening buzz.
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3. Braddon Nights: Where The Cricket Crowd Turns Into A Street Party
While pundits on BBC and Sky dissect England’s choices in Canberra, a very different post‑match analysis is happening in Braddon — over craft beers, natural wine, and truffle fries.
Braddon is Canberra’s “how is this the same city?” moment. Once a slightly industrial strip of workshops, it’s now lined with small bars, ramen joints, and coffee spots that take their beans far more seriously than any drinks vendor at the ground. On a night after a big match or tour game, the area quietly fills with people still wearing team colours, mixed in with locals who barely glanced at the scoreboard.
You might start at a brewpub, where the chalkboard list of IPAs is longer than the scorecard from the day’s play. At the next bar, someone at the table beside you is streaming highlights of a dropped catch; at another, a group is planning a weekend hike in nearby Namadgi National Park. The entire neighbourhood hummed through Covid‑era domestic tourism and has only sharpened its identity since — more food trucks, more pop‑ups, more reasons to walk slowly and keep saying, “Let’s just check out one more place.”
If you’re following the Ashes news this week from your couch in another country, picture this: somewhere in Braddon, as you read about Stewart backing England, a group of travelling fans are raising one last round and deciding whether to extend their stay by “just one more day.”
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4. A Parliament House Sunrise That Puts The Headlines In Perspective
Every Ashes tour year, Canberra pops into the media cycle as a supporting character — a tour game here, a training camp there, a line or two about conditions. But the city’s real showstopper happens quietly at dawn, when the hill behind Parliament House becomes one of the most surprising sunrise spots in any capital city.
Set your alarm brutally early. Walk or rideshare up to Parliament House while the sky is still a vague grey. The building, which you’ve probably only seen as a backdrop on news packages about politics or the day’s big sporting debate, feels different in person: softer, greener, half‑hidden under its grassy roof. Walk around the precinct, then turn back towards the city as the sun pulls colour into the landscape — Lake Burley Griffin in the middle distance, the Brindabella Ranges on the horizon.
In the same news cycle that’s asking whether England were right to “stick to their guns” before the big series, this view reminds you that Canberra’s identity isn’t just politics and pitches. It’s this strange combination of capital‑city institutions and wide‑open sky, where a sunrise is enough to make you forget about batting collapses and net sessions for a moment.
Bring coffee, a light jacket (mornings can be cool even in Australian summer), and something analog — a notebook, a paperback. It’s the kind of place that makes you want to write down the fact that you were here at all.
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5. The Quiet Escape: Suburban Cafés And Bushland Just Beyond The Scoreboard
One of the most disarming things about Canberra, especially if you land here because of cricket, is how quickly the city dissolves into bushland. Media coverage this week might frame it as “England’s tour stop in Canberra,” but if you zoom out just a few kilometres, you’re in a different story altogether.
Start your morning in a suburban café — somewhere in Kingston, Manuka, or inner‑north suburbs like Ainslie — where the barista is more interested in your weekend plans than your opinion on the batting order. There’s a good chance the person at the next table works at one of the national institutions you visited yesterday, or has just knocked off a night shift as a nurse, or, yes, was at the game with you and is still slightly hoarse from appealing every half‑chance.
Then, drive or bus out towards the fringes: the Australian National Botanic Gardens for a gentle hillside wander through native plants, or even further to Tidbinbilla or the edge of Namadgi, where kangaroos become as common as parked cars. These places don’t care what Alec Stewart said on BBC, or whether the match had first‑class status. They are the longer story around Canberra — the reason locals can finish a workday in a suit and be on a hiking trail twenty minutes later.
For city‑escape lovers, this mix is the magic: one foot in a capital city with embassies and galleries, the other only a short hop from a trail where your phone finally stops buzzing with live‑score notifications.
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Conclusion
This week, most people seeing “Canberra” in the headlines are doing it through the narrow lens of an Ashes tour game and whether England were right to “stick to their guns.” But hidden inside that sports story is a perfect invitation: to treat the Australian capital not just as a warm‑up venue, but as a fully‑formed city escape in its own right.
Walk the lake after stumps. Trade the commentary box for galleries. Let Braddon reset your idea of a “quiet” government town. Watch the sun rise over Parliament House, then vanish into bushland that feels hours from anywhere.
By the time the series moves on and the headlines follow it, you’ll have something better than a hot take on team selection: you’ll have your own Canberra story — the kind of city escape that starts with a cricket fixture and ends with you secretly planning when you can come back, even when there’s no match on at all.