Quintessential London Christmas activities

Thought you’d gone a bit OTT with your Christmas decorations this year? Your jazzy tinsel collection is nothing compared to The Churchill Arms’ festive display, where the owners deck the pub’s exterior with around 90 Christmas trees and thousands of twinkling fairy lights. It doesn’t get much more festive than sipping a glass of mulled wine underneath the glowing trees. Just be glad you’re not paying the electricity bill.

The annual Gingerbread City exhibition has become one of London’s best Christmas attractions. The sweetest festive event you’ll find, it tasks leading architects and designers to use their building know-house and ditch their conventional building materials for dough bricks and sugar paste mortar. Expect over 70 gingerbread buildings, everything from doughy houses, train stations, markets, museums, schools and parks – making up impressive, tiny biscuit cities. This year the theme is ‘Playful City’, with all the sugary buildings designed in ways that show all the ways that urban living can be fun. Prepare for a feast for the eyes, but resist the urge to nibble! 

A surefire way to feel ridiculously festive is dropping by an evening of carols inside Sir Christopher Wren’s architectural masterpiece, aka St Paul’s Cathedral. The legendary London landmark hosts a series of mostly free and unticketed carol concerts each year. Visit over December for a huge range of concerts, including family-friendly services, Handel’s Messiah, and traditional carols. The big service of the year is the Midnight Mass – but be prepared to queue. Start practising your high notes now.

Even the most Christmas-averse individual cracks a blissed-out smile at the sight of a magical festive light display – and London is never in short supply of some thoroughly excellent ones. Every year the city’s many illuminations always help to liven things up a bit – including your walk home from work. This year, if you can snag a ticket, make your way to Kew Gardens for its annual display, or check out Regent Street’s glowing angels, which have been illuminating the thoroughfare each season since 1954. 

Every winter the Southbank Centre turns the banks of the Thames into a frosty wonderland, full of little wooden Alpine-style cabins selling gifts, warming drinks and snacks. This year,  snaffle down cheese fondue in a cosy igloo, tuck into a truffle burger and grab a glass of mulled wine while you look through gifts, jewellery and decorations made by independent craft traders and take in those sparking riverside views. 

A trip to Somerset House’s ice rink has become an annual Christmas tradition for many Londoners, and for good reason. Gliding (or, at least, attempting to) around the rink, gazing upon the Georgian architecture and 40ft Christmas tree feels like you’ve skated onto a movie set, ready to be watched by families settling in for their post-turkey food coma. There’s more to this rink than just skating, though. Its ever-popular Skate Lates are back, while the rinkside Skate Lounge and Jimmy Garcia’s pop-up restaurant The Chalet have returned to keep you fuelled up with Alpine-inspired refreshments. 

Find more places to go ice skating in London

’Tis the season for rampant consumerism, but if all the covetable clobber, shiny new tech and luxury knick-knacks are failing to fill the void, you’d do well to swing by the Choose Love store during your Christmas shopping spree. First set up in 2017 by Help Refugees, the clever pop-up doesn’t peddle fancy beauty products or the latest trainers. Instead, its shelves are filled with emergency blankets, children’s shoes, sleeping bags, toiletries, mobile phone credit, nappies, education supplies and other essentials needed by refugees around the world. Once you’ve bought what you can, the products are distributed via more than 80 projects that the humanitarian aid organisation works with across the globe. The pop-up is taking over a two-floored space on Regent Street and this year for the first time ever, you'll be able to find the Choose Love Coffee Cup, offering another cockle-warming way to support this charity's work.

One of London’s quirkiest Christmas traditions as well as being one of the oldest, the Peter Pan Cup has been contested on Christmas mornings since 1864. Strictly a spectator event – unless you happen to be a regular, not to mention hardy, member of the Serpentine Swimming Club – the name of the 100-yard swimming race in Hyde Park’s lido derives from the 1904 edition, when author and playwright Sir James Barrie presented the trophy to the winner. The race commences at 9am so head down to watch the brave folk go for it before you start opening your presents.

Get ready to ‘ooh’ and ‘ahh’ at Liberty’s annual Christmas window display. When you’re done with window shopping, treat yourself to a porcelain Liberty bauble (the store creates a new, limited-edition decoration every year) to hang from your festive fir.

Dennis Severs’ House – aka the ornate Huguenot house that sits on a Spitalfields backstreet – is a real-life time capsule. Part museum and part art piece, its rooms are still decorated in the manner of a family home between 1724 and 1914. Each Christmas, it becomes a seasonal hotspot and visitors are greeted with gingerbread figures and figgy pudding mix laid out in the 18th-century kitchen, Christmas trees wrapped up in decorations and a lavish holiday feast set out on the dining room table. Book an after-dark ‘Silent Night’ tour to see it glowing with candlelight. 

Being homeless in London is tough at any time of year, but it’s particularly difficult at Christmas. Do your bit for those less fortunate than you by volunteering with Crisis at Christmas. The charity now works all over the UK but it all started in London with an ‘open Christmas’ in 1971 which was run by 20 volunteers in a derelict church. Whether you want to roll your sleeves up in the kitchen, you’re a healthcare professional who can provide check-ups or you fancy running a workshop, there are loads of ways to help. The charity particularly needs night shift volunteers. Sign up to make someone else’s Christmas special.

The world of solid dairy has some truly devoted fans and they’ll do well to pay a visit to Borough Market’s annual Evening of Cheese, where they’ll find an enormous range of products from all over the world to tempt turophiles, including wines, ciders, chutneys and – obviously – absolutely loads of top quality cheese from around Europe. Looking to craft the perfect festive cheeseboard? Head down to get your paws on loads of tasty little samples, and some expert advice from the market’s artisanal traders. There’ll be plenty of drinks on hand to complete the gouty vibes, while the festivities will also feature the annual parmesan-cracking competition, where cheesemongers compete to cut open a huge wheel of the good stuff and arrange it in a tower. Be sure to nab a spot by the front to get first dips on the freebies afterwards!

Each year, Hyde Park gets transformed from pretty park to a massive snow-covered, Alpine-themed festive funscape. One of the largest Christmas events in the UK, and a major London tourist attraction for six weeks each winter, it’s expected to welcome a whopping 2.5 million visitors in its seventeenth year. You’ll find all manner of entertainment inside, including a traditional Christmas market, fairground rides, a Bavarian village where you can sink frothing steins or warm up with a steaming cup of mulled wine, a kid-friendly Santa Land with presents lying in wait at Santa’s Grotto, a real ice slide and the UK’s largest outdoor skating rink. Londoners scoff at its popularity – it’s busy, expensive and causes nightmare traffic all the way from Green Park to Knightsbridge – but you can’t claim to have ‘done’ Christmas in London until you’ve had a wander round the massive 350-acre site.

There are few venues as Christmassy as Royal Albert Hall – its iconic music hall evokes memories of Decembers past in chilly church halls, listening to organs play and choirs sing, no matter what time of year you visit. Stopping by ahead of Christmas, then, is a guaranteed way to get yourself in a festive mood and what better event to attend than one of its sing-along carol services. Warm up your pipes and practice your keys, even the most tone-deaf among us won’t be able to help joining in.

If hunkering down in the dark of the cinema watching movies sounds like the perfect way to get amped up for Christmas, then boy does the Prince Charles Cinema have a programme for you. This year, its festive slate is so jam-packed, you could spend every day from the start of December until Christmas Eve watching its screens, watching everything from the very seasonal The Muppet Christmas Carol, Home Alone, Scrooged and Elf. If Christmas movies aren’t quite your thing, there’s plenty else on offer, too, from Interstellar and The Godfather to The French Connection and Eyes Wide Shut. For the full list of screenings visit here.