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 ‘Recycled City’, with all the sugary buildings designed in ways that show how recycling can be innovative and exciting. There’ll also be daily gingerbread house-building workshops (£90). Prepare for a feast for the eyes, but resist the urge to nibble! 

This Christmas will be the 25th Hackney Empire panto since the iconic east London venue turned back into a theatre after a stint as a bingo hall. Well over half of those productions have involved Clive Rowe, who is back for 2025 as director and as London’s most iconic dame. This year, expect the timeless tale of Dick and his cat to be interpreted with plenty of well-timed gags, toe-tapping songs and some expert Damery from Rowe. This panto has become a London fave thanks to its good-natured local focus and a real sense of grounding in east London.

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. But the greatest delight of the programme? Its series of sing-along Muppet Christmas Carol screenings. Everyone gets dressed up, everyone belts out the lyrics to ‘It Feels Like Christmas’ (not to mention the 30 second scat song) and everyone leaves with a heart full of Christmas nostalgia. Ahhhhh.

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, with DJ takeovers from Rinse FM, Daytimers’ Rohan Rakhit, Dankie Sounds, and Jay Jay Revlon, while pop-up gourmet dining spot The Chalet and Whispering Angel’s skate lounge have returned to keep you fuelled up. 

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. After several successful years on nearby Carnaby Street, the pop-up is moving into a department store-sized space on Regent Street for its biggest ever edition this year. Head down to check out a beautifully-designed space filled with thought-provoking installations from the Empathy Museum, to meet the usual roster of surprise celebrity volunteers working on the tills, and to do your bit to spread some Christmas cheer to those who need it most.

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.

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.