Canary Wharf Winter Lights 2026

20th January

London light festivals seem a bit thin on the ground this year. Battersea Power Station is taking a break from theirs and Westfield West London’s “Here We Glow” looks to have been a one off last year. At Canary Wharf however it’s business as usual so I headed up on day one for a look.

Free to visit Winter Lights is on from 20th to 31st of January and runs from 5pm to 10pm each day. Sixteen temporary installations are spread throughout the Canary Wharf estate alongside the nine permanent works which are there year round.

They vary in size and wow factor with some being full-on sound and light shows and others a bit underwhelming. If you look near each there will be an explanatory panel but it’s easy (and advisable) to ignore the Art Bolx and just enjoy the exhibits for themselves. Pick up a free map from the pink-tabard clad stewards on site or download it before you go else you’ll probably miss something. I never found 6b (indoors somewhere and I wasn’t the only person having trouble locating it) and another one, outdoors in this case I could have missed even though I had a map if there hadn’t been a crowd round it.

Stand outs for me were FloWeЯ PoWeЯ by Aerosculpture/Jean-Pierre David and Christian Thellier down near Westferry Circus, Hulahoop by Scale in Union Square, and Manifestation by Marcus Lyall in West Lane. Several others were pretty good too, again mostly the ones with the benefit of movement.

I arrived at about 5pm and by 7.30pm had managed to do the whole circuit (not necessarily in order) and by that time the temperature had begun to drop sharply so I took my frozen fingers indoors to find something to eat before heading back to Waterloo and the train home.

Although it was fairly busy with plenty of “phone zombies” to try and dodge I’d recommend visiting midweek and avoiding the weekends especially if you want to photograph or video anything. That’s because from previous experience the weekends are like someone left the gate to the twat farm open and it’s harder to even get a good look at the installations.

If you can’t get there at all here’s a Flickr Album (69 photos).

And here’s a video (YouTube, 14 minutes).

Canary Wharf Winter Lights 2024

19th January 2024

A quick look around the Canary Wharf Winter Lights Festival for 2024. It was bloody cold and I'm glad I arrived early to avoid most of the crowds.

There's a bunch of photos here on Flickr

Canary Wharf Winter Lights 2023

20th January 2023

After a two year hiatus caused by that thing  it was good to return to Canary Wharf for the annual Winter Lights Festival, a display of Illuminated artworks situated around the business district on London’s Isle of Dogs. Some of these were quite impressive and some were a bit meh to be honest but it made for an interesting - and free - evening out.

 

 

 

Some, such as In(visible) by Daneil Popescu you actually get to walk inside although I baulked at the opportunity to queue up for ages in the cold night air to wander through the dangling fibre optics of Anima.

 

Down at Westferry Circus there were super-Instagramable elephants although I don’t think the guy with the massive LED floodlight on top of his camera had the right idea for photographing illuminated art.

 

 

 

 There were some really good London skyline views if you turned your back on the elephants though.

 

 

 

This year as part of the festival Canary Wharf Middle Dock got a visit from Luke Jerram’s Floating Earth  where it prompts the difficult discussions we all need to have about climate change and what we, as individuals and wider society, can do to make our lifestyles more sustainable. From London it will be going to Brescia in Italy. I hope that it will be travelling sustainably.

 

 

 

 I made a short video showing some more of the exhibits

 

 

 

 And there are some more photos on Flickr here.

 

 

 

 I look forward to doing it again next year.

The lights, the lights!

Sunday 24th November

It is that time of year again. You can barely move it the supermarkets for piles of tat that no one needs to buy (the war against single-use plastic seems to have been temporarily suspended) and the shelves are full of festive fayre much of which will have passed its use by date before the big day.

On the plus side however it's also the time of year that the lights go on. Town centres - or their modern replacement, Shopping Centres - across the land put up their best seasonal illuminations in an effort to draw as many spenders as possible in competition with other local towns. So far, so standard.

As well as your usual Christmas Lights from Bromyard to Oxford Street there are more ambitious, or maybe more artistic displays. Canary Wharf has "spectacular light installations and interactive art"  but you'll have to wait until January to see that. In the meantime you can already see some spectacular light installations and interactive art by heading up the Metropolitan or Jubilee lines to Wembley Park. (Other transport choices are available if not coming from central London.)

For here near the home of English football (that will probably be disputed by those in the north) and the London Designer Outlet, is Winterfest 2019. Or Christmas in technicolour as it says on their website. The website also says that you can, "Experience Wembley Park’s first-ever immersive winter lights trail. Artists from all over the world have curated light and sound artworks that will transform Wembley Park into an immersive playground of unique art installations, combining light, sound and touch into a truly multi-sensory experience. From the acclaimed Sonic Runway, making its European debut in Wembley Park via Nevada’s Burning Man festival, to London’s tallest-ever LED light Christmas Tree, get ready to be enveloped by a technicolour trail of lights and interactive sounds."

And that's a pretty good description, as I discovered on a Sunday evening with nothing better to do. Here's a flavour (with cheesy music but no sleigh bells I promise) of what I found:

Winterfest is on until January 3rd so they'll be hoping you'll come and see it and spend money on Christmas presents and in the Boxing day sales. Or you could just go and see the lights - there is no admission charge. I succumbed to the lure of a Pret filter coffee as it was a chilly night so I suppose they acheived their aim of attracting more trade to the tune of £1 😀

Season's Greetings.

Winter Lights

Sunday 20th January 2019

From Tropical London to decidedly not tropical Canary Wharf. Wrapped up well to see the Winter Lights exhibition of art installations in and around Crossrail Place, Canary Wharf Shopping Centre, and Jubilee Gardens.

It was a tad nippy down the docks under the full moon.

Last Parade - Alexander Reichstein

Submergence - Squidsoup

Floating Islands - Mürüde Mehmet

Flow - Squidsoup

Floating Islands - Mürüde Mehmet

Prismatica - Raw Design

Everyone's photo op.

Two Hearts - Stuart Langley

More photos here Flickr Album but photographs don't really capture the exhibits as well as video: