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).

London Winter Lights round-up

I’ve been to four of London’s Winter Lights Festivals. Here’s how it went.

 

Southbank Centre

 

Dotted around the Southbank Centre was the least impressive collection of light artworks I’ve been to this year. Some were not specific to the festival but are permanent exhibits.

 

 

 

 Others were hard to find and in one case I think wasn’t there at all - the promotional material did mention that not all exhibits would necessarily be there at all times. The most interesting exhibits were the animated projections onto the Brutalist buildings but the whole thing was a bit underwhelming.

 

Here’s the Flickr Album

 

 

 

Canary Wharf Winter Lights

 

Always well organised with plenty of stewards (and security guards) to point the way and dish out free paper maps to help you find your way around. A good selection of artworks too. It’s always worth avoiding the weekends when it gets so crowded it’s hard to see the lights, I went midweek so it was much ore relaxed.

 

 

 

 The exhibits were mostly good. Alas one which I think would have been quite impressive was suffering from technical difficulties which stopped it working. The giant one-armed bandit was a bit meh and needed constant interventions from the attendant since no one seemed to be sure what to do. Apart from those there was plenty of light and sound to go around.

 

A Flickr Album

 

 

 

 Better still here’s a video walk around.

 

 

 

 Battersea Power Station 

 

Around and within the iconic power station were eight installations from the arty to the sparkly to the interactive provided something other than expensive shopping to do at Battersea. It’s worth waiting till it’s fully dark to get the best effect and this year ambient light levels seem to have been taken into account which has been a problem previously. Clever illumination meant the building itself was almost an unofficial installation itself.

 

 

 

 All the installations were present and correct. I’m still a bit confused by the kids horse-on-a-spring called “Never Ends” and no one seemed keen to begin.

 

The Flickr Album

 

 

 

and the video

 

 

 

 and finally to Shepherd’s Bush for

 

Here We Glow, Westfield

 

 This was a new one for me. It was a mix of festival specific installations and what I think are part of the shopping centre’s permanent lighting. Eight installations again - if you include the tacky selfie star outside the entrance to the tube station. A couple of the temporary exhibits  were pretty good sound+light works. One you could easily have walked past and missed.

 

 

 

A Flickr Album obviously

 

 

 

and a video

 

 

 

 

 So how did I rank them?

 

1st Canary Wharf, still the largest and best organised.

2nd Battersea Power Station, it’s improved in its second year.

3rd Westfield London, compact and some quirky installations.

4th Southbank Centre, glad I didn’t make a special trip.

Battersea Power Station Light Festival 2024

30th January 2024

More winter lights, this time at the shopping mall that was formerly Battersea Power Station.

I made a wee video.

I also took some photos, available in this Flickr Album.

Verdict: Worth a look if you're nearby or really like this sort of thing. Could be a bit underwhelming if you've come a long way. Battersea Power Station has much too high ambient light levels to really pull this sort of display off.

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