What a fantastic antidote to these grey January days: beginning Thursday and running for four nights, London will be illuminated by giant flowers, animated with acrobats and glowing with light graffiti. The free outdoor festival Lumiere London brings international artists to our city to create all this and more—30 installations to light up the night from Kings Cross to Trafalgar Square, Westminster to Regents Street.
Many of the displays are witty and lovely—brightly coloured fish float down Piccadilly, neon dogs come complete with their own neon mess, an enormous elephant trumpets on Regent Street, Westminster Abbey’s martyrs turn technicolour. Some of the art is also thought-provoking: 1.8 London, an iridescent, interactive net sculpture at Oxford Circus, was inspired by the impact of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Litre of Light shows how a plastic bottle can be transformed into a sustainable lightbulb, bringing light to developing countries and communities in the wake of disasters. Local schoolchildren helped create the bottles in the installation, and during the festival kids can join drop-in workshops to decorate a recycled bottle to add to the display, or make their own solar bottle light (click here for workshop info).
The lights are on from 6:30 to 10:30pm each night, from Thursday the 14th through Sunday the 17th. There’s a map of the festival showing the location of each of the 30 installations, so you can plan your route. Since some roads will be closed to accommodate the event, you are advised to leave your car at home. Wrap up warm, take the kids, and see London in a new light.
