Author: She Loves London

London at Christmas

Originally posted in 2024, updated in 2025 – when, er weirdly, most of this still stands.

London goes a bit mental at Christmas.

The first sign that everyone is about to lose their tiny minds is the increase in suggestions that you should spend your evening traipsing across a freezing park, following a slow moving herd of pushchairs, tourists and excitable Londoners (the worst kind) into a wallet-rinsing, fairy-light-twinkling, pedestrianised festive version of the M25, where you’ll pay £6.50 to drink mulled wine out of a polystyrene cup while the smell of overpriced Bratwurst wafts up your nostrils from a nearby wooden hut.

I am, of course, talking about Winter Wonderland: that annual Festive “Good” Idea which, if we’re being entirely honest with ourselves, is best experienced after no less than 18 shots of whisky, and from far, far, far away.

A helicopter, for example.

(Or better yet, France.)

Credit: @MPSintheSky

It’s not so much Christmas Day itself which brings the ruckus round here, but the two weeks before.

Anyone who works centrally will be familiar with Christmaspartymageddon.

That’s the name given to any working day in the city between the 6th and 17th of December. Pubs, restaurants and bars become packed with office workers consuming their eighth unnecessary turkey dinner of the week, before trying desperately to avoid paying for drinks by standing near senior management at the pub from about 3pm onwards.

I work in Farringdon, which reached peak Christmaspartymageddon on Thursday last week. And no one, not one of us could have anticipated the fallout that followed on Friday.

Then there’s all the lights.

People go nuts over them. Christmas lights in London are a big thing which, you know, I get because they’re pretty, and festive.

And that’s fine when it’s the normal stuff. You know, snowballs on Oxford Street, some sort of crown and twig arrangement spanning down Regent Street.

But who can forget that classic Christmas combo of headphones, sunglasses and moustaches? Oh Carnaby (Street), you are spoiling us.

Credit: George Rex

And nowhere exemplifies London’s Annual Christmas Meltdown quite like Oxford Street.

In fact, make that any street or indoor complex containing shops, because every single one of them is guaranteed to propel you into a near catatonic state within seconds of walking through the door.

Even if you thought you knew what to get someone before walking in, even if it’s your last chance to get something and you absolutely have to make a purchase because otherwise Christmas will be ruined, even if you’ve got one job to do that day and it’s to go into Selfridges and buy something specific: trust me.

None of that seems to matter when you emerge onto what is basically the first, second, forth, fifth, sixth AND seventh circle of shopping hell.

What happens instead is you’ll just back away slowly, muttering “I’ll do it tomorrow. I’ll get it from Amazon. I’ll pay for Prime. Anything. But not, not this.”

Credit: @JEBjork

But there are some good things happening too.

Office parties, free bars, chocolates in the office, chocolates in bowls on the kitchen table, chocolates in the back of your Uber cab, Londoners paying for other Londoners’ bus fares.

And then there’s people generally being nice to each other: leaving bags of food next to homeless people, or, like the William IV pub in Islington, feeding people Christmas dinner for free.

In the end, over 180 people got fed at that pub on Sunday, which is a loads better way to spend your afternoon than slowly but surely losing your mind in a crowd on Oxford Circus.

So on that happy note, this will probably be my last post of the year. Thanks for reading. Tell your friends. Better yet, send me presents.

Also, does anyone want to do my Christmas shopping for me this year?

22nd December 2025
FOUND: Mysterious Note on the District Line

“You know those letters you were on about, I found one!”

These were the words of my colleague Matt as I walked into work in early December.

This wasn’t long after finding out someone was leaving anonymous letters around London, filled with sentiments that would bring a little smile to your day.

Then the next week, low and behold, Matt had been on the District Line to Upminster when he saw a small square of paper staring up at him from the seat.

Imagine the excitement.

Finding anything on the District Line that isn’t chewing gum or a faint smell of wee is usually cause for celebration – but an actual written note? Nothing short of momentus.

What could it be…?

An inspirational quote?

A life-affirming statement?

A nugget of advice that would shape the course of Matt’s life…forever?

Sort of.

We might not quite be there yet with the whole “let’s all be nice to each other” thing, but in the spirit of January, let’s all thank Anik for his input anyway.

Anik on the District line: your fellow Londoners send their thanks both for your happy sentiments and also for your tumblr featuring photos of Emma Watson, moody trees and black holes.

You can’t bring us down, for we are all off to the pub for two more days until work starts. Hurrah, wheeyyy, woop.

Happy New Year everyone. And if you want, you can send me stuff you found in London to contact@sheloveslondon.com.

3rd January 2024
Flashback: East London, Saturday Night. Lockdown Edition.

Saturday night in Shoreditch has always meant queues to get in, and tonight is no different. A line extends across the front of a Vietnamese restaurant and, a few doors down, another dotted strip of figures reaches towards Rolling Stock, the nightclub under the bridge. The doors to both are firmly shut.

In their place, two unlikely weekend hotspots experience a resurgence – Sainsbury’s and The Grocery, the latter complete with outdoor hand sanitising station – bringing the crowds in.

I’d left my flat half an hour earlier without much of a plan or daylight left to play with, just my headphones and a disjointed need for a quiet Saturday night out of the house. Seen from the top of Kingsland Road, the glass towers of east London usually signal precisely the opposite. But this is London stalled, a city in reverse. The A-roads of Zone 1 are calm and dead, but I look both ways in the local park.

So music on, a bad mood to shift, the enthusiasm for group video calls wearing thin: I walk, percolating the day’s non-events, until the food shoppers and early evening strollers thin out somewhere between Liverpool Street and Shoreditch.

It would be easier to walk past the boarded up pubs, the empty restaurants, the shuttered bars, without an intimate knowledge of what Saturday night in east London is normally like.

But the dissonance is distracting, and by the time I’ve turned right onto Threadneedle Street my headphones are hanging around my neck. Near Bank, traffic lights tell an empty road when to stop and go. Only a recorded voice echos up the steps of the station, where two old Evening Standards rustle on the steps below.

I wanted quiet, and here it is: just a distant hum with seagulls – seagulls? – calling over it like a token sound effect.

Tonight an ambling, vaguely cyclical walk to St Paul’s and back is what passes for progress. What else can you do when everything else has stopped? The nights out, the social life, the holidays, the career plans, all the markers I use to assess how I’m getting on. I might have always preferred not to look too far ahead, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a plan.

Saturday night is drawing on and my feet are starting to hurt. Somewhere by Barbican the realisation dawns that there’s no transport home, and I’m tired, it’s getting dark. The buses aren’t for me, and a Boris bike from outside St Bart’s Hospital doesn’t seem like a good idea. The sun sets as I cut back towards Old Street roundabout, and begin the long, slow walk back east and home.

This first appeared in my newsletter, which goes out around once a week at the moment because let’s be honest, not much else going on is there? You’ll get something like this, plus a few links to good, London related stuff I’ve found on the web. I’ll get happy someone’s signed up. Win-win. Sign up here.

12th May 2020