London New Year’s Day Parade 2012
Whilst many are nursing a hangover and spend the day tucked under their duvet, those who attend London’s annual New Year’s Day Parade, inevitably start their new year in style. The London New Year’s Day Parade 2012 will be the first big event of the year that sees London hosts its third ever Olympic Games.
The London New Year’s Day Parade 2012 will celebrate its 26th anniversary and promises to be louder, more colourful and better than ever. More than 10,000 performers, including musicians, acrobats, cheerleaders and dancers, representing the different London boroughs will perform dazzling shows entertaining a multi-cultural crowd of thousands of parade revellers, intent on starting the New Year with a ‘bang’.
Those involved with providing an epic New Year’s Day for the folk of London are also from a diverse mix of ethnicities, as performing in the parade is particularly popular with young people from Japan, the US and across Europe, who join forces with local Londoners to provide an unforgettable start to the New Year.
Starting at 12 noon at the Ritz Hotel, the colourful procession slowly moves along to Piccadilly, Piccadilly Circus, before moving to Lower Regent Street, Waterloo Place, Pall Mall, Cockspur Street, Trafalgar Square, Whitehall, and eventually concluding its magnificent tour at Parliament Square, at the feet of Big Ben.
The 2.2-mile route takes approximately three hours to complete and expects to attract a crowd of half a million people, determined not to spend their New Year’s Day tucked up in bed under the duvet!
London Art Fair 2012
It’s nearly Christmas! We hope you really enjoy the festive season. To help prevent those post-Christmas blues from creeping up, now may be a good time to organise attending some great artistic and cultural events in the capital in the new year, after all London is alive with such events. If this sounds like a good plan then let us inform you about the London Art Fair 2012, which is taking place from 18 – 22 January 2012.
Held at the Business Design Centre, Islington, the London Art Fair 2012 will feature some of the greatest names of 20th century British art. More than 100 galleries from across the UK and beyond are presented during the five-day event, with expositions blending a pleasant range of work from emerging artists and established leading figures.
Saatchi Gallery, Whatiftheworld gallery, Troika Editions, The Multiple Store and Rise Art, are just five of the many exclusive galleries to be exhibited at the London Art Fair 2012.
Throughout next year’s fair there will be various art projects taking place, which will attract artists and galleries from across the world, all keen on being involved in such a highly-esteemed art event.
The London Art Fair 2012 will also have a Photo50 section, which is essentially a showcase for contemporary photographers, displaying 50 works selected by a panel of distinguished individuals from the world of art and photography.
The London Art Fair was established in 1988 and is seen by the British art scene as being the “official green light” of the new art season.
The Museum of London’s Charles Dickens exhibition
The Museum of London’s Charles Dickens exhibition – Bringing Victorian times back to contemporary London.
Charles Dickens, one of the greatest English novelists of all time, managed to single-handedly romanticise and mystify Victorian London. London, with its gangs, villains, trials and tribulations, was a main focus in many of Dickens’ novels, and one that has managed to captivate the imagination of readers with a longevity most author’s fail to achieve.
To celebrate the 200th anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, the Museum of London is holding a major Charles Dickens exhibition.
Running until Sunday June 10, 2011, The Museum of London’s Charles Dickens exhibition will recreate an atmosphere of Victorian London through different sounds, sights and smells, taking visitors back in time to an era that inspired the great author to write his legendary novels.
Costumes, artefacts, photographs and paintings will fill the Museum of London’s rooms; all dedicated to illustrating the themes that Dickens so ingeniously wove into his stories.
Dickens’ childhood, which included working in a blacking factory while his father was imprisoned by debtors, had a prolific influence on his novels, and such important social themes, including poverty, childhood mortality and prostitution, will all be highlighted and examined in this first major Dickens exhibition in the UK for more than 40 years.
London’s oldest pubs – Possibly!
You can’t beat a good old English pub and there are none quite so ‘traditional’, ‘antiquated’ and ‘English’ than the pubs in London. Although London’s oldest pubs have remained, for years, an ambiguous debate, what is certain is that dozens of pubs in the capital date back centuries.
If visiting one of London’s oldest pubs, selling mouth-watering real ale and being home to a horde of scandalous stories, takes your fancy, then a visit to any three of the following London’s oldest pubs should be high on your agenda of things to do whilst in the capital.
The White Hart, Drury Lane
The White Hart on Drury Lane claims to be the oldest pub in London, being first licensed in 1216. Another popular story to circulate around the White Hart’s walls is that the infamous highwayman Dick Turpin and his buddies used to prop up the bar in the White Hart in-between ambushes. Whether these mythical tales bare any truth or not, the White Hart on Drury Lane, with its fine selection of beers, wine, spirits and food, is an enchanting place to enjoy some refreshments, with the knowledge that Dick Turpin could have been sat in that exact same spot!
Christmas carol services in London
There are few other places in the world that feels quite as ‘Christmasy’ as London and there is nothing quite like Christmas carols to get you in the festive season. During this time of year, the capital comes alive with festive services, songs and good old-fashioned yuletides filling the Christmas night-time air.
Here are three, of what promise to be, the best Christmas carol services in London this year.
Trafalgar Square Christmas Carols
Starting our Christmas carol services in London is this free annual event is taking place every night between Monday 5 December, 2011 and Thursday 22 December, 2011 and brings a truly traditional Christmas cheer to Trafalgar Square. Various choirs from throughout London will play to a hefty crowd of Christmas carol enthusiasts. The 2010 Trafalgar Square Christmas Carol event saw 50 choirs from different churches and groups take part, and this year, even more are expected to sing.
So practise your singing, wrap up warm and head on down to Trafalgar Square between 5pm and 9pm until the 22nd, to join in the festive cheer.
St Martin in the Fields Christmas Carols
