Visit London Blog - Enjoy the very best of London
Zoe is the Deputy Managing Editor of www.visitlondon.com. Zoe's favourite places in London are Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, the Golden Jubilee Bridge, the V&A Cafe, and San Marco's Pizzeria.
It’s the festive season, and London’s lit up like a, well, Christmas Tree…
From presents to snowflakes to classy twinkly Victoriana to psychedelic reindeer, it’s a varied bunch for London’s Christmas lights this year.
We want to know which you think are best!
Loading ...We head to the Old Vic for this week’s video recommendation. The wonderful Kevin Spacey stars in Inherit The Wind, a fab courtroom drama about the freedom of thought.
When it opened in September this year, the show got some great reviews. It’s currently running until 20 December. If this little snippet whets your appetite, book your tickets now. You won’t be disappointed.
This week’s news is dominated by the news about Hair coming back to London’s West End!
We’re too young to know anything about the original(!) but we’ve heard our parents talking about it, recognise the songs (Aquarius and Let The Sunshine In) and it all the stories about it from the 60s sound incredible. (Plus, anything starring Elaine Paige, Richard O’Brien, Tim Curry and Paul Nicholas must’ve been amazing!)
It’s also exciting to have the first entire Tony-award-winning Broadway cast opening a musical in London. We’ve got to wait til April, but it’s down in our diaries to get tickets!
In other theatre news, Dreamboats and Petticoats, the musical inspired by an album of 50s songs, is due to reopen in January. From a successful touring show, this musical was so popular at the Savoy this summer, it extended its run by seven weeks!
And now it’s coming back: book your tickets to see it at the Playhouse from 6 January. Anyone out there seen it and want to tell us about it? We’re yet to catch this one.
If you’re looking for a shorter-term theatre fix, Panto season is very nearly upon us! We’ve had news from the Lyric that the rehearsals for Jack and the Beanstalk are well under way. Backstage, the Dame’s seven (count them!) dresses are almost finished, and the 4-metre-tall Giant is getting close to being brought to life…
Over at the New Wimbledon Theatre, we’ve heard news their panto has added another jewel to its star-studded Aladdin’s lamp. Anita Dobson (fresh from baring all in Calendar Girls, but best-known to the world as Angie Watts from EastEnders in the 80s) is the final star to share the role of the Genie of the Lamp alongside Ruby Wax, Pamela Anderson and Paul O’Grady.
Do you have plans to see any of London’s fantastic Pantos? Let us know which baddie you’ll be booing and hissing at over the Christmas season…
Leicester Square welcomed some cool customers this week to celebrate Christmas in the West End: click on the thumbnails above to see more…
Artists created four 1m-tall ice penguins enjoying the various attractions of the West End: shopping, dining, culture and entertainment.
The star attraction was a penguin sculpture based on the most popular West End show – as voted by more than 2,000 people in an online comp – a penguin in a Wicked witch’s hat!
The shopping penguin held a giant ice shopping bag with Christmas gifts frozen inside (including a Paul Smith notebook and socks, a Molton Brown gift box, a Pingu and a mini wooden frog on wheels). The dining ice penguin was enjoying an ice-cold meal; while the cultural penguin got himself in the picture by holding onto an icy picture frame.
Did you get any snaps of these chilly stars? Drop them into our flickrpool…
The weather in London this Saturday was typically autumnal: lots of exciting wind and rain, with a bit of thunder and lightning thrown in for good measure!
Sadly, the wet weather led to the fireworks at the Lord Mayor’s Show being cancelled for the first time in 20 years; although the rest of the parade was a great success.
According to The Guardian:
“The bad weather is nothing unusual… Forecaster Nigel Bolton said: ‘In most winters we experience gales and heavy rain, but the last three or four winters have been quite quiet. Most winters bring storms and gusts of winds so we shouldn’t be too surprised by this.
‘Thursday and Friday are looking particularly wet. It’s unpleasant but not unprecedented.’ “
In light of this news, we want your recommendations of the best things to do in London when the weather turns wet. We’ve got some great ideas to keep families dry in the city, but can you add to the suggestions?
OK, so at over 10 minutes, this is a little longer than most YouTube snippets, but we promise it’s totally worth staying with it. (And it’s Friday – you deserve a little break…)
This remarkable colour film of London was taken in 1927 by pioneering filmmaker Claude Friese-Greene.
We think some of the black-and-white information plates are hilarious!
London’s roads look so wide and empty with the slow, elegant motorcars moving gracefully along them. And there’s a fascinating section that seems to have been filmed right infront of where VL Towers stands in shiny More London today! See if you can spot familiar areas looking drastically different, and let us know what your favourite bits are…
We start this week’s London theatre news by bringing you some exciting casting announcements:
There’s Anthony Head (from Buffy to Merlin to the Old Vic) leading the cast in Six Degrees of Separation from January next year; and a winning team in Kim Cattrall and Matthew MacFadyen, starring in Noel Coward’s Private Lives at the Vaudeville from February. It suddenly seems a long time until the start of 2010; we can’t wait!
Another West End show which has benefitted from its fab celeb casting has announced closing dates this week. The wonderfully camp La Cage Aux Folles has featured star turns from Graham Norton and John Barrowman, but it’ll be shaking its feather-boas for the last time at the Playhouse Theatre on 2 January. Book now, if you haven’t seen it yet! Fittingly, like a well-made transvestite’s glove, the actor who opened this revival in London back in 2007, Douglas Hodge will be back wearing the diamonds and dresses for the final curtain. It’s sad news for London, but we should be proud that this award-winning, sequin-filled show is headed to Broadway for 2010.
And we move from award-winners to awards season in Theatreland! The Evening Standard Theatre Awards shortlist was announced this week. Dominated by the Royal Court (well done Jerusalem, Enron, Mark Rylance, Samuel West, and my favourite, Rupert Goold), there’s also shows from the National (August: Osage County) and the Lyric (Punk Rock). The prize for best musical will be fought out between two revivals, A Little Night Music and Hello, Dolly!, and two new productions, Been So Long and Spring Awakening. Read the complete shortlist here.
The ES awards will be announced at the Royal Opera House on 23 November. After that, we’ve got the Theatregoers’ Choice Awards and the Critics’ Circle Awards. We’ll bring you news on those when we have it!
Do the Evening Standard Theatre Awards sound a bit too passive for you, waiting to find out who the critics have chosen to reward for their talents? Would you prefer to have your say in who wins what? Then you should sign up to be an Olivier Awards judge! The lucky panel get to see about 80 shows in a year, before helping pick the best of the bunch. Sound like a dream come true? Sign up here.
Finally for this week, we’re thrilled to hit your silliness buttons again with news about SILENCE! The Musical, an unauthorised parody of the cult classic, The Silence of the Lambs, coming to London next year. The show features Olivier award-winner Miles Western as Hannibal Lecter, and opens on 19 January at The Above the Stag Theatre in Victoria. Expect singing serial killers, songs with titles we just can’t publish here, and a chorus of tap dancing lambs…
We love this film, showing everything that’s great about football in London. It’s being used as part of the 2018 World Cup bid.
Have you promised to back the bid yet? It only takes a moment and could make all the difference!
We’re also offering you and your team the chance to play at Wembley. Yes, you read that right; YOU could be playing football, with your mates, at Wembley Stadium.
What are you waiting for? Enter the competition today.
Christmas is sprinkling its twinkling magic over more areas of the capital every day at the moment! Here’s footage from Covent Garden’s Christmas Lights switch on last night.
Snow, Christmas carols, Christmas lights, reindeer and very happy visitors full of festive cheer…
Want to know when the Christmas lights are being turned on near you? Check out our Christmas lights round-up.
This weekend, it’s time for the Lord Mayor’s Show.
A celebration of diversity in the capital, the Lord Mayor’s Show sees more than 6,000 people walk through the streets in a colourful procession of acrobats, costumes, music and dancing.
The procession begins at 11am at Mansion House following a military flypast. It will travel down Cheapside to St Paul’s Cathedral, where the Lord Mayor will be blessed before proceeding to the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand.
At 5pm, the Lord Mayor launches a spectacular fireworks display on the Thames between Blackfriars Bridge and Waterloo Bridge.
But what do you enjoy most about the annual Lord Mayor’s Show?
What's the best thing about the Lord Mayor's Show?
Total Voters: 25
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