Christmas in London (with kids!)
If you’re visiting the UK over Christmas time, or if you live here and need some ideas for fun days out with the kids, there are loads of things to do in London to celebrate the festive period!
Winter Wonderland
Recently, we visited Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park as a family and loved it! The only downside is that it can be quite expensive. You pre-book entry, and then pay extras for fairground rides, the ice rink, and other attractions as well as for food and photos!
We pre-booked entry and the visit to the Magical Ice Kingdom (it’s -10°C inside to keep the ice sculptures nice and cold, so wrap up warm, and wear something a bit more substantial than leggings on the bottom if you fancy going down the ice slide!), and a trip on the Santaland Express Train (we wouldn’t do that again as even though our youngest could ride, there wasn’t really anything exciting for her to look at during the short journey). As we booked to go last minute, we missed out on a slot for the ice rink, but I would definitely try and book this if we go again.
If you can, stay until around 5pm when it starts to get dark, you’ll see the whole place lit up beautifully!
Buckingham Palace
At 11.00am each day, the Changing of the Guard parade happens outside Buckingham Palace. As a wife of a former Grenadier Guard, this is something I have to watch pretty much every time we go to London, but the kids are still young enough to really enjoy seeing the Guards and hearing daddy tell them all about it! You may be used to seeing them in red but if you haven’t seen the winter uniforms this can be interesting to watch (and it’s totally free of course!)
Museums
The cutest future paleontologist t-shirt from Koe & Co online!
There are tons of free museums in London - V&A, Imperial War Museum, Science Museum, Natural History Museum, and the British Museum, just to name a few!
The Natural History Museum is one of our favourites, it’s huge and so interactive especially with the dinosaur displays! I also found these cool ‘future paleontologist’ t-shirts that I would definitely buy for the kids to wear on our next trip there!
Our daughter absolutely loves dinosaurs and even the our youngest baby (just turned 1 at the time) found the dino exhibition really fun. There were a couple of little animatronic dinosaurs that she thought were dogs, so she started saying “woof woof” to them and wanting to stroke them!
Oxford Street
The Christmas window displays are so worth it, but it will be incredibly busy as this is an iconic part of London at any time of year, but especially at Christmas. The lights across the street are gorgeous, and Oxford Street is home to the 7-floor toy shop, Hamley’s. Even if you’re not planning on buying anything, the toy demonstrations in Hamley’s are so much fun and the kids will love it, but there is a chance you’ll be pestered for lots of new toys, right before Christmas! Maybe save this one until just after the festivities?
Greenwich Observatory
I’ve not been here since I was a child myself but if you have a little stargazer or science-geek this is a great trip to visit longitude 0 (the Prime Meridian)! It is a little outside of London, but very easy to get to with public transport. They have awesome astronomy and planetarium shows there too. I’m definitely planning on taking our children to here when they’re a bit older.
