First look at Canary Wharf’s annual Winter Lights display
The Canary Wharf estate has been filled with a walking trail of winter lights in its annual festival, giving people a decent hour or so of free light shows to watch.
The lights are scattered throughout the entire estate, and staff at each location hand out free paper maps. There are also plenty of signs to point your way.
It felt smaller than previous years, but in fact, there was only one artwork fewer (12 vs. 13). Maybe because some of them are large singular artworks instead of clusters of lots of smaller pieces, it felt thinner.
As with any large collection of artworks, some will make you gasp, and others are a bit meh.
One of the better ones this year was the slowly spinning blue lights, which could almost be seen as floating in the sky.
Arguably, the most unexpected was a tall solid column of lights flashing away, as it appeared to be from a distance, but when you get up close, the surprise of what the column is actually made from is a delight.
I won’t spoil that one, as you really do want to discover it for yourself.
A floating light display in the docks looks better from a distance, even if for a moment I wondered if it was sponsored by Dubai. It’s not.
One indoor display in the Jubilee Place shopping centre is very easy to miss. It looks very much like a fairground game, although being interactive is a risk, and judging by how often the attendant had to tell people what to do, it may not be working that well.
The glowing figures, which seemed to have stepped right out of an early Doctor Who story about the autons, seemed to elicit a mix of curiosity in most and fear in some of the younger visitors.
The Winter Lights trail is open every evening until Saturday 1st February from 5pm to 10pm.
And maybe doff a cap of admiration for the optimism displayed by the ice cream van that’s arrived in the hope of selling ice cream to people who are already struggling to keep warm on really cold nights.
There are also three other light shows in London this month – at Battersea, Southbank and Westfield Shepherds Bush.
And if that’s not enough, an indoor light show by Luxmuralis will also fill St Paul’s Cathedral next month.
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