Day: December 28, 2023

I’ve wanted to visit Kew Gardens for some time, and this trip the opportunity arose by booking to see the Christmas Light show.

We booed at 5pm, which given its dark atmosphere 4pm was plenty dark enough to see the lights. The lights are great, a little more subdued compared to what we are used to with Sydney’s Vivid light show and the Christmas lights at the Hunter valley gardens.

Also tried Mulled Wine, which is best described as drinking a Christmas Mince Pie. At least it was warm, but otherwise it’s actually pretty horrible.

Maybe it’s an acquired taste you need to grow up with, but I’ll pass on it next time.

When you buy a ticket, you can choose the “Victoria Gate” or “Elizabeth Gate” entry. If you can, choose the Victoria gate. It’s closer to the tube station. That gate was sold out and we had to use the Elizabeth gate, and to get to that we had to take a bus.

With public transport completely shutdown on Christmas Day in London, we were limited in what we could do, it had to be within walking distance.

A bit of google searching about 3 months before we left home I found a Christmas lunch offering at a Pub in Hammersmith which was only about a 15 minute walk from where we were staying in Shepards Bush. We got to stroll down some very nice looking streets on the way to the pub, and luckily wit wasn’t raining.

Unlike home in Australia (or Canada or USA too) the houses here had virtually no Christmas lights or decorations set up. I found one house with a few white lights and that was it.

The pub turned out to be excellent, there was a stack of food across the three courses. We ended up staying close to 4 hours.