What to expect this Christmas at Kew Gardens in London

From Wednesday 17 November 2021 to Sunday 9 January 2022, Kew Gardens in London is doing Christmas and it needs to be on your list of things to do to end the last two years of nightmare.

Now in its ninth festive year, this year’s trail features a host of seasonal favourites alongside pioneering new light installations, illuminating Kew Gardens’ UNESCO World Heritage landscape with vibrant bursts of colour and over a million twinkling lights.

Standouts at-a-glance:

New installations feature stunning video design and scenescapes inspired by Kew collections
Highlights include 12 Days of Christmas tree installation, Christmas Cathedral, and LED light spheres illuminating night sky 200 metres over-head
Visitors can keep warm with seasonal street food, mulled wine and hot chocolate, or enjoy a Christmas dinner at newly refurbished The Botanical Brasserie restaurant
Trail is supported by Montezuma’s Chocolate

This year and kicking off next month in November 2021, we’ll be gifted with a first-time selection of spectacular trees from Kew’s arboretum as their canvas.

Creative studio Novak will create a brand-new piece for Christmas 2021, using a stunning combination of video design, projection mapping and light to bring botanical illustrations from Kew’s archive to life, alongside a host of heart-warming festive imagery.

Further, a brand-new installation, Spheric, which is a fifteen-metre-wide dome of light covered in over 2,000 individually controlled LED pixels, will sit on a reflective water pool, allowing you to fully immerse yourself in this unique mirrored illusion as they cross the lake.

And as we’d hope, the favourite Christmas Cathedral returns for 2021, affording guests the perfect opportunity to capture this quintessential Christmas moment on camera.