New Year’s Fireworks

London, England

On New Year’s Day in 2007, Adrienne and I celebrated in Budapest, Hungary. We came back inside our cabin on our river cruise, and we watched some of the New Year’s Eve coverage. One of the places shown later that evening (1:00 in the morning for us) was the New Year’s fireworks in London. Knowing my wife’s love for fireworks, I promised to take Adrienne to London in the future.

In 2024, we had our chance when we decided to take a family trip to the United Kingdom during the Christmas holidays. As soon as we locked in on the destination, we locked in on preparing for the fireworks show.

Unless you want to pay a pretty hefty cost to watch the fireworks on a boat from the Thames, you will need to buy access to one of the zones to attend the fireworks show. All zones are in view of the fireworks, which can be seen with the London Eye. As an individual, you can purchase up to four passes per person. Adrienne managed to get in the digital line exactly at the start (midday on a predetermined day in October), but there were still 11,000 people ahead of her to book. The tickets for the official viewing areas sold out so quickly that our party was split, with half in the blue zone and the other half in the red zone. Overall, 100,000 tickets are distributed by the Mayor of London’s office. Purchasing the tickets can be a little pricey; for us, it was £50 per person because we are not London residents. London residents can pay a much smaller fee to attend the event.

The next hardest selection was figuring out who was going where. We pretty much sent Simon to hang out with his grandparents and his aunt for the fireworks show. After meeting up with everyone at a subway station, we ended up splitting Simon off with the other group, since we were in different sections, and we took the tube to our assigned areas. It was odd to hand him off at a tube station, but that was the easiest way for us to get into groups of four for the fireworks show.

We arrived at our assigned area a little before 8:00 PM, which was when the gates officially opened. We then went through a few sections before ending up at our location on the banks of the Thames, across from the London Eye.

The next part was the hardest part. It was cold, and we had hours to kill before the New Year’s Show. Trying to do anything online was difficult because the cell service was overwhelmed by all the extra people along the river looking for something to do. It’s hard to keep your spirits up for hours while waiting for the show. There was a lot of music, but waiting for midnight became an endurance race. Fortunately, there were lots of port-a-johns nearby, and we did not have to do like people in Times Square and wear adult diapers.

When the time came, the fireworks show lasted about 12 minutes.  We took a few photos or short videos, as did everyone with a phone in London that evening. The show ended, so the next hardest part was figuring out how to get out of downtown. With lots of downtown areas fenced off and the Tube stations closest to the zone closed, it became a study in patience for walking to an open Tube station while trying to separate yourself from the crowd. After wandering through a few streets, we eventually made it to a tube station and caught a train nearby, back to the spot where we had parked our car earlier on New Year’s Eve. We drove back to our Airbnb in Langley and arrived sometime between 2:00 and 3:00 in the morning.

Was the show worth it? Yes, it was a great fireworks show, and we achieved a long-term travel goal. Would I do it again? Probably not the same way. All told, we invested about 6-7 hours for 12 minutes of entertainment, though people-watching can be entertaining, too. It would be much more expensive to book a riverboat trip, but it would be much more comfortable and intimate. New Year’s Celebrations can seem hokey and cliched, but the hope and promise of a New Year is universal among all people. I was glad that we had the chance to celebrate London-style.