London offers a variety of ways to keep you entertained over the festive season. Here are some of the best tips from Guide London to help you make the most of the capital over Christmas and New Year!

For many Londoners, the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree lighting ceremony along with carol singing marks the start of the countdown to Christmas. The ceremony typically takes place on the first Thursday in  December and is led by the Lord Mayor of Westminster, accompanied by a band and choir followed by the switching on of the Christmas lights.

The 2023 Summer Opening at Buckingham Palace will be from Friday, 14 July, to Sunday, 24 September. During the 10 weeks, visitors to Buckingham Palace will see the 19 magnificent State Rooms, which provide the setting for ceremonial occasions and official entertaining. All rooms are furnished with many of the greatest treasures from the Royal Collection.

Notting Hill Carnival is the largest street festival in Europe.  It was started in the 1960s as a way for Caribbean communities, part of the Windrush Generation to bond and celebrate their cultural traditions. Now taking place every August Bank Holiday weekend in the streets of London W11, the Notting Hill Carnival is an amazing array of sounds, colourful sights, and social solidarity.

Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is the most travelled sovereign in British history, undertaking more than 250 overseas visits during her 65-year reign. During 2016 alone, The Queen carried out over 300 official engagements the length and breadth of the United Kingdom. An important part of these occasions is the receiving or exchanging of gifts, the subject of the an exhibition at this year's Summer Opening of the State Rooms at Buckingham Palace.

The art of 1930s America tells the story of a nation in flux. Artists responded to rapid social change and economic anxiety with some of the 20th century’s most powerful art – brought Grant Wood, American Gothic, 1930 together now in this once-in-a-generation show. 45 truly iconic works paint an electrifying portrait of this transformative period.

One hundred years on from the Russian Revolution, this powerful exhibition explores one of the most momentous periods in modern world history through the lens of its groundbreaking art. Renowned artists including Kandinsky, Malevich, Chagall and Rodchenko were among those to live through the fateful events of 1917, which ended centuries of Tsarist rule and shook Russian society to its foundations.

Now in its fourth year, the new 2016 winter trail is inspired by the gardens themselves, as the trees, temples and glasshouses of Kew are playfully lit and all aglow. Enter between two giant Christmas trees festooned with ribbon and wander beneath unique tree canopies drenched in seasonal colour. Follow the path between a carpet of light gently swaying like blossom and stop for a moment of reflection at the scented Fire Garden inspired by Five Gold Rings from The Twelve Days of Christmas.

The world's largest Lego store opened on 17th November in Leicester Square. The London flagship has been two years in development and features a life-size tube carriage made out of 637,903 Lego bricks. In total the creations on display are made from 1.7 million bricks and together weigh five tonnes.

A new Picasso exhibition will be on display at the National Portrait Gallery. Picasso’s portraits epitomise the astonishing variety and innovation of his art. This major exhibition with over 80 works focuses on the artist’s portrayal of family, friends and lovers and reveals his creative processes as he moved freely between drawing from life, humorous caricature and expressive painting from memory.

On 2 September 2016, it will be exactly 350 years since the catastrophic Great Fire of London started in Thomas Farynor's bakery in Pudding Lane. The fire raged for four days, destroying 13,200 homes and leaving 65,000 people homeless. The speed at which London recovered, and the way it did so, laid the foundations for the global city we know today.

At the end of February, Turner Prize winner Richard Wright started on a new artwork for the Queen’s House, part of the Royal Museums Greenwich. This is the first time an artist has worked on the ceiling of the Great Hall since Orazio Gentileschi created a series of nine paintings in 1639. Richard’s complex installation, inspired by the Tulip Stairs, will be on view when the Queen's House re-opens after restoration on 4 July 2016 to celebrate the 400th anniversary of its commissioning and design.

Submerged under the sea for over a thousand years, two lost cities of ancient Egypt were recently rediscovered. Their story is told for the first time in what is expected to be a blockbuster exhibition at the British Museum – Sunken Cities: Egypt’s Lost Worlds.

Royal Collection Trust is investing £37 million at Windsor Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse to deliver major improvements for visitors. A series of projects, collectively known as Future Programme, will transform the way visitors are welcomed, interpret the buildings in new ways, create dedicated new Learning Centres, and open up new spaces to the public.

The Sicily Culture & Conquest exhibition is currently on display at the British Museum. Sicily has been shaped by waves of conquest and settlement by different peoples over 4,000 years. Since the 8th century BC, Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs and Normans all settled or invaded the island, lured by its fertile lands and strategic location.

In 1866 the Blue Plaque scheme was founded by the Society of Arts and so this year they celebrate their 150th anniversary. Now managed by English Heritage, London's blue plaques are handmade in Cornwall by the Ashworth family. The first blue plaque was awarded to the poet Lord Byron in 1867, but his house in Holles Street, was demolished in 1889 – today it is the site of John Lewis department store.

The British Library has announced the acquisition of the personal archive of Kenneth Williams, including 43 personal diaries and approximately 2,000 letters spanning his entire life and career from the age of 18 until his death in 1988.

The Victoria & Albert Museum has unveiled When Soak Becomes Spill, a major new installation by leading Indian contemporary artist Subodh Gupta.  

Using the work of Monet as a starting point, The Royal Academy of Arts landmark exhibition Painting The Modern Garden: Monet To Matisse examines the role gardens played in the evolution of art from the early 1860s through to the 1920s.

Interested in comic art?  Then consider organising a Bath tour with one of our Blue Badge Tourist Guides and be sure to check out the High Spirits: The Comic Art of Thomas Rowlandson exhibition at Holburne Museum of Art. 

Launching on 13th November 2015 at The Queen’s Gallery, Buckingham Palace is a new exhibition titled: Masters of the Everyday: Dutch Artists in the Age of Vermeer.

The 800th Lord Mayor’s Show in London will be held on Saturday 14 November 2015 and starts at 09.00 with a river pageant. The Lord Mayor will be travelling to the City in a flotilla of traditional Thames barges and small boats, including the famous QRB Gloriana. Tower Bridge opens in salute at 09.25 and the new Lord Mayor alights at HMS President ten minutes later.

The Victoria & Albert Museum will launch The Bejewelled Treasures: The Al Thani Collection exhibition on 21 November 2015.  Spectacular objects, drawn from a single private collection, will explore the broad themes of tradition and modernity in Indian jewellery. 

The Royal Academy of Arts is showcasing an exhibition on the work of Jean-Etienne Liotard who was an artist in great demand across Enlightenment Europe and beyond.

London’s tourism boom has continued during the second quarter of 2015, with the city welcoming a record 5.1 million international visitors between April and June this year, 6% more than the same period last year, according to the Office for National Statistics International Passenger Survey (IPS).

Tate Britain has launched an exhibition featuring Frank Auerbach (b 1931, Berlin), a British artist who has made some of the most vibrant, alive and inventive paintings of recent times. Often compared to Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud in terms of the revolutionary and powerful nature of his work, his depictions of people and the urban landscapes near his London studio show him to be one of the greatest painters alive today.

The Victoria & Albert Museum established in 1857 by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert is the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design and houses a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects. This vast collection is stored and displayed in a number of buildings over 12 acres of land in the South Kensington area of London, with over a third of a mile in circumference. These objects along with a wide range of exhibitions make the Victoria & Albert Museum one of the more popular tourist attractions in London.  Below we highlight six upcoming exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert Museum.  

The sixth and final series of the popular costume drama starts airing in the United Kingdom, at 9pm on 20 September.  It will be made up of eight episodes and a Christmas special to be broadcast on Christmas Day. The series will span the years 1925 to 1927, with the Crawley family and their servants facing an uncertain future.

Queen Elizabeth II is now the longest reigning monarch in British history, having broken Queen Victoria's record on 9 September. To commemorate this, a special photographic Long To Reign Over Us exhibition is currently on show at Buckingham Palace (until 27 September 2015) and Windsor Castle (until 27 January 2016).  Each of the displays celebrates The Queen through a selection of photographs from 1952 to the present day. The images include official portraits and photographs of Her Majesty undertaking visits in the United Kingdom and across the Commonwealth, as well as those capturing informal family moments.

The Fabric of India exhibition will be the highlight of the Victoria & Albert Museum India Festival and will explore the dynamic and multifaceted world of handmade textiles from India from the 3rd to the 21st century.

Whaaam! Pop! Kapow! This is pop art, but not as you know it. Tate Modern is ready to tell a global story of pop art, breaking new ground along the way, and revealing a different side to the artistic and cultural  phenomenon.

After last year's successful event, the London Triathlon is back for 2015 and is expecting a record number of triathletes to take part. The race sees top sportsmen compete alongside total novices and a variety of distances are on offer to suite all abilities. Participants can choose from Super Sprint, Sprint, Olympic and Olympic Plus waves, and can also compete as part of a team relay. The event takes place at the site of the 2012 Olympics. 

First held in 1964 as an offshoot of the Trinidad Carnival, the Notting Hill Carnival has remained true to its Caribbean roots, bringing a spirit of diversity to London. When it first started, around 500 people attended the Caribbean festival.  Today, the carnival attracts lots of people to London, and continues to grow in popularity. Expect some 50,000 performers, nearly 40 sound systems and more than 1 million spectators over the bank holiday weekend.  

Below are 5 reasons why the Royal Academy of Music Museum in London is a must for music lovers! 

21 DNA-inspired double helix sculptures have appeared across London as part of Cancer Research UK’s campaign to raise awareness and funds for the Francis Crick Institute, a world-leading centre of biomedical research and innovation due to open in 2016.

From 19 September to 13 December 2015 the major artist and cultural phenomenon Ai Weiwei takes over the main galleries at the Royal Academy of Arts with brave, provocative and visionary works. 

The Ministry of Defense has announced plans for the 70th anniversary of Victory over Japan Day taking place on 15 August 2015.   Working in collaboration with The Royal British Legion, the commemorations will take place in Central London. 

Film4 Summer Screen returns to the iconic courtyard at Somerset House in London from 6–19 August for 14 nights of open-air film screenings.

Cornelia Parker's One More Time was unveiled recently at St Pancras International station as the inaugural artwork in Terrace Wires, billed as "the fourth leg" of London’s rotational public art spaces alongside the Fourth Plinth, Serpentine Gallery and the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall.

This autumn the British Museum, in partnership with National Museums Scotland, will stage the first British exhibition in 40 years on the Celts. Celts: Art And Identity opens at the British Museum on 24 September and will draw on the latest research from Britain, Ireland and Western Europe.

It was one of the jewels in the crown of Georgian London: a building so unusual that a suspicious public were unconvinced it would remain standing when it was built in 1762.  Designed at the height of the 18th century craze for Chinoiserie, The Great Pagoda at Kew was famously adorned with 80 brightly coloured wooden dragons. The eye-catching dragons were the talk of the town for 20 years, before disappearing in the 1780s, rumoured to be payment for the Prince Regent’s gambling debts.

London’s iconic Palace of Westminster and the Houses of Parliament is in need of  repairs that could take as long as 40 years and cost taxpayers £7 billion if the MPs refuse to temporarily decamp elsewhere, according to a recent report conducted by Deloitte.

Visitors to London will be pleased to hear that Transport for London will launch a night time tube service starting the early hours of 12 September. Thereafter, there will be a round-the-clock service on Fridays and Saturdays on Jubilee, Victoria, and most of the Central, Northern and Piccadilly lines.

A new waterlily species has been found on a plant-hunting expedition in a remote spot in Kimberley, Western Australia. As plant-hunter Carlos Magdalena investigated the waterlily, it became clear this was not the first time the species has been encountered by Kew Garden experts. 

It is too soon to claim that the common ancestor of dinosaurs had feathers, according to research by scientists at the Natural History Museum, Royal Ontario Museum and Uppsala University. 

From a basement in New York, Joseph Cornell channelled his limitless imagination into some of the most original art of the 20th century. Cornell hardly ventured beyond New York State, yet the notion of travel was central to his art. His imaginary voyages began as he searched Manhattan’s antique bookshops and dime stores, collecting a vast archive of paper ephemera and small objects to make his signature glass-fronted ‘shadow boxes’.

Currently at the National Portrait Gallery is a fascinating photographic exhibition on the life of actress and fashion icon Audrey Hepburn (1929-1993). 

The Serpentine Gallery unveiled its 15th annual summer pavilion on 22 June brining a touch of Glastonbury to Kensington Gardens in the form of a giant multi-coloured tent.

The Frames in Focus: Sansovino Frames exhibition marks the first in a series of exhibitions at the National Gallery which will explore specific frame types; bringing together 30 exquisite examples of this distinctive style of frame associated with Venice and the Veneto.

Soundscapes (8 July – 6 September 2015) is part of the National Gallery Inspires programme of exhibitions. Drawn from the National Gallery collection, the exhibitions take a fresh view of National Gallery paintings. Soundscapes has commissioned musicians and sound artists to select a painting from the collection and compose a new piece of music or sound art in response. Immersive and site-specific, the experience encourages visitors to ‘hear’ the paintings and ‘see’ the sound.

Windsor Tourist Guides Ltd, run by Guide London/Association for Professional Tourist Guides member Amanda Bryett, has won “Best Overall Walking Tour in Britain” awarded by CIE Tours International.  The company who run round Britain coach tours, mainly for the American market, ask their clients to rate every aspect of their tour. The Windsor town walk achieved a client satisfaction rating of 93.5%.  

London welcomed more international visitors than ever before in 2014. The city’s cultural attractions and world-class sporting events proving irresistible draws for millions, according to new figures released by the Office for National Statistics International Passenger Survey (IPS).

Open Garden Squares Weekend takes place in London this year with 218 hidden and little-known gardens opening to the public on Saturday 14 and Sunday 15 June. The gardens range from the historic and traditional to the new and experimental. They include classic London square gardens, roof gardens, community allotments, urban wildlife and ecology centres as well as the gardens of historic buildings, institutions, restaurants, schools and shops.

The Fighting History exhibition launching at Tate Britain in June will focus on the conflict, martyrdom and catastrophe found in history painting from the eighteenth century to the present day.

Tate Britain will open the first major Barbara Hepworth exhibition in London for almost fifty years. Barbara Hepworth (1903–75) is most commonly associated with St Ives, Cornwall, where she lived from 1939 until her death in 1975.

The Coral Reefs: Secret Cities of the Sea exhibition at the Natural History Museum in London explores the richness of life beneath the waves and the importance of these delicate ecosystems and includes more than 200 specimens spanning corals, fish and fossils, a live coral reef and a virtual dive through stunning imagery from the Catlin Seaview Survey. 

The Shoes: Please And Pain exhibition will look at the extremes of footwear from around the globe, presenting around 200 pairs of shoes ranging from a sandal decorated in pure gold leaf originating from ancient Egypt to the most elaborate designs by contemporary makers.

28 successful candidates from the 2013-2015 London Blue Badge Course were presented with their badges by the Reverend David Stanton, Canon of Westminster at a ceremony in Westminster Abbey on Thursday 16 April. 

A new exhibition at Tate Modern will showcase the work of Sonia Delaunay (1885–1979) who was a key figure in the Parisian avant-garde and became the European doyenne of abstract art.

Powerful, beautiful and inventive, the Victorian era was a golden age for sculpture. Tate Britain’s exhibition Sculpture Victorious celebrates some of the most astonishing and lavish works produced in this groundbreaking period.

At a time when Britain will be engaged in the democratic process of an election, the Victoria & Albert Museum will examine the role of public institutions in contemporary life and what it means to be responsible for a national collection.

The Victoria & Albert Museum in London will showcase a What is Luxury? exhibition which will interrogate ideas of luxury today. It will address how luxury is made and understood in a physical, conceptual and cultural capacity.

A rarely seen portrait of the Duke of Wellington goes on view at the National Portrait Gallery as part of exhibition marking the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) and illustrates his extraordinary life as a soldier and statesman. 

The Royal Academy of Arts will host an exhibition of the works of Richard Diebenkorn.   Revered as one of the great post-war masters in his native United States, Richard Diebenkorn is an artist whose staunchly independent career takes us from abstraction to figuration and back again.  He is described by the Washington Post as one of America’s “finest abstract painters."

Marlene Dumas is one of the most prominent painters working today. Her intense, psychologically charged works explore themes of sexuality, love, death and shame, often referencing art history, popular culture and current affairs.

This year Easter falls early in April and many families will no doubt head to London during the break. There are several Easter Egg hunts, including the annual one at Kew, but also at more unexpected venues, like the Bank of England Museum.

London’s annual Chinese New Year celebrations, the biggest in the world outside China, starts with a small ceremonial event on Saturday 21 February, but the majority of the festivities will take place on Sunday 22 February. 

As Salisbury Cathedral prepares for a bonanza year of events to celebrate Magna Carta's 800th anniversary, work has begun on the new Chapter House exhibition.  The new Magna Carta exhibition will see the Chapter House and Cloisters transformed into an interactive space that will set the document in its historic context. It will be an immersive visitor experience with digital media displays, artefacts, interactive stations and video to bring the story of King John and his barons to life.

Whether a sacred sanctuary, a place for scientific study, a haven for the solitary thinker or a space for pure enjoyment and delight, gardens are where mankind and nature meet. A new exhibition at The Queen's Gallery, Buckingham Palace will explore the many ways in which the garden has been celebrated in art through over 150 paintings, drawings, books, manuscripts and decorative arts from the Royal Collection, including some of the earliest and rarest surviving records of gardens and plants.

John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) was the greatest portrait painter of his generation. Acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, he was closely connected to many of the other leading artists, writers, actors and musicians of the time. His portraits of these friends and contemporaries, including Auguste Rodin, Claude Monet and Robert Louis Stevenson, were rarely commissioned and allowed him to create more intimate and experimental works than was possible in his formal portraiture.

A spectacular Stegosaurus skeleton was unveiled on 4 December at the Natural History Museum in London. It is the first complete dinosaur specimen to go on display at the Natural History Museum in nearly 100 years. The 150 million year old Stegosaurus stenops is the only Stegosaurus in a public collection outside the USA.

This exhibition will bring together masterpieces produced during Rubens' lifetime, as well as major works by great artists who were influenced by him in the generations that followed.

2015 marks the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo and the defeat of Napoleon. In celebration of the allied victory, George IV created the Waterloo Chamber at Windsor Castle, a grand space filled with portraits of those instrumental in the victory, among them the Duke of Wellington. 

The Association of Professional Tourist Guides (APTG) member and Blue Badge Tourist Guide Amanda Bryett who runs Windsor Tourist Guides Ltd was a finalist at the Beautiful South Awards 2014 held at the Grand Hotel, Brighton in December and won a Bronze award for Outstanding Customer Service. As a finalist Amanda now goes forward to the national VisitEngland awards 2015.

Lambeth Council has given the go-ahead to the proposed £175million Garden Bridge, which will span the river between Temple and the South Bank. 

Members of the Serpentine Swimming Club, one of the oldest swimming clubs in the country, will swim their traditional 100-yard (91-metre) Christmas Day race in the Serpentine.

A new exhibition showcasing the career of British Pop artist Allen Jones, from the 1960s (when alongside peers like Hockney and Caulfield he was closely associated with the rise of Pop Art) to the present day will open at the Royal Academy of Arts.

There is a new exhibition titled: Cairo to Constantinople – Early Photographs of the Middle East in the Queen's Gallery at the Royal Trust Collection which follows the journey taken by the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) in 1862, as he undertook a four month tour around the Middle East.

A new display in the Theatre and Performance Galleries at the Victoria & Albert Museum titled Russian Avant-garde Theatre: War Revolution and Design 1913 – 1933 presents more than 150 radical designs for theatrical productions by celebrated figures of the Russian avant-garde.  

Timed specifically to coincide with the centenary of the First World War, this exhibition concerns the relationship between photography and sites of conflict over time, highlighting the fact that time itself is a fundamental aspect of the photographic medium.

Mike Leigh's film Mr Turner focuses on the latter life and career of the artist Joseph Mallord William Turner played by Timothy Spall. It premiered in competition for the Palme d'Or at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival, where Spall won the award for Best Actor and cinematographer Dick Pope received a special jury prize for the film's cinematography.

The Queen's Gallery Gold exhibition at the Royal Collection Trust celebrates the enduring qualities of gold, and draws on works of art from the Bronze Age to the present day. The distinctive properties of gold – its lustre and its warm yellow colour which appears to mirror the sun, its rarity and its perceived purity, because it does not tarnish, have meant that this material has always been associated with the highest status, both earthly and divine.

This year the Museum of London welcomes an exciting new exhibition, delving into the mind of the world’s famous fictional detective, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. 

The acclaimed Wildlife Photographer of the Year exhibition premieres at London’s Natural History Museum each year and tours more than 60 cities in the United Kingdom and across the world.

This is the first comprehensives exhibition in the United Kingdom of Giovanni Battista Moroni’s work.   He was one of the greatest portraits of 16th century Italy.  Famed for his gift capturing the exact likeness of his sitters, he created portraits that are as penetrating and powerful now as they were more than 400 years ago.

In September 2014, the Royal Academy will present the first major retrospective of work to be held in the UK by Honorary Royal Academician, Anselm Kiefer.  This will be the most significant exhibition of the German artist’s work ever held in the UK, spanning his entire 40-year career and unveiling new work created in direct response to the Royal Academy’s spaces.

The Great Gallery, one of the finest collections of Old Master paintings in the world, is reopening on 19 September with a new hang following its two-year refurbishment.

This major exhibition titled Constable: The Making of a Master will reassess John Constable's influences, techniques and legacy to offer a new interpretation of one of Britian's best-loved artist.  Discover how great works are created as Constable's most famous masterpieces are united with revoluntary oil sketches: expressive evocations of land, sea and sky that allowed him to transfer the freshness of the outdoors into his exhibition paintings.

Guide London speaks to some of the recent beneficiaries of the charity Go Make It Happen a registered charity, which aims to support young people who want to work in and build careers in the tourism profession.

The Royal Academy’s annual Summer Exhibition is the world’s largest open submission contemporary art show. Now in its 246th year, the 2014 exhibition continues the tradition of showcasing work by both emerging and established artists in all media, including painting, sculpture, photography, printmaking, architecture and film.

Be awestruck as huge fossils and life-size models of mammoths and their relative’s tower above you and meet Lyuba, the world’s most complete mammoth, as she takes centre stage in the Mammoth's Ice Age Giants exhibition at the Natural History Museum. 

From a Suffragette tea service to protest robots, the Disobedient Objects exhibition coming to the Victoria & Albert Museum will be the first to examine the powerful role of objects in movements for social change.

The Design Museum is currently showcasing an exhibition of American architect Louis Kahn (1901-1974) who is regarded as one of the great master builders of the Twentieth Century. Kahn created buildings of monumental beauty with powerful universal symbolism.

27 successful candidates from the 2012-2014 London Blue Badge Course, pictured below were presented with their badges by Yvonne Leach, the President of the Institute of Tourist Guiding, at a ceremony at the Founding Museum on 9 April.

Guide London speaks to Ruth Polling, who received the London Blue Badge Tourist Guide of the Year Award (Katrine Prince Memorial Prize) at the Blue Badge presentation ceremony at the Foundling Museum on 9 April.

It’s official! London has welcomed over 16 million international visitors in one year for the first time in history, making it one of the most popular holiday destinations in the world.