christina79

We are going to be in London on New Year's Day... aside from the big parade, is anything interesting going on? Are stores and restaurants open? Museums and attractions?

spedersen

Christina:

Don't know about News Years but we were in London last year at Christmas and Boxing Day. Very little was open. Also, much of the public transportation was not running. As we had to get to Windsor that day we ended up taking a cab!! (Cabs charge an extra holiday fee!!) You can always go to Westminister Abbey for a church service. We did that and it was quite nice.

kmchick

We were in London last New Years day, I ran a 10k in Hyde park (even if you don't participate it can be fun to watch). The larger shops were open, but the smaller restaurants we tried to go to were closed, as were most museums. Get a copy of Time-Out when you arrive-it will have lots of activities/concerts etc for the day.

KidsToLondon

Look here too for related info:

http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...p;tid=34698195

zeppo2

We were in London New Year's Day two years ago, and Westminster Abbey was open, and I also remember doing a Lodon Walks walk. I also enjoyed the parade--stood across from Westmister's.

shandy

We were in London last New Year's Day. We did a tour of Westminster Abbey, watched a bit of the Parade and went on the London Eye. The Tate Britain and Tate Modern were both open. So absolutely no trouble filling in the day.

The only problem we had was that we were still in the Westminster area come lunchtime and we couldn't find anywhere decent to get a meal. Had to make do with some junk food down by the Thames. We did also have to wait a little while to cross the roads on couple of occasions because of the parade.

Some of the shops were open. We were in the Harrods area about 4-5pm and although Harrods itself were shut, quite a lot of the other shops around were open. It must be up to the individual shops to decide whether to open or not.