Willesden Green Festive Lights

The Willesden Green Town Team want to light up our High Road and Walm Lane with festive lights which celebrate all our cultures, between 18th October 2025 and 28th March 2026. We have over 35 participating shops signed up.

Please help us raise the money we need to light up our high street and have a launch party on October 18th. Read more and donate by visiting our Crowdfunder page.

Read more about our participating shops

We have over 35 shops signed up. Here are some of them. Over the next two months you will see the list grow and be able to find out more about their stories and how they feel about Willesden Green Festive Lights.

Click on the images below to read more about our participating shops!

We want Festive Lights in Willesden Green

The concept of ‘Christmas Lights’ in a high street is a popular UK tradition and one welcomed by many, visitors, shoppers and shopkeepers alike.  Highstreets small and large across the country do as much as they can to decorate and enhance their high streets during the festive time.  Lights enhance the high street, encouraging visitors to enjoy, commune, wonder and gaze at the beauty, enjoy the spectacle.  Importantly, to shopkeepers, this increases footfall and encourages trade.

But in Willesen Green our community is heavily multi-cultural, so focusing only on Christmas lights is not very inclusive.  In addition, even though we raise the subject each year, councils no longer have budget and they are complex to arrange.  But still shop keepers want them and locals love them.

Introducing……..Willesden Green Festive Lights

This year, the Willesden Green Town Team are supporting the shopkeepers to ‘do it for ourselves’. We are offering the first 30 participating shops FREE FAIRY LIGHTS to be installed inside their front windows. So collectively we will light our High Road and Walm Lane, bringing warmth, welcome and beauty to our streets.

In exchange for the free lights, our shopkeepers are all agreeing to ‘light up’ their windows between 4pm-10pm every night, and NOT just for Christmas, but between 18th October 2025 (just before Diwali) to 28th March 2026 (just after Eid al-Fitr) and the weekend before the clocks go forward and our evenings are naturally lit once again. Between those dates our lights will celebrate ALL OF OUR CULTURAL FESTIVALS! Take a look on this page for the festivals we can celebrate - and let us know if we have missed anything please!

Read more….

Dates and festivals of Willesden Green Festive Lights

By setting our campaign dates between Saturday 18th October 2025 and Saturday 28th March 2026, we are able to celebrate even more of our cultural festivals (and let us know please if we have missed something):

  • Diwali (20/10/25)

  • Bodhi Day 1/12-8/12/25

  • Channuka 14/12 - 22/12/25

  • Winter Eqinox 21/12/25

  • Yalda Night 20/12-21/12/25

  • Christmas 25/12-26/12/25

  • Chinese New Year 29/1-12/2/26

  • Ramadan and Eid al-Fitr 17/3-20/3/26

  • Chet (Sikh New Year) 14/3-13/4/26

  • Spring Equinox 20/3/26

  • Saturday Lights Down 28/3/26

  • Clocks go forward on 29th - the perfect time to close our Festive Lights campaign!

 
 
Let's light up Willesden Green this winter

Lighting Up Willesden Green during the winter months!

As part of the Willesden Green Festive Lights campaign, we will tell the stories of our community, our shops, shopkeepers and their services.

By featuring participating shops on our website we will share their services, tell stories of our cultures and share more with you the different celebrations covered by our Festive Lights Campaign.

Together, we hope to bring alive the human element in our community, fostering familiarity and friendship, respect and love between each other.  As the campaign unfolds we hope other events and collaborations will develop as we learn more about each other and get closer.

Light and love are the shared themes of our cultures, faiths and families. Let’s light up Willesden Green this winter!

If you want to volunteer, find out more or have any questions get in touch via our contact form at this link.

And if you want to donate to support this campaign see our donation page at this link, it takes 30 seconds. Thank you.

Sign up now to become a partipating shopkeeper!

Raising money

We are applying now to various community funds to raise money for this campaign. You can help us by contributing to the Festive Lights campaign by donating via the link on our front page, it is easy and takes 2 minutes.

If you have any questions about the campaign, email us at willesdengreentownteam@hotmail.com or deborahmahs@gmail.com.

 

What can festive lights do for our community?

  • Boosting the festive atmosphere for all our cultural celebrations, creating a magical ambiance and a sense of happiness and wonder creating greater wellbeing for locals.  Seeing the lights and decorated windows will improve people’s mood and create a more uplifting and positive vibe.

  • Having our own Winter Lights campaign can be the beginning of a new shared Willesden Green tradition.  New cultural and shared experiences can lie at the heart of a community, creating memories, a sense of belonging, a sense of pride: “Look how beautiful our neighbourhood looks.  This is us, lighting our high street up for all occasions, not just Christmas!”

  • Creating ‘tourism’ for Willesden Green: Through our communications in the media and social media, we will tell our story (and the stories of our shopkeepers) to even more people - encouraging some ‘tourism’, i.e. “have you seen what they have done about festive lights in Willesden Green?”. Many people travel through our highstreet daily (on buses) and a warm and friendly ambiance is a good reason for them to come back and visit, increasing foot-fall to shops, restaurants and cafes, leading to more shopping, dining and engagement.

  • A sense of pride, knowing that our community and businesses are really working together, creating a new sense of community.