This year marks the first year of Willesden Green Festive Lights a collaboration between the community and our shop keepers and businesses to shine a light on our High Road and Walm Lane this winter. The Willesden Green Town Team have raised money from our community to supply festive lights to our businesses, restaurants, cafes and shops. We hope this is the beginning of a new tradition for Willesden Green.

By lighting up the shop-fronts along Walm Lane and the High Road, we can celebrate the diverse and rich culture of Willesden Green that has seen a tapestry of independent restaurants, shops and services enrich our high street. This campaign will highlight this special corner of London and our aim is to draw our community out onto our streets and to attract visitors from across the city to discover Willesden. 

Thank you to everyone who has donated - at 29/9 we have raised £2,300 to buy the lights. We will also shine a light on our communities, cultures and festivals - all during the project which starts on 18th October 2025 and runs through until 28th March 2026.

Participating shops

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

Bringing Festive Lights to 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.

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).

Click on the images as the festivals come up.

Willesden Green Festive Lights starts on 18th October and Diwali which follows a few days later on the 20th.

Our aim is to share knowledge and stories of our cultures, faiths and festivals here in the Willesden Green neighbourhood and the first celebration to beautifully start our campaign is Diwali

Diwali 2025

Diwali falls on 20th October this year.

Main aims of our Festive Lights campaign

• To create a beautiful light spectacle for our high street and Walm Lane

• To support our shop keepers and bring them together in a shared project for better outcomes in our community and our high streets

• To share, celebrate and showcase our community's diversity, our multitude of faiths, festivals and cultures.

This year, the Willesden Green Town Team are supporting the shopkeepers to ‘do it for ourselves’. We are offering as many shops as we can afford to FREE FAIRY LIGHTS (on loan for use again next year) 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

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.