For over 800 years the newly elected Lord Mayor of London has made his or her way from the City to distant Westminster to swear loyalty to the Crown. Over the centuries this journey grew into the riotous mediæval pageant known to all as the Lord Mayor's Show, the first outside event ever to be shown live on television and still the oldest and grandest civic procession in the world. It's a great free day out for the whole family, on the streets of the City of London on November 10th.

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Getting here

Leave your car at home! The roads are all closed, the whole of London is clogged up and there’s nowhere to park anyway. Several tube and train stations will bring you out right on the processional route: St Pauls is on the outward leg, Blackfriars or Mansion House are on the return leg and Bank is right in the middle of everything.

Access

The Lord Mayor’s Show is naturally accessible and enjoyable by everyone, and you will see many disabled people both taking part and joining the crowds to watch. The only problems you might encounter are to do with getting into the City and negotiating the busy streets. Special parking arrangements are available for blue badge holders. See the access page for map, advice and useful contacts.

Grandstands

For the best view of the Show you need to be above the crowds in a Grandstand seat at St Paul's. Sales open in late May, then they sell out long before the Show. Wheelchair spaces are also available. Each seat comes with a complementary copy of the official Souvenir Programme.

Roads closed for the Show

The Lord Mayor's Show shuts down the City of London for most of the day. There is no road access at all, either in or out, and many bus services are diverted or interrupted. We regret the inconvenience this causes but the security of the Show is taken very seriously and no exceptions can be made.

Click through for the full details, map and timetable.

Contact us

If you have any questions about the Show or suggestions for the site and app, please write to Will Ross on will@lordmayorshow.org.

Participation in the Show is by invitation only but enquiries from new participants are always welcome.

History of the Show

stretches back 803 years to the failing reign of Bad King John.

The Lord Mayor’s Show enthusiastically embraces the Shakespearean view of life, a particularly English phenomenon founded in literature by the London Poet Chaucer, and described by another London author Dickens as “streaky bacon”. By this he meant that the way we do things here is to put the comic and the tragic against each other, we do coarse and we do grandeur. We do bawdy and we do elegance. In the first two or three hundred years after his death Shakespeare was heavily criticised by Classicists especially in France for this mixture. Well, the Lord Mayor’s Show perpetuates it. There is splendour and there is a knees-up.
Melvyn Bragg, in his introduction to the 800th anniversary book

The Lord Mayor's Fireworks

start at 5.15 over the Thames between Blackfriars and Waterloo.