The Lord
Mayor’s Show
10 November 2018
Welcome to the Show! For more than 800 years the newly elected Lord Mayor of London has been rowing, riding or marching off to the distant village of Westminster to swear loyalty to the Crown and begin his or her year in office.
Over the centuries that journey became known as the Lord Mayor's Show. It has been a mediaeval carnival, a renaissance spectacle and a military parade, and it is still the longest and most splendid civic procession in the world.
is available on iPlayer until 10 December
Thank you to everyone who took part in this year's Show and came to watch. The next Show will be on November 9th 2019 starting at 11am from Mansion House and filling the whole day with pomp, pageantry and spectacle. See you there!
Getting here
Leave your car at home! The roads are all closed, there’s nowhere to park and the rest of London is all jumbled up. 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. Special parking arrangements are available for blue badge holders, and the grandstands include spaces set aside for wheelchair users. See our access page for maps, advice and useful contacts.
Roads closed
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, many bus services are diverted and every parking bay is closed. We regret the inconvenience this causes but the security of the Show is taken very seriously and no exceptions can be made.
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 Lord Mayor's Show
in which London displays a very bad attitude and does not share nicely.
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. Click for more information.