Nov 10

Save the date and bring your family and friends to the 2018 Lord Mayor's Show. See the new Lord Mayor of the City of London take to the streets in a glittering coach as part of a three-mile long ceremony full of innovation, spectacle and pageantry. The Lord Mayor's Show connects the 21st century City to its mediæval roots to give you the oldest, the biggest and the best free day out in London.

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The Show

For over 800 years each newly elected Lord Mayor of London has made his or her way upriver to Westminster to swear loyalty to the Crown. Over the centuries their journey grew into the riotous mediæval pageant known as the Lord Mayor's Show, the first outside event ever to be shown live on television and now the oldest and grandest civic procession in the world.

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.

Grandstands

For the best view of the Show you need to be above the crowds in a Grandstand seat at St Paul's. Sales begin in early June and 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