London in January: Weather, Events and the Best Tours

Is January a good time to visit London?

January is the best-value month to visit London and the hardest one to enjoy outdoors. It is the coldest month on the ten-year mean at 7.7C highs and 1.7C lows, with twelve wet days. In return you get the lowest hotel rates of the year and attractions running at a fraction of their summer occupancy.

Nothing else in this guide gives you the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and the national museums this empty. From about 4 January, once the New Year visitors have gone, central London runs at its annual low for the rest of the month. Timed slots that sell out in August are available on the day. Hotel rates in zone 1 hit their floor. If your priority is seeing the permanent city rather than the seasonal one, January is the month.

The obstacle is not the temperature so much as the combination of cold, wet and dark. A 7.7C mean high sounds manageable and mostly is; a 1.7C mean low with twelve wet days and a 16:20 sunset is what actually shapes a January day. The itinerary that works is two indoor anchors a day with a short walk between them, not a loop of the parks.

And there is one hard closure that has to be planned around. The London Eye shuts for the whole of January for its annual maintenance programme. It is the most-booked single attraction on this site, it is not running, and no amount of clicking through to a booking page will change that. If the wheel is on your list, come in December or wait for February.

London weather in January

January averages 7.7C highs and 1.7C lows, the coldest of the year, with 61mm of rain across twelve wet days. Sunset is 16:20 on the 15th, and the month is the first of the recovery: London gains 1 hour 11 minutes of daylight between 1 and 31 January.

Temperature, rainfall and wet days are the 2015 to 2024 means from ERA5 reanalysis for central London, 2015 to 2024, via the Open-Meteo historical archive. Daylight, sunrise and sunset are for the 15th, from timeanddate.com sunrise and sunset tables for London.

January is colder than December on both measures, by one and a half degrees on the high and two and a half on the low. That lag is normal: the sea around Britain reaches its coldest in late winter rather than at the solstice, so the coldest air arrives a few weeks after the darkest days. Frost in central London is common on clear January nights, though settling snow is not.

The good news is direction of travel. December loses daylight, January gains it, and by the end of the month sunset is 16:47 rather than 16:01. That hour is genuinely noticeable: a late-January afternoon has a usable outdoor window that a mid-December one does not. If you can only travel in deep winter, the last week of January beats the first.

Rainfall drops to 61mm, the second-lowest total of the ten months here, but the wet-day count stays at twelve. That combination means frequent light rain rather than occasional heavy rain, which is exactly the weather a good waterproof coat handles and an umbrella does not. Cold rain at 4C is also the most unpleasant weather London produces, so plan indoor time generously.

Crowds, prices and what to book ahead

January is the quietest month of the year in London from about the 4th. Attractions that require booking weeks ahead in summer are walk-up in January, and zone 1 hotel rates reach their annual floor. The exceptions are the last days of Hogwarts in the Snow, which closes on 17 January.

The first three days are the tail of the Christmas and New Year period and behave nothing like the rest of the month. From roughly 4 January the visitor population collapses, and it does not recover until the February half-term. Weekday mornings at the Tower, St Paul's and Westminster Abbey in mid-January are as quiet as those places ever get.

Two things still have deadlines. Hogwarts in the Snow at the Warner Bros Studio Tour finishes on 17 January, and the Somerset House ice rink closes on 10 January. Both run at higher demand in their final week than in the weeks before, so if either is the reason for your trip, book rather than assume.

The other January effect is retail. The winter sales run through the first weeks and the West End is busier at ground level than the attraction numbers suggest, particularly at weekends. That is worth knowing if your hotel is off Oxford Street, but it does not touch the museums, the palaces or the river.

The best tours in London in January

January's ranking is the most heavily rewritten in this guide, for one reason: the London Eye, the single most-reviewed product on this site, is closed for the entire month and does not appear in the ten at any position. Underground and indoor experiences fill the space it leaves.

1. Harry Potter Studio Tour

4.6 out of 5 from 10,822 verified GetYourGuide reviews • from £85 • 7-9 hours

Keeps first place through the first half of the month. The Christmas dressing comes down on 17 January, so a booking before that date buys a materially different experience from one on the 20th. It is also the only full-day indoor option in our list, which counts for a lot at 7.7C.

Best for in January: Hogwarts in the Snow, but only until 17 January

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2. Churchill War Rooms

4.5 out of 5 from 1,001 verified GetYourGuide reviews • from £67 • 2.5 hours

Ranked second, up from seventeenth on review volume. The Cabinet War Rooms are below ground, heated and completely weather-independent, which is worth more in the coldest month of the year than in any other. GetYourGuide lists this experience as not suitable for wheelchair users.

Best for in January: Being twenty feet underground in the coldest month

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3. Madame Tussauds

4.6 out of 5 from 23,025 verified GetYourGuide reviews • from £24 • 2.5 hours

Twenty-three thousand reviews and a format that does not care what the sky is doing. In January the queue that defines this attraction in July has essentially gone, so it is both the easiest and the cheapest month in which to do it.

Best for in January: Two and a half warm hours with no weather risk

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4. The Shard

4.5 out of 5 from 9,727 verified GetYourGuide reviews • from £24 • 1 hour

Promoted deliberately as the January answer to the closed London Eye. Cold dry January air often gives the sharpest long-range visibility of the year, and with sunset at 16:20 a mid-afternoon slot covers daylight and the lit city in one ticket.

Best for in January: The clearest air of the year, and the Eye is shut

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5. London Dungeon

4.6 out of 5 from 4,666 verified GetYourGuide reviews • from £24 • 1.5-2 hours

Sits on the South Bank a short walk from SEA LIFE, which makes a single warm indoor afternoon easy to assemble in a month where walking between distant sights is unpleasant. Well past its Halloween price and demand peak.

Best for in January: Ninety indoor minutes on the South Bank

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6. Natural History Museum Tour

4.9 out of 5 from 93 verified GetYourGuide reviews • from £65 • 2.5 hours

Rated 4.9 from a small review base. The museum is free in every month, so this ticket buys guiding, and January is the month when a warm, structured two and a half hours indoors is worth paying for rather than wandering.

Best for in January: A guided route through a free building

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7. Abandoned Tube Stations

4.8 out of 5 from 56 verified GetYourGuide reviews • from £47 • 75 minutes

An abandoned Underground station is one of the very few London experiences where January weather is irrelevant. Seventy-five minutes, a small review base but a 4.8 rating, and it involves a lot of stairs, which is worth knowing before booking.

Best for in January: Genuinely weatherproof and genuinely unusual

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8. Westminster Abbey

4.6 out of 5 from 13,289 verified GetYourGuide reviews • from £27 • 2 hours

Thirteen thousand reviews and the emptiest it gets. The Abbey is entirely indoors, it takes about two hours, and in January you can actually stand in front of the Coronation Chair and the Poets' Corner memorials without being moved along.

Best for in January: The quietest month inside the Abbey

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9. Afternoon Tea

4.6 out of 5 from 82 verified GetYourGuide reviews • from £83 • 1.5 hours

Ranked in on seasonal fit rather than review volume. In the coldest month of the year, ninety warm indoor minutes at 15:00 that are not another gallery is a genuinely useful thing to have booked, and January is the one month when it can be had without the Valentine's or Christmas premium.

Best for in January: Somewhere warm that is not a museum

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10. SEA LIFE London

4.4 out of 5 from 3,678 verified GetYourGuide reviews • from £25 • 1.5-2 hours

Keeps a place because it is warm, indoor and finishable in ninety minutes, which matters when the daylight window runs from about 08:00 to 16:20 and small children lose patience in the cold.

Best for in January: Children, indoors, and short

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The London Eye is ranked out of January entirely. It is the most-reviewed product on this site with 39,011 verified reviews and it would otherwise be first, but the wheel closes for the whole month for annual maintenance and we will not list a closed attraction in a ranked top ten. The Shard is the honest substitute. Every outdoor walking, cycling and open-top product also stays out, and Buckingham Palace remains closed for the season.

Events and festivals in January 2027

January is the emptiest month in the London calendar and that is the point of it. Two seasonal attractions close in the first half: the Somerset House ice rink on 10 January and Hogwarts in the Snow on 17 January. After that there is nothing dated until February.

The two seasonal closures are worth putting in your calendar rather than discovering. The Somerset House rink runs its last session on 10 January and the ice comes up immediately afterwards. Hogwarts in the Snow finishes on 17 January, and the Warner Bros Studio Tour reverts to its standard presentation from the following day. Neither is announced loudly, and both catch people out in the third week of the month.

New Year's Day falls on a Friday and is a bank holiday, with reduced Sunday-style transport across London and many attractions on shortened hours. It is nothing like the 25 December shutdown, though: the Underground and buses do run, just less often and starting later in the morning.

Beyond those, January is genuinely quiet. There is no major festival, no dated cultural programme and nothing that will fill a hotel. That is the reason the prices are what they are, and it is also the reason the permanent attractions are as accessible in January as they will be all year.

What is closed in January

January carries the single biggest attraction closure in this guide. The London Eye is shut for the entire month for annual maintenance, with no partial operation and no workaround. Buckingham Palace remains closed for the season and the Tower of London is on winter hours until 1 March.

Buckingham Palace opening season: Royal Collection Trust, visiting Buckingham Palace. Changing the Guard days are published a month at a time on the Household Division Changing the Guard listing, and the ceremony can be cancelled at short notice in bad weather.

The London Eye closure is the reason this page exists in the shape it does. It is the most-booked attraction we list, it is the thing most first-time visitors put at the top of their itinerary, and for one month a year it simply does not run. Almost no competitor page for January mentions it. If you take one fact away from this guide, take that one.

Practically, there is no substitute for the Eye in the sense of a slow rotating capsule, but there is a substitute for the view. The Shard is higher, it is enclosed and heated, and January often gives the sharpest long-range visibility of the year because the cold air holds less moisture. It is the honest recommendation for the month rather than a consolation.

For the rest, January is a month of quiet, ordinary opening. The national museums are open and free. The Tower, the Abbey and St Paul's all run normal winter schedules. The one thing worth double-checking is opening on 1 January itself, when many attractions open later than usual or stay shut.

What to wear and pack for London in January

January is the coldest month at 7.7C by day and 1.7C by night, and it is wet on twelve days out of thirty-one. Pack for cold rain rather than snow, which is the specific combination London does best and which needs waterproof boots more than it needs a thick coat.

Cold rain at 3C to 5C is genuinely the worst weather London produces, and it is the January default. It is not cold enough for snow and not warm enough to shrug off, and it soaks through canvas shoes within an hour. Waterproof footwear is the single item that changes a January trip most.

Frost is common on clear nights but ice on pavements is rarer in central London than visitors expect, because the traffic and the buildings keep the centre warmer than the surrounding country. Where it does catch people out is the parks and the riverside paths first thing in the morning.

• •Waterproof boots, for cold rain rather than snow
• •A warm hat and gloves for the 1.7C average low
• •A coat rated for wind as well as cold, particularly along the river
• •Two indoor anchors booked for every day of the trip
• •A view ticket that is not the London Eye, because it is closed

How we chose these tours

January is the clearest illustration of the rule that closed means out. The London Eye would top this list on review count and does not appear on it at all, because the wheel does not turn in January. Underground and indoor experiences fill the gap, and The Shard is promoted explicitly as the replacement view.

1. Popularity first. The base order is the verified review count on the live GetYourGuide listing, which is the only booking signal we can check independently.
2. Then seasonal fit. A tour moves up or down for a specific, stated reason tied to January: temperature, wet days, sunset time, school holidays or a closure. Every move is explained in the entry itself rather than left implied.
3. Closed means out. If an attraction is shut for the month, it does not appear in the ten at any rank, however popular it is. We name it in the closures table instead so you can plan around it.
4. Nothing is invented. Prices, star ratings and review counts come from the live product page, checked on 28 July 2026. We do not publish an opening time, closure or event date we could not confirm, and we say so where we could not.
5. We earn a commission. Booking links go to GetYourGuide and pay us if you book. That does not change the ranking: the review counts are public and you can check every one of them against the listing.

FAQs about London in January