London New Year's Eve 2013 fireworks display: details

New Year’s Eve celebrations around the world can often by anticlimactic, but that’s rarely the case for revellers who gather in London to watch the city’s annual fireworks display.

Always a big-budget spectacle, the free display is deployed beside and from the London Eye and regularly draws crowds of up to 250,000 people. Although details for the New Year’s Eve 2013 fireworks display are still being finalised, the event routinely begins at 10pm on December 31. At that point a DJ typically plays to spectators, right up until Big Ben strikes midnight and a blaze of fireworks explode from the Eye. Lasting 10 or so minutes, the display is concluded with a mass rendition of Auld Land Syne.

Anyone wishing to join the celebrations on the night should be prepared for large crowds and plenty of queuing. Spectators wait in designated viewing areas along the Thames and access to each zone closes as soon as it is full – those with young children may be more comfortable watching the event on television.

Some roads and bridges in central London will close in advance of the fireworks. As usual, public transport on the night of New Year’s Eve and for the initial hours of New Year’s Day will be free: Tube, DLR< buses and trams in London will be free from 11.45pm on December 31, 2013 to 4.30am on January 1, 2014. Some Tube services will run during that entire period.

Did you know:
The London Eye is an appropriate backdrop for New Year’s Eve celebrations. It was developed to commemorate the new millennium, although delays meant it wasn’t opened until March 2000.
Big Ben, the bell within the Clock Tower at the Palace of Westminster, weighs about 13 and a half tons. Learn more about its origins in our feature on the bell's history and most significant moments.