Winter Lights, Umbrella Blindness, and the Art of Getting in the Way

Canary Wharf is a frightfully dull place to visit at any given time. Always one moment away from a major scandal and home to far too many bars charging £8+ for a pint, it’s a space that sees victims coming from miles off. A sanitised playground for money and power, carefully engineered to feel impressive while offering very little that’s genuinely human.

Naturally, that emptiness has been filled elsewhere. As businesses quietly abandon the space, flats are retro-fitted into hollowed-out buildings and tourists are dragged in with half-baked theatre, strange attractions, and events that simply cannot cope with the audiences they attract.

And then the Winter Lights happen.

In previous years, the event has been half-decent. Last night, though, the rain, the umbrellas, and the sheer refusal of people to share space turned it into a living hell. Umbrella blindness took hold immediately. People froze, terrified of getting even remotely damp, while others hurled themselves forward through crowds as if the experience might evaporate if they weren’t first.

It became unbearable, if not nigh on impossible, to follow the prescribed route. Installations that demanded pause and distance were swallowed by a crowd that never stopped moving. Art designed to breathe was smothered by urgency, impatience and the relentless need to be seen.

That is not to say there were no moments of genuine brilliance.

FloWeЯ PoWeЯ by Aerosculpture, Jean Pierre David and Christian Thellie, Aether by Architecture Social Club and Sanctuary by Ithaca Studio were outstanding. Vibrant pops of colour, hypnotic to watch and, if you found yourself stuck in a good crowd, genuinely close to being moving.

In Bloom by Kumquat Lab and Lacto Reacto Light by Jack Wimperis offered something else entirely. Moments of interactivity that felt playful rather than competitive, and where engagement did not require elbowing your way through a wall of phones, when you could get anywhere near them at least.

The problem is not the event. It is the way it is consumed.

A sour taste made itself known early on, as other people’s phones became almost surgically attached to my face so they could capture terrible selfies inches from the displays. There is something uniquely maddening about watching people press themselves so close to kinetic installations that they miss the spectacle entirely. What is the obsession with being directly in front at any cost. Why must you always be in the eyeline, no matter what.

Art is subjective, but this year too many pieces felt like variants on themes explored more effectively in previous iterations. The repetition is starting to feel lazy, unimaginative. Winter Lights needs to decide what it wants to be. An event producing bold, challenging work that justifies the crowds, or a commercially convenient lure for a niche audience who will spend money before and after a polite amble around the Wharf.

Those two things are not one and the same.

Ultimately, we were left hugely underwhelmed. Overwhelmed by people doing everything possible to make the evening about themselves, and frustrated that we had wasted a good chunk of change on transport and dinner for an experience that collapsed the moment reality rain, crowds and human behaviour was introduced.

Winter Lights still contains moments of beauty. But until the event reckons with who it is designed for, and how it functions under pressure, those moments will continue to drown beneath umbrellas, entitlement and the need to be seen.