Fortnum & Mason Christmas Windows 2025: Full Guide

The Fortnum & Mason Christmas Windows for 2025 filled the six bays on Piccadilly with unicorns under disco balls and narwhals leaping through turquoise waves. In another, a pair of lovebirds sat in a glowing tree with fireworks painted behind them. Running through every scene, as always, were the mice in red coats.

The Fortnum & Mason Christmas Windows 2025: A Fantasy Set

The 2025 scheme was a fantasy set rather than a nativity or a Dickens street. Unicorns pranced beneath mirrored globes. Narwhals twisted through teal water. Two lovebirds sat in a lit tree while fireworks went off behind them, and in each window Fortnum's mice in scarlet uniforms were marching, climbing or hauling something.

It stopped people. Londoners with a coffee in one hand and a phone in the other paused at the glass, their own reflections mixed in with the miniature scenes behind it.

What Was in Each of the Six Windows?

One bay was Alpine, with snow-dusted fir trees clinging to the cliffs and two of the mice part-way up a frozen slope on an expedition, their faces painted earnest and determined.

Next to it, a Highland cow stood in frosted drifts. Auburn coat, painted strand by strand, lit so the warm colour showed against the white of the snow.

Further along, a parrot in emerald and gold perched on a stone pedestal. Below it the mice were at work. One balanced on a toy crane. Another hoisted a matchstick as long as its own body. A third stood off to one side, directing the operation.

Then the fantasy windows: the narwhals in teal water, the unicorns under the mirrored globes, the birds and the fireworks.

Emerald, Amethyst and Sapphire Against Eau-de-Nil

Emerald green, amethyst purple and sapphire blue, set against Fortnum's own eau-de-nil. In daylight the colours read as flat blocks. By twilight, with the lighting on, the scenes went deeper and looked more like a stage set than a shop window.

The backdrops were hand-painted, and the sculpted pieces in front of them gave each bay real depth. Smaller touches: snowflakes carved into the glass, lights hidden behind the ice formations, brushstrokes done to look like frost on a windowpane.

Scale was played with too. A disco ball hung over a rough tree trunk. A travelling trunk sat beside a snow-covered hill. Playful, but never gaudy.

The Mice in Red Coats

Fortnum's mice are the store's unofficial Christmas mascots: small, busy, and always in the same scarlet uniforms. In 2025 they were the thread through all six bays.

They climbed the frosted cliffs in one window. They worked the crane beneath the parrot in another. Elsewhere they stood with their arms raised like conductors in front of a toy orchestra. Every whisker and every button on their coats had been picked out.

Details Worth Standing Still For

These windows rewarded standing still. Up close, there was a mouse's pawprint pressed into the snow. Stepping back, the reflection of the building's façade landed on the painted backdrop, so the real building and the painted one sat on top of each other.

After dark the lighting was layered and low, flickering like candlelight and moving the eye from one vignette to the next, so the snow seemed to glimmer again each time it shifted.

The Piccadilly Building Does Part of the Work

The setting does part of the work. At Fortnum & Mason's Piccadilly shop, under the Christmas lights, the windows threw their glow onto the pavement and onto the people passing.

There was a balance to how the 2025 scenes were laid out: dense in places, empty in others, with a symmetry that matched the building itself.

What the Motifs Say About Fortnum & Mason

The Highland cow, the forested slopes and the red-coated mice are British countryside winter. The parrot supervising the mice, and the disco ball over a unicorn, are something else entirely. The 2025 windows put the two side by side and let them argue.

Each bay ran on that contradiction: luxury and a joke, craftsmanship and curiosity, the familiar and the made-up.

Fortnum's windows are new every year. In 2023 the theme was Where Christmas Comes Alive, with Christmas Eve scenes of tea caddies, bottles and cakes. My photos of those, and of the rest of the decorations, are in Fortnum and Mason Christmas Decorations: The Facade, the Clock and the Atrium. The rest of the West End, street by street, is in my ranked guide to London's Christmas lights.

How the Windows Looked After Dark

Light was the thread. Disco balls turned above the scenes, and each miniature tableau had its own soft glow. The lights did not just decorate; they picked out texture, shadow and gesture.

As the evening went on, the light bounced off the snow, the icicles and the mirrored surfaces. People stood and watched as though the mice might move, or the parrot might turn its head.

All of it analogue. Paint, resin, glass and bulbs.

Piccadilly in December 2025: wet pavements, lights in the puddles, roasted chestnuts somewhere close by, and six windows where unicorns leapt, narwhals swam and mice in scarlet coats kept working behind the glass.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.