The Queen's House Ice Rink — Local services in London

Closest location Ice Rink to you

Medium sized ice rink, I was thinking it would be a large open field ice rink from the look of the promotional picture, but they put you in a box with other skaters.

Skiing shoes they give you are comfortable for a while and then they start to hurt the middle part of your foo. Personally I never ice skate before and this was my first time. Therefore i cannot fully judge on the shoes. Shoes are VERY easy to put on and off.

I ice skated during evening time and the light to illuminate the field was a UV light, perhaps to keep the ice cold, I don't know why. Taking pictures would be unfortunate for many people unless you have a Pixel 3/4 that can take a Night Shot.

The reason why i gave this 3 stars out of 5 was because they never said anything about buying a ticket when you arrive on site through their website, they just promoted booking for a ticket online, with the hidden booking fee cost on top of your booking!

When we arrived the lady said we should go to the marquee because we booked, when we got to the marquee, there was no signs for people who booked. All we saw was "NO entry", forcing us to walk all the way to ticket purchase and luckily a lady told us we can just enter the marquee and show them our ticket:/

Getting onto the ice rink was super quick and easy. You enter the marquee, show them your ticket, give your shoes your wearing and they exchange it for a ice skating shoes! You need to be there 15mins before (30mins website suggest) booking time so you can get yourself ice skating shoes on time before they start promptly for timed session. No introductions or prep talk from team, although there are signs. But with the amount of people waiting for a shoe or to get on the rink, you would not know the sign boards are there.

Staffs are there on rink to make sure all goes smoothly, you can take a break anytime, and you can use those assisted ice skating toy things which is fun for many adults and children.

Music is being played in the background, but i don't know why some music crackle while playing. You get 45mins to skate per session! You better get skating with the Off Peak session! Because Peak session is £16 (£2.50 booking fee) and you only skate for 45mins!

Personally if you are good at ice skating or a beginner, this would be fun for you. However if this is your first ice skating (like me) or you aren't just that good, i would tell you to avoid this ice rink or go at quieter times! We booked for the 7pm session and that was the last event for the day because they close at 8pm. And it had a lot of people for Off Peak time. Because of so many people on the ice rink, you cannot really guide yourself peacefully on the rails because others are either taking pictures, standing talking, during nothing or trying to get their grip.

If i knew how to ice skate, I would have gotten my money's worth! 45mins is too short. Imaging coming...

The main reason for 1 stars is the lack of clear communication regarding masks. There are some signs inside the marque that say "hands, face, Space" but nothing clearly saying please wear a mask on the ice that I noticed. Once we got on the rink almost no one was wearing a mask. Including almost all the staff. About 20minutes into our session a member of staff came onto the rink and fairly aggressively started going up to each skater and telling them to wear a mask. Almost everyone apologised a lot and said they felt really bad and didn't realise they had to wear a mask as it was outside and they where doing exercise. A few people even argued they had read that it wasn't required on the website and they would have worn contact lenses if they had known. One person I could see was getting fairly upset with the member of staff about this. The staff member also went up to the other members of staff to ask them to wear a mask and then went to the photographer who also replied she thought it was only required indoors at the ru k she had to wear a mask. My main issue is that if they just clearly showed you had to wear a mask or announced it on the loud speaker (they announced all sorts of other stuff but never asked people to wear a mask) it would have been a lot easier and made people fee a lot less bad about not wearing a mask. People could have brought a mask specifically for sporting etc. All in all I think the staff member was very passive aggressive towards the skaters and seemed to make almost everyone on the rink feel terrible. Literally half the people on the rink where talking about it for the rest of session. All this could be avoided so simply by just explaining clearly that masks are required on the ice as well as inside.

Other than that we a great time it's such a beautifully situated ice rink! We had a great time and the team seem very efficient. We where surprised at how busy it was. At points we could only go at a slow walking pace but I guess this might be better in the mornings. The boots where the snap lock version so much quicker to get on than the lace up ones. The social distancing inside the tent is pretty good and has a decent...

Not managed correctly! There was no order from the moment we walked in, to the moment we walked out. People who already had their skates on, were lining up in front of where you had to collect your skates. This created people being bunched together for no reason. If you didn't hear someone shouting at you to go to their station you would be standing there for no reason. It was exactly the same when collecting your shoes after the session. The only difference was that now everyone ended up bunched together in the door way and outside When i tried to go instead to get to a better station, I tripped over a poor child who was putting his shoes on. There were no staff members around trying to organised people, it was a shamble. It then took nearly 15 mins to collect my shoes as there was clearly not enough staff. I didn't see anyone cleaning the skates before they were out back too. On that note, they didn't encourage people to were masks, there was no prompt to use hand sanitiser when entering, they had a few hand sanitiser stations but the one i used was empty. There were no covid precautions here.

The ice itself was scenic but that's it! It was way too crowed. The ice was really slippery, so I wasn't surprised to see over 10 different falls. We couldn't skate but just move around trying to avoid people.

I didn't feel safe on the ice or safe off it because of the lack of covid measures. I wouldn't visit again, which is a shame as its a...