Few cities are as rewarding to fly over in Microsoft Flight Simulator as London. By day, the Thames, Tower Bridge, the Shard and the towers of Canary Wharf make the city easy to read from the cockpit. After dark, the picture changes. Street grids, arterial roads, bridges and lit commercial districts become your main references, and the quality of the lighting decides whether a night flight over the capital feels real or flat.
🔆 Immersive Lights: London, a new freeware release from creator Immersive_Lights, is built for exactly that. The add-on is made only for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and covers London and much of the Greater London area. That includes Central London, Westminster, the City of London, Canary Wharf, Greenwich, Stratford and Wembley, as well as Heathrow and the urban areas around them.
The core of the package is its street lighting. Instead of using a general light texture, the creator places lamps pole by pole along lit roads, with spacing, position and height based on the type of road. The lamps also light the ground. A separate glow layer adds soft pools of light beneath street lamps, along roads and at junctions, and this layer follows the terrain. The result should be more depth when you look down at the city from low altitude.
The distribution of light is based on real-world patterns. Busy urban streets, major roads and junctions are brightly lit, while parks, residential pockets and unlit roads stay darker. That contrast is often what makes a city readable at night, since dark areas such as Hyde Park or Richmond Park help you orient yourself as much as the bright corridors do. The add-on also reflects London's mix of lamp types: modern white LEDs cover much of the city, alongside warmer fittings and the orange sodium lamps that are still in place in some areas. Small differences in brightness and color temperature between individual lamps, plus the occasional flickering or unusually bright light, keep the scene from looking too uniform.
Beyond the streets, the add-on floodlights stadiums, sports fields, industrial sites, railway yards, docks and logistics facilities, so places like Wembley and the riverside freight areas should stand out from the air. Colored shop signs add life to commercial streets and shopping districts, and red obstruction lights mark tall buildings, towers and masts across the city. Those lights matter for helicopter flights or low-level VFR routes along the Thames.
You can download 🔆 Immersive Lights: London for free on Flightsim.to. If you'd like the same lighting across the whole country, 🔆 Immersive UK is available in the Flightsim.to Store. As with any lighting add-on, the final look will also depend on your simulator settings, your hardware and any other London scenery you have installed, so a quick test flight after installation is a good idea.