It is no small feat to drag tens of thousands of people out of their homes and pubs on the coldest weekend of the last few months just to stare at illuminated walls. I’ve never been to a football match, but clambering out of London’s Oxford Street underground station last Friday night into a bitter chill, I did feel eerily connected to the crowds around me.

We had come to see Lumiere London, the mid-January festival of light that brought the capital to a standstill. The scrum to get into the Circus of Light – a giant big top promising “a magical animated world of music and mayhem” – was a precursor to the chaos that followed 24 hours later when the police issued warnings and Kings Cross station was evacuated due to overcrowding.

If you were one of the dozen people lucky enough to get anywhere near the Lumiere bar at Central Saint Martins college, then you may have seen Mick Stephenson’s Litre of Light. Perhaps the only “design” project in Lumiere London, it plays upon a simple optical effect – the way a plastic bottle filled with water and bleach will diffuse and amplify the light passing through it. Whether the source is daylight or artificial light, this provides a cheap way to improve the illumination in a space.

“Nothing could outcompete the lights that already fill the city”

Although simple, the piece and the way it was installed were quite beautiful, and I’d be keen to see its practical applications beyond providing lighting for a bar in an art school.

Nearby, the way the crowd gathered round Spectra-3 by Field.io turned it into an alien street performer: a mirrored radar dish swung about by unseen forces. It felt oddly confined in the space, between two fully lit buildings. The piece had to contend with so many other background noises and lights, it felt out of place. It should have been on a quiet hilltop in the mist, throwing light at the sky.

It would be easy to criticise on artistic grounds. Some of the work was hard to see, not just because of the crowds but because London is itself, literally, brilliant. Nothing could outcompete the lights that already fill the city, and no single piece helped me to “see London in a new light”.

Only a handful of works dealt with exciting conceptual ideas, and the word “spectacle” – which can only rarely be applied to good art – did repeat itself an awful lot. Some pieces, accompanied by the kind of blurbs that you have to read eight times, did no more than awe people with powerful projectors. Still, the sheer number of harried Londoners who turned out, night after night, looking for a free thrill, is testament to the scale and promise of Lumiere London.

At one point I found myself in Regent Street, milling around with families and young couples beneath Porté par le vent’s Luminéoles – two gigantic tropical fish dirigibles. It’s rare that anything this spectacular happens for free. (In London, they’ve even started ticketing the fireworks on New Year’s Eve.) These creatures from beyond, with their impressive bodies and elegant choreography, were for a while a part of London, not just laid on top of it, sequestered on a rooftop bar somewhere behind a velvet rope. And they were a joy to see.

Lumiere London was held at venues across central London, 14 to 17 January

Light spectacular