The magic of light is at its best in the darkest months of the year. Around this time the coach parties begin pouring into London to cruise up and down Oxford Street and Regent Street and view the enchantments of London’s most famous Christmas lighting displays. In the past few years the coaches have also made a little deviation down Store Street to look at the legendary Christmas illuminations on the headquarters of Imagination, the design consultancy that has built up a reputation for sensational lighting.

Seven years ago executives at the Lloyd’s of London building asked the company to design some temporary exterior lighting for a one-off event. A theatrical designer came up with a striking blue scheme, and they liked it so much that they kept it. This year the building next door to Imagination, New London Architecture (NLA), is putting on a spectacular architectural lighting exhibition, London Lights, which will offer more thrills for the lighting tourists coming to London.

Special lighting festivals are also being switched on around the country at this time of year. Glasgow’s inaugural festival of light, Radiance, took place from November 25 to 27. The core of the show was in Merchant Square, where a company called Lightquest set up the 186 Human Generator. The title refers to the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second. This was an interactive installation with visuals, live music from Weird Attractors and volunteers who generated enough energy through physical effort to power lighting elements in the square. The Central Mosque and St Andrew’s Metropolitan Cathedral were among other focuses of the festival.

The Huyton Gallery/Library in Knowsley, Merseyside, is also putting on a show, Dazzle, using elements from the Blackpool illuminations. The lights will be displayed on the walls above head height, with one large piece of lighting art in the centre of the gallery.

The British Council has organised a lighting design show, Twinkle Twinkle: New Light from the UK. This has already toured to Istanbul, Tokyo and Moscow and it has now come home to Britain for Christmas. It is showing in Barnsley, South Yorkshire. This is an exhibition of the best in current British lighting design, featuring works from international designers such as Ron Arad and Tom Dixon as well as experimental pieces. The finest designs, such as Paul Cocksedge’s Sapphire and Tonic or Jessica Shaw’s Cloud, come close to recapturing our childhood enchantment with clustered lights.

Liverpool too holds a light festival. This year’s City of Lights, which took place in September, involved spectacular lights, laser shows and large-scale screen projections. Its next one will be in 2007, coinciding with the city’s 800th birthday. And Leeds organises annual lighting awards as part of the Leeds Architecture Awards Scheme. Last year the Parkinson Building, part of Leeds University, won the award for the use of lighting to enhance the features of this beautiful Portland stone building, turning it into a key landmark of the city.

“Lighting as an art has evolved a bit like fireworks,” says Peter Murray, the curator of London Lights and founder of NLA. “We used to have fireworks only once a year, but now we have them for all sorts of celebrations. Technology has advanced enormously. The same is true for the lighting of buildings. Today good lighting on buildings is regarded as a true art. The technology has advanced a great deal, and architects are paying a lot more attention to how they light their buildings at night.”

Nobody is satisfied with mere floodlighting any more. That used to be the standard way of lighting a building at night, aiming to reproduce the effects of daylight. Nowadays architects like to pick out elements of a building with tiny LED lights, special washes or with an infinite range of colours to give new emphases.

In Munich, for example, the Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron designed a football stadium that was to be used by two different teams. They devised a system of lighting that allowed the building to be lit in red when one of the teams was playing and in blue when the other was playing. Like other architects they worked out how to use light to change the character of the building to suit different occasions.

Because it demands mastery of both form and technology, lighting has become a rich field in innovation and creativity. British designs for highly sophisticated exterior lighting have enjoyed a renaissance since the late 1990s, and much of it has developed from the technology used in the illumination of pop concerts. When done well, good lighting can have a transformative effect on any kind of building.

Will Alsop, who has two buildings featured in the NLA show, now designs with lighting as an integral part of his schemes. For his Fawood Children’s Centre in Harlesden, North London, a typically bold and colourful piece of architecture, he incorporated coloured lozenges that can be lit from the ground at night, giving the building a completely different ambience to daylight.

“It’s much more subtle than floodlighting. London’s lighting has advanced enormously in the past 15 years,” he says. “If you were to stand on Waterloo Bridge and look down the river at night, the view would be completely different from that of 15 years ago. But if you contrast London today with Shanghai today, again the contrast is huge. The Chinese love light and colour, and the centre of Shanghai is very in-your-face. Japanese cities are like that too: the lighting at night becomes a key part of the experience of these urban centres. Maybe European cities will move in that direction, but for us, still, the idea that light can transform a city into somewhere else is very exciting.”

Even the Queen approves. Last year, Buckingham Palace was lit with a projection of the Union Jack for a night. And now Broadcasting House is getting a lighting makeover designed by Martin Richman and Tony Cooper.

Britain seems to be catching up with Asia and other parts of the world in developing new strategies and designs for lighting its cities. So far we have avoided the pullulating mass of neon that can hit you so painfully between the eyes in central Tokyo or Shanghai. But although our approach is perhaps more sophisticated, it need not be sober. The whole point of lighting is that it needs to thrill.

London Lights is at New London Architecture, WC1 (020-7250 0530), to Jan 21 (www.newlondonarchitecture.org)

Twinkle Twinkle is at The Design Centre, Barnsley, South Yorks (01266 771133), to Dec 21 (www.designcentrenorth.com)

Dazzle is at Huyton Gallery/Library, Merseyside (0151-443 5617), until Feb 19 (arts.galleries.dlcs@knowsley.gov.uk)

The Leeds Architecture Awards Scheme lighting prize will be awarded on Feb 8