Open House 2018: world's biggest architecture exhibition unlocks London buildings' hidden secrets
Change is what London does best. This is the theme underpinning Open House London this year, with new landmark buildings and entire regeneration districts on show this Saturday and Sunday.
Together with guided tours and talks from a host of volunteers, in total there are more than 800 programme items to enjoy — and it’s free.
You can walk through the old haunts, down the corridors of Whitehall and tread the floorboards of the Old Vic, but “in our 27th year we’re exploring the new London emerging around us as the capital remakes itself in the Brexit era”, says Rory Olcayto, chief executive of Open City.
For the second consecutive year the venues are spread across the capital with all 33 boroughs represented.
World’s biggest architectural exhibition
Open House started as a modest architectural affair in 1992 as a busload of 100 sightseers toured 20 buildings. The weekend festival now features 834 places of interest with 250,000 visitors expected to descend.
“It is has become the world’s biggest architectural exhibition,” says Olcayto. “The turnout shows the depth of regard we all share for our city’s great townscape and the range of emotions it can inspire within us.”
Women in architecture is also a focal point for the event organisers, featuring the likes of Camden-based Clare Wright and her practice Wright & Wright. She is currently refurbishing the Grade I-listed Geffrye Museum in Hoxton.
Visitors can download the Open House app from this Saturday which will display projects to see near you.
Most of the properties are accessible on a first-come basis but be warned, last entry to many of the sites is 4.15pm (openhouselondon.open-city.org.uk).
Here’s the Homes & Property pick for a good snoop of London locations where the doors are normally locked.
New London
Covering 1,600 acres, equivalent in size to the City, Old Oak and Royal Park in north-west London is the capital’s largest redevelopment site.
It’s already home to 2,000 businesses, 40,000 employees and 4,000 residents but as of 2026 will become a major transport hub and the only place in the UK where Crossrail meets HS2.
Open House visitors can witness the £26 billion transformation of marshland and former industrial sheds into a new town connecting London with the Midlands and 25,500 new homes.
Amid the cranes, longstanding buildings of note include the Ace Cafe, which opened in 1938 and is a meeting point for car and motorbike enthusiasts. Visitors can create Fifties-inspired costumes and dress up for a photoshoot.
London’s newest office space, along with technology, is showcased at the 16-storey White Collar Factory in Old Street Yard. In the heart of Silicon Roundabout, six buildings include offices, studios, incubator space for start-ups, restaurants and apartments. Completed last year, it was imagined as a warehouse-style factory tower.
Old haunts
The Foreign Office is always Open House’s busiest building, with 10,500 people visiting over two days last year. The Grade I-listed Victorian offices in King Charles Street in Westminster were built by George Gilbert Scott and Matthew Digby Wyatt in 1861.
In the Sixties, as part of grand plans for a new Whitehall, the buildings were to be torn down but a lack of money meant the plans were scrapped.
Scott’s masterpiece Dunbar Court represents the pomp of Colonial times. Originally open to the sky, the four sides of the court are surrounded by three levels of columns and piers supporting arches.
The ground floor Doric and first-floor Ionic columns are polished red Peterhead granite, the top-floor Corinthian columns are of grey Aberdeen granite and the pavement is made of Greek, Sicilian and Belgian marble.
The waiting room at Peckham Rye station was once considered to be one of south London’s grandest. Designed by Charles Henry Driver in 1865 it closed in 1962.
After a campaign to get the building Grade II listed in 2007, the space was restored for events and is already fully booked for Open House this year, as are the Bloomberg Building and the US Embassy.
Top picks still available include St Augustine’s Church in Fulham Palace Road which has undergone award-winning restoration by architect Roz Barr. It was destroyed in the Blitz and temporarily rebuilt.
In this latest project layers of paint were stripped back to reveal original timber and stone columns, all treated with white oil for a more sacred feel.
Also recommended is 168 Upper Street, a restored war-damaged 19th-century block in Islington.
“Windows and stonework details have been misremembered, overscaled and underscaled, placed incorrectly, making the whole composition feel dream-like,” says Rory Olcayto. “Serious and playful, this is highbrow architecture we can all enjoy.”
Quirky and uplifting
Designed as an inverted pyramid Canada Water Library is a big building on a small footprint. The civic centrepiece for the district’s regeneration, it has a café, performance space and is aluminium-clad, with deep windows.
Also new to Open House, Maggie’s Barts in Farringdon opened last December to give social, emotional and practical support to people with cancer. It has been designed to feel more like a home than a hospital, a curved glass building with no reception desk or signs but with a big kitchen table.