ARCHIVE:

The Open House Festival Team

open-city.org.uk

The start of spring, with all its connotations of new life and rebirth, is a good time to gain fresh perspectives. This month, two exhibitions invite us to do precisely that, by reconsidering two familiar, natural features of London’s environment. Coming to the end of its run, SOIL: The World at Our Feet at Somerset House uses artworks and artefacts to explore the role that soil plays in sustaining life on this planet and to imagine a different future to the one we’re currently on course for. Opening in April and looking back into London’s past, Secrets of the Thames at London Museum Docklands is a celebration of mudlarking, the remarkable treasures that are uncovered on the riverbed each time the tide recedes, and what they have to tell us about the Londoners of the past.

By welcoming Londoners into spaces that aren’t usually open to them, the Open House Festival also invites visitors to experience and think about the city differently. The 2025 edition of the festival will take place 13-21 September, and we’re now open for applications. The festival is an annual celebration of London’s architecture and neighbourhoods, and the people and communities that make them. Every year, buildings and other sites across all 33 London boroughs open to the public so that Londoners can explore and learn about them for free.

If you have a building you want to open, a neighbourhood you want to share or a story you want to tell as part of this year’s Open House Festival programme, you can find everything you need on our website. To kick things off, we’re holding a series of online surgeries from April onwards, open to anyone and everyone who thinks they might want to run an open day or other event during the festival. So, if that’s you, sign up for one or more of the sessions and come and speak to a member of the festival team.

The Open House Festival is run by Open City, a charity that empowers communities to learn about, feel connected to, and have a role in shaping the places where they live. Our programme of tours offers an opportunity to explore an area of the city you might be unfamiliar with, or to get a fresh perspective on a neighbourhood you know well. Sensing London is a walking tour that encourages participants to experience the urban realm around them in new ways, ‘sensing the rhymes, rhythm, volumes, and voids that normally flow past unnoticed’. Our Brixton walking tour explores the changing town centre there and the role played by market-led regeneration, and then the neighbourhood beyond, including stops at buildings which have become features of the festival programme, including Brixton Rec and Brixton Windmill. And if you prefer to tour from the comfort of a seat, the April edition of the Architecture on the Thames boat tour will give a fresh view of Central London’s architectural highlights.

Meanwhile, over in theatreland, My Master Builder is opening at Wyndham’s Theatre. Henrik Ibsen’s 1892 play Master Builder is a tale of personal success and what it does to the individual concerned and those around them, and playwright Lila Raicek has relocated the action to the Hamptons, New York. If you’re a fan of the messy-rich-people-making-a-mess genre of television, then this is probably the play for you.