An important date for your diaries, as the annual festival of letting people inside normally private buildings, will open for ticket bookings next week.

Previously everything was crammed into one weekend, but this year, Open House London lasts a fortnight, giving people more chances to visit places that might be open for more than just a couple of days. Around 700 buildings opening up, many for the first time since the pandemic closed so much of the city to everyone.

The 2022 Open House Festival will run from Thursday 8th September to Wednesday 21st September 2022.

The full programme goes live on the Open House website on Wednesday 24th August 2022 – followed by a mad scramble to find all the venues that need booking and grab tickets to the best ones.

This is also Open House London’s 30th anniversary, having started in 1992, originally a series of bus tours, but in 1994 as the Open House Day that we’ve come to love — the chance to walk around the city going inside lots of buildings we’d rarely get the chance to see inside.

Having gone through the preview guide — which lists around 400 of the expected 700 venues to be open, these look like some of the best to my mind to keep an eye out for.

North London

  • Isokon Building
  • Lincoln’s Inn
  • Page High Estate
  • Shaftesbury Theatre
  • St Pancras station clock tower
  • The RSAF Factory Clock
  • Trevithick House

East London

  • Apothecaries’ Hall
  • Balfron Tower
  • Bank of England
  • City Hall
  • Cody Dock
  • Coopers’ Hall
  • East Ham old town hall
  • Founders’ Hall
  • Leathersellers’ Hall
  • New Museum of London
  • One Canada Square
  • Painters’ Hall
  • Rio Cinema
  • Salters’ Hall
  • Shoreditch Town Hall
  • Stationers’ Hall

Southeast London

  • Caroline Gardens Chapel
  • Crystal Palace Bowl
  • Dawson’s Heights
  • Devonport Mausoleum
  • Energy Hub
  • Kaymet Factory
  • Southwark Integrated Waste Facility
  • Vanbrugh Park Estate
  • Woolwich Town Hall

Southwest London

  • Anderson bomb shelter
  • Cressingham Gardens
  • Dorchester House
  • International Maritime Organisation
  • Lambeth Palace Library
  • Lambeth Town Hall
  • Osborne Water Tower
  • Wandsworth Prison Museum

West London

  • Argentine Ambassador’s Residence
  • BBC Broadcasting House
  • Burlington House
  • Caledonian Club
  • Canada House
  • Ealing Town Hall
  • Embassy of the Republic of Poland
  • Lancaster House
  • National Liberal Club
  • Preedy Glass
  • Room by Antony Gormley
  • Tin Tabernacle

In a typical year, London Open House attracts 250,000 visitors. Will you be one of them this year?

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9 comments
  1. Maria del Carmen Marchese says:

    When volunteers for Open House can book a placement? It is not an email or telephone number to contact the team, thank you very much.

    • ianVisits says:

      Seems troubling that you can be accepted as a volunteer and also not have any information about the event you are volunteering at — but for contacting organisations, I find reading their privacy policy always has a contact email address — you can find links to privacy policies usually at the bottom of websites.

    • Philip says:

      I got an email from Open House on August 12 re: Volunteering. If you didn’t get it I contact them at volunteers@open-city.org.uk

  2. Chris Rogers says:

    I bought the guide for the first time since before you-know-what, since I hoped/assumed that something like a full service would be back, notwithsanding the dual dates this year; what a disappointment. Leaving aside the bizarre and completely unhelful abandonment of the usual borough-based listing in favout of the N/S/W/L crudeness (North runs from Stanmore to Covent Garden!), it is very ‘thin’, with nothing like the numbers previously and no indication whatsoever of whether booking will be needed, which traditionally was the whole point of buying the guide. Presumably one will thus be forced to trawl the website on 24/8 to find that out, by which time it will of course be too late since others will have got there first. Not sure where the ‘700’ comes from but if so why go to print with half the listings missing? It isn’t the organisers’ fault if fewer owners want to take part, but it is their decision as to how the venues are presented. Sadly the whole organisation of LOH has been incredibly poor for some years now with booking failures, website failures, comms failures. It may be time to all it a day.

    • Al says:

      I agreed with what you said. What a huge disappointment with the guide book which informs one nothing about the actual events. Why would the organiser want people to bombard its website and causing traffic jam while on the other hand, make the best use of the guide and get the dates and venues out beforehand.

  3. Lydia says:

    Message from Lydia.

    How do you book for events? It was supposed to go live today, 24 August but I can’t find it anywhere. Since Open House have now done away with the previously excellent guide and are now forcing us to go online, it would be helpful if there was somewhere we could go to to make the bookings, if required.

  4. Christopher Fenn says:

    As usual the website has crashed, you would have thought they would have fixed it by now.

    • ianVisits says:

      Working fine for me at the moment, and was working fine between 10-10:30am.

      In fact, was quite impressed with how smoothly it all ran.

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