30 years of Open City
Open City member of staff Phineas Harper reflects on 30 years of making London more open, accessible and equitable
Together over the month of September, we celebrated the landscapes, the architecture and the communities that make London unique. I was simply astounded by the extraordinary variety and creativity in the Open House Festival programme this year and want to convey huge thanks to the phenomenal team of staff, volunteers, contributors, boroughs, partners and collaborators who made this year’s festival such a triumphant landmark in London’s cultural calendar.
It is simply phenomenal how the Open House Festival has grown. Once it was just a small handful of buildings dotted across a few fairly central London boroughs. Now the event is the largest and most inclusive celebration of special housing, architecture, landscapes and neighbourhoods in the world.
There were over 800 sites in the 2022 Open House London Festival across all 33 London Boroughs, and that is just one of now nearly 60 Open House Festivals around the world from Lagos to New York. This weekend will see Open House Dublin, the weekend after, Open House Barcelona. We’re launching new Open House Festivals in Norway, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, and Spain this autumn alone with Copenhagen, the West Midlands and others to come soon.
At a time when it can feel incredibly hard to build bridges across borders and between communities, when powerful forces seek to drive us apart and make us afraid of others, I am so proud that the Open House Festival community in the UK and overseas stands up for bringing people together. For welcoming strangers in. For learning from our differences. For making neighbourhoods everywhere – from Bow, to Manhattan; from Hackney to Santiago; from Lewisham to Osaka; and from Ealing to Zurich more open, accessible and equitable.
Of course, none of this – not the Open House Festivals, not our year-round walking tours and study trips, not our weekly Londown podcast or our beautiful books. not our pioneering education work with children and young people from communities under-represented in city-making industries – not one thing would be possible without you.
Whether you’re reading this as a volunteer, a member of staff, a student, a sponsor, a donor, a trustee, a journalist, or another collaborator – you are the reason our charity exists. You are the reason we were able to not just survive the pandemic but create one of the most vibrant, diverse and dynamic programmes of any cultural organisation I know in that period. You are what makes everything Open City does possible. Ultimately Open City is a community, and as I look around that community reflecting on 30 years of working together, I feel overwhelmed by all the generosity and creativity I see.
Sure, there are times when our work is complicated, frustrating or stressful. There are some challenges which feel huge and many times when our small charity just doesn’t have the resources to do everything we’d like to. But there are also times you meet an Open House Festival visitor moved to verge of tears by the experience of meeting the residents of a council estate her dad designed before he passed away. There are the times you meet a young rising star designer, the only member of their family to go to university, and they tell you the first time anyone looked them in the eye and asked how they thought the city could be better, was at an Open City Accelerate workshop. There are times you see deep-set negative preconceptions about council estates fall during an Open City walking tour, or battles to save precious community buildings won in part thanks to our programmes. Then you remember what it’s all about – because when you connect communities and places with sincerity and generosity, you change lives.
If you’re not a regular donor to charity, please consider signing up as an Open City Friend today. We are a small organisation and rely on support from people like you. Anything you can give, even that’s just a few quid a month, makes a huge difference to the organisation and to the communities we work with.
Thank you.
