Homecoming curated by Claudia Kenyatta and Emma Squire
Claudia Kenyatta CBE and Emma Squire CBE are the joint incoming Chief Executives of Historic England, having shared the role of Director of Regions since 2023. Both bring extensive senior civil service experience in culture, heritage, and community renewal, including leading landmark programmes such as Historic England’s High Streets Heritage Action Zones and the Government’s £1.59bn Culture Recovery Fund. Beyond Historic England, Claudia chairs Battersea Arts Centre and Emma chairs Bridport Museum, and together they serve on the Mayor of London’s Cultural Leadership Board.
Almost 9 million people call London home. This collection presents different iterations of home within London, from the residences of great artists to post-war housing estates to Tudor almshouses to projects that show how communities are founding new homes within the city, to temporary shelters for those in need.
Many homes are situated within historic buildings – some of which were not designed as housing but have nevertheless proved resilient and adaptable spaces. These walls could tell tales of multiple generations, myriad occupants and uses over time. Now new generations are working to retrofit historic buildings to meet the challenges of today. Across England up to 670,000 characterful new homes could come from sensitively repurposing empty or underused historic buildings and due to embodied carbon, the greenest home is the one that already exists.
As you journey through London’s homes, we hope you’ll find somewhere to stop and stay a while, and marvel at the many people and communities that occupy historic buildings and continue to reimagine these as homes for the future.
London boasts many historic almshouses, from Tudor dwellings in Croydon and Waltham Forest to 18th and 19th century buildings for specific trades like brewery workers in Hounslow. While you can visit these historic sites during Open House, we have chosen to spotlight a historic almshouse charity (tracing its history to 1541) which has built contemporary social housing, reimagining the almshouse for today. Appleby Blue Almshouse in Southwark was designed by Stirling Prize-winning architects Witherford Watson Mann for United St Saviour's Charity and offers 57 almshouses for residents aged over 65. The project both sets a new benchmark for the quality of older people’s housing and it shows community can be fostered in the inner city through innovative, thoughtful housing projects.
2. Walter Segal Self-build Houses
Our next stop brings together two groundbreaking self-build projects in Lewisham.
In the 1980s, at Walters Way, residents built their own homes through a public-sector self-build scheme, eligible to people on the council’s waiting or transfer lists. With names pulled from a hat, people with no building experience came together to self-build 13 houses using methods developed by project lead Walter Segal. Today these houses have been extended and renovated with the addition of sustainable features.
3. 'Tomorrow is Built Today' exhibition of Black-led self-build
In the 1990s at Nubia Way, Europe's largest black-led community self-build for rent initiative resulted in award-winning eco-housing. The project saw a co-operative of African and Caribbean Londoners named Fusions Jameen work with a housing association to build homes by the community and for the community. The scheme gave the builders a stake in the properties, not through cash investment, but through their labour, and secured residents a rent 30% below other social housing.
Open House gives rare access into both pioneering self-build homes and an insight into the social values and context that inspired people to embark on these communal projects.
4. Lillington Gardens Estate
The Lillington Gardens Estate in Pimlico is one of the first low-rise, high-density public housing schemes to be built in the post-War period. It proved that low-rise flats with an intricate design could accommodate the same number of people per acre as tower blocks.
In 1961, John Darbourne won an open architectural competition held by Westminster City Council for the design of the estate. His design responds to the nearby Church of St James the Less, with its striking Victorian red brick. The scheme provided homes for around 2,000 people with a high proportion provided for older people. There were also pubs, shops, doctors, a community hall and a library. Before the estate was built, this part of Pimlico was mainly older terraced housing.
Lillington Gardens Estate was a key influence on low-rise social housing from the mid-1960s until the early 1980s. The scheme won many awards including a Ministry of Housing and Local Government award for good design in 1970. More recently, the estate’s importance was recognised in being designated a conservation area in 1990 and listed at Grade II* (phases 1 and 2) and Grade II (phase 3) on the advice of English Heritage in 2000.
5. Highpoint
This high-rise block of Grade I-listed modernist flats exemplifies an interwar vision of a new way of urban living. Built in 1936-38 by famed architect Berthold high, Highpoint was pioneering in design for considering community and wellbeing and remains one of the city’s best-preserved examples of modernist domestic architecture. The design promotes a healthy lifestyle by integrating a communal swimming pool, tennis courts and beautifully landscaped gardens for residents to use. In addition to being able to enjoy these communal spaces, Open House offers the opportunity to see inside a flat and appreciate Lubetkin’s attention to detail and utopian vision – he is quoted as saying: ‘nothing is too good for ordinary people’ and throughout his life worked to design housing and community services for all.
6. Noel Rees: rural - romantic suburban vision
Around 80% of England’s population live in the suburbs and these areas can be assumed to be quiet, conservative and unchanging. Historic England research on suburbs, however, has proved quite the opposite, as set out in a new book England’s Suburbs 1820-2020.
Petts Wood is a typical 1930s suburb, the character of which is protected by its designation as a conservation area. Other examples of suburban architecture that can be visited as part of Open House are 1 Waterlow Court, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, and Tower Gardens in Haringey, a cottage estate constructed between 1904 and 1928 by the London County Council, which oversaw a groundbreaking programme of social housing from 1890 onwards.
7. Mount Pleasant
This Edwardian site – a former workhouse – is not far from the historic home of Charles Dickens (now a museum). The ghosts of London past have been turned to good, however, in this imaginative reuse scheme by Peter Barber Architects. The attractive parts of Mount Pleasant have been retained and the more foreboding aspects transformed through creative interventions of different coloured but complementary brickwork, enclosing a new courtyard. The building provides housing for the homeless, but in radically different and greatly improved conditions to that of the 19th century.
There are several Blue Plaques to people who have campaigned for and built better housing in London. These include social worker Mary Hughes in Whitechapel, founder of Hampstead Garden Suburb Henrietta Barnett in Hampstead, social reformer Octavia Hill in Marylebone, and activist Olive Morris in Brixton.
8. Dorich House Museum
A stone’s throw away from Richmond Park lies Dorich House Museum, a Grade II-listed home completed in 1936 by sculptor Dora Gordine (1895-1991) and her husband the Hon. Richard Hare (1907-66), a scholar of Russian art and literature. Gordine designed the house herself and it stands as an exceptional example of a modern studio house by and for a woman artist. Set over four floors, the house is now a museum holding the largest collection of Gordine’s work. The house also continues to champion women’s creative practice by operating as an international centre to promote and support female artists.
9. Rana Begum's Little Citadel
Described by the RIBA Jury as an "extraordinary house", that to visit "will inevitably be a different experience from any before" and by the Civic Trust Awards as "an outstanding piece of architecture", we welcome you to a behind-the-scenes hidden world view of acclaimed artist Rana Begum's 'Little Citadel' retreat compound, comprising her studio, home, guest house and gardens on multiple levels.
10. Walworth Living Tour
This characterful 1890s building – formerly a parish hall for All Saints’ Church – is in the Thomas A Becket and High Street Conservation Area. During the Second World War the building was a ‘British Restaurant’ – a communal canteen where local people could purchase inexpensive nutritious food. By 1943, there were over 2,000 such kitchens nationally, serving 600,000 meals a day; this was particularly needed in London where many people lost their homes in the Blitz. The building still serves this predominately residential area, now as a ‘Living Room’, a home away from home for local people to meet and eat together. Also, don’t miss the impressive Grade II-listed terrace at 18-56 Surrey Square opposite the Living Room, which was intended as one side of a square of townhouses and built in 1793; the rest of the square was never realised, although the ambition survives in the street’s name.
11. Dr Johnson’s House
Samuel Johnson’s family was not rich, and he struggled to find accommodation when he moved to London from his Midlands birthplace in 1737. The City of London at that time would have been a teeming with hundreds of thousands of residents – quite different to the City today, where very few people now live. Johnson moved to this house in Gough Place in 1748 – the only of his London residences to survive – and it was here he compiled his famous Dictionary. His household was large and from 1752 included Francis Barber, born into enslavement in Jamaica, whose education Johnson paid for and who he later made his heir.
