Open House Festival to celebrate nine special neighbourhoods to mark its 30th anniversary
Press Release
Today Open House Festival, London’s annual celebration of special buildings and communities, has launched a new curatorial strategy to mark its 30th anniversary centred on championing nine remarkable London neighbourhoods.
Aldgate, East Ham, Greenwich Peninsula, South Tottenham, Somers Town, Battersea, Walworth, Shepherd’s Bush and Cambridge Heath will take centre stage at this September’s two-week Open House Festival along with hundreds of other buildings and landscapes across all 33 boroughs of the capital.
During the festival, visitors to each neighbourhood will be able to explore a wide range of different building types and architectural styles with multiple community events, tours and things to do in each location.
Open House Festival, which will run from 8 to 21 September is created by Open City, a charity dedicated to making London more open, accessible and equitable. To mark the festival’s 30th anniversary, organisers are planning a number of special new features including celebrity guest curators, a new book exploring migration and food in London, and new buildings and landscape never before featured in the Open House Festival. Further details will be announced throughout the summer.
This year London’s Open House Festival has announced a major collaboration with the UK’s biggest property website Rightmove, creating free public tours of homes across the capital from Modernist flats to Georgian townhouses.
The partnership will enable the Open House Festival to better include private homes of all shapes, styles and era in its two-week city-wide programme. Along with championing domestic architecture, Open House and Rightmove are working together to open up neighbourhoods of London, helping communities celebrate their corner of London, and offering more ways for people to explore whole pockets of the city.
The new Open House Festival chief curator Zoë Cave said:
‘London is a city of many neighbourhoods – unique areas each with their own characters and architecture that barrel into one another, changing, evolving and overlapping. The Open House Festival’s new curatorial strategy puts neighbourhoods at the heart of how we explore and celebrate London’
Sarah Brown, Head of Brand at Rightmove said:
‘Rightmove is the perfect place to discover homes in new areas you might want to live in. And Open House Festival is a unique opportunity to visit some of those areas first-hand. We know it's the people who live in London's neighbourhoods that make them such great places to live. At the festival you’ll be able to see how local communities in these vibrant places work together, as entire streets and estates open up across the capital.
‘As part of the online festival programme, we’ll be sharing Rightmove’s unrivalled expert insights to create unique guides, spotlighting a few London neighbourhoods and supplementing the Open House Festival Guidebook. So you'll be able to discover everything you need to know about an area before you head to the festival. Find out about local house prices, schools and transport links, and explore some of the great homes you can buy and rent in each area. And we'll be sharing insider tips on where the locals love to eat, drink and shop, too.’
You can find the London neighbourhood guides at rightmove.co.uk and www.openhouse.org.uk this August.
Images
Click here to download images relating to the nine focus neighbourhoods.
Notes
Over the years, around 8 million people have attended the Open House Festival since it was launched in 1992.
The 2022 Open House Festival will launch on Thursday 8 September and run for two weeks until Wednesday 21 September.
The Open House Festival website is www.openhouse.org.uk
In a typical year the London Open House Festival attracts 250,000 visitors making it the largest and most inclusive event of its kind in the world.
There are 50 other Open House Festivals around the world including in New York City, Lagos, Taipei and Zurich. London
Contacts
Please contact press@open-city.org.uk with enquiries.