Open House Open Call
Open House Festival is looking for London’s most compelling homes, buildings and places for its 30th anniversary in September.
With the support of new partner, Rightmove, the Open House Festival plans are bigger, bolder and more ambitious. For festival’s 30th birthday, the mission is to have the most diverse range of buildings and places open. We believe that if there is a story to be told about your home, building or neighbourhood then it should be opened and celebrated in the festival. If it is special and interesting to you, it will be to others too.
What started as a handful of bijou buildings open for small tours one weekend in the early 1990s, has grown to become Open House Festival, one of the largest and most spectacular celebrations of special buildings, places and the communities behind them in the world.
For three decades Open City has cajoled and encouraged councils, institutions and individuals to throw open the doors of architecture and landscapes to welcome people of all backgrounds for free visits. Persuading hundreds of Londoners to open up their homes and spaces to others, not for private gain but for the public good, is both our proudest accomplishment and our most enduring challenge.
So why do it? Why do so many people put so much effort into the Open House Festival every year and why should you get involved for our 30th anniversary celebrations?
The festival pivots on the idea that when Londoners of all backgrounds are offered genuine opportunities to explore, experience, celebrate and critique their urban landscape, we can create a better city – one in which all citizens have the power, the platforms and the knowledge to take part in meaningful discussions about its future. Open House Festival is created year on year because through learning about places, communities and histories outside our usual experience we grow in empathy and understanding of others and the world. Open House Festival is created because by doing so, London will become a more open, equitable and accessible city.
Domestic architecture and Rightmove
London has an extraordinarily rich history of domestic architecture from iconic high-rise towers and pioneering social housing estates to eccentric mansions and converted boats. These different styles and typologies of housing are where homes are made and through tweaks and changes, come to reflect those who live there.
Open House Festival is a two week celebration dedicated to celebrating these homes and everything people have done to make it theirs.
With the support of this new partnership with Rightmove, Open House Festival will be better enabled to include far more private homes in the festival across every corner of the city. You don’t have to live in an architecturally outstanding home or be an architectural historian to contribute to Open House Festival; everyone with a story to tell is welcome in the festival programme.
Beyond individual buildings, this year the festival is opening up whole neighbourhoods. Spotlighting compelling areas beyond the city centre such as Shepherd’s Bush, Globe Town, South Norwood, Golders Green and offering a unique chance to explore and discover all the different things that make up London – the landscapes, the streets, the estates, the hidden infrastructure. Open City is taking this approach because we know the festival is at its best when a whole street or neighbourhood opens for the weekend and you can see all these parts working together. These dense clusters of open buildings and spaces within a few streets from each other – prompting people and activity spilling out into a neighbourhood’s squares and streets – also maximise our feelings of openness and celebration, creating a truly transformative experience that will last for generations.
More information
The 2022 Open House Festival will open on Thursday the 8th of September and run for two weeks including hundreds of free events. The festival organisers are encouraging Londoners of all backgrounds to sign up to include their own homes in the programme or to volunteer for the festival to help reopen London following the pandemic starting.
Do you live, work in or have a relationship with a spectacular building or place in London? Join us and contribute to the festival; find out more here.
If you’re a newcomer to contributing the festival, we are running a mentoring programme to offer; support; find out more here.
