Royal Docks tours — Open City

Discover Royal Docks London with an Open City tour…

Open City offers private year-round group tours of the Royal Docks at competitive prices and with the flexibility to meet all needs

Led by local guides who all live or work in the Royal Docks, these private tours are the ideal way for visiting groups — including architects, developers, academics and public authorities — to discover London’s largest regeneration zone.

Our network of expert guides are all graduates of Open City’s Golden Key Academy who received training in tour guiding excellent with support from the Royal Docks Team.

Open City has three decades of experience in running the annual Open House Festival which enables interior access to buildings often not otherwise open to the public.

Open City can deliver individual tours or multiple sequential tours to meet larger group size needs with events available on weekends and weekdays throughout the year.

All prices are available on request.

Merlin Fulcher, Head of Tours at Open City

Make a booking

Our tours typically tour run for 2-2hr30 and host up to 25 participants. Prices for all group tours are available on request

**All along the dock edge**

This fun walking tour along the northern edge of Royal Albert Dock — led by Anna Gibb — an architect and illustrator, living and working in the Royal Docks is enlivened by unique illustrations.
Historically a frontier of trade into and out of London the Royal Docks has had a fascinating journey from busy port to a place for people to call home.

Building a home in the Royal Docks: past, present and future

From workers' homes in Victorian era's busiest port, to a millennial urban village and it's low-cost candy-wrapper cladding, to a rooftop of a brand new development in a hotly-tipped regeneration area — a journey through time in Royal Docks
The Royal Docks have been home to Londoners for centuries. We will start our journey in the industrial heart of Victorian trade, where workers stayed close to factories manufacturing rubber, sugar, dyes, syrup, soap and event TNT.
Fast forward to the 20th century, when the West Silvertown ‘urban village' concept popularised by the now King Charles in the 1990s became reality in the form of Britannia Village. This mix of private and affordable homes includes innovative low-cost housing prototypes by architects Ash Sakula and Niall Mclaughlin, with their iridescent cladding.
From there to the rooftop of one of Royal Wharf's newest developments - Peabody/Redrow's Pontoon Reach - this tour take in views over the Thames Barrier, looking to the future of housing in one of the London’s biggest regeneration areas.
**About your guide:** Miko Schneider is a journalist by training. Since moving to the UK from South Africa in 2010 — via Amsterdam and Denmark — she's worked as a people & culture professional, coaching and developing colleagues in the housing sector.

**Sketch and stroll - masterplanning the docks**

Join Matt Ponting for a walk around Royal Victoria Dock, to draw local buildings and discover the heritage of the area, and specifically look at how the authorities masterplanned the area in the early 1980s.
Which buildings did they save and why, what was removed, and what happened next. The session will encourage participants to think about they would have planned the area, both in discussion and through sketching.
The session will be interactive with a number of opportunities to draw the docks, and to reflect on the area now and in the past.
**About you guide:** Matt Ponting is a local resident and illustrator, who specialises in bright and colourful architectural drawing, focussing on the docks, with a number of public artworks that can be spotted in the docks.

Water-based food and hospitality activities around Royal Docks: past, present and future (in Mandarin)

The Royal Docks once drew people and produce into the capital from all over the world. As the docks become a hive of activity once more, this tour looks at the rise, fall, and subsequent resurgence of the city’s industrial heartland with a special focus on food and hospitality.
This tour looks at how Royal Docks historically fed London, and how new water-based hospitality and other innovative activities are now bringing a unique quality of life and futuristic waterscape to the area.
**About your tour guide:** Joanna Dong is a local resident. Having an interest in international cultural exchange and collaboration, she has worked in theatre touring, producing and curating and is a graduate of Central School of Speech and Drama. She is fascinated by the history and recent changes of her local area.

Also available from Open City group tours…

Design District and Greenwich Peninsula

Led by up-and-coming architect and tour guide Morgan Lewis, this insightful and engaging tour will visit iconic developments across this historic 60 hectare riverside site which is the focus of an ambitious phased £8.4 billion redevelopment masterplan. Starting and finishing at Design District (home to the Bureau members club and also Canteen food hall where all participants may claim a 10 per cent discount on drinks) the walk will follow a circular route around the new waterfront neighbourhood which will soon be home to more than 35,000 people.

London Pubs

This fun and engaging walking tour — led by public historian and tour guide Sheldon K Goodman — will explore the enigmatic streets and alleys of Holborn, Farringdon and Clerkenwell which play host to a roster of legendary pubs such as The Cheshire Cheese, The Rising Sun and The Fox and Anchor. Inspired by Open City's new book Public House: A Cultural and Social History of the London Pub, the tour will celebrate the incredible diversity, design and stories of London’s public houses as we are at last able to enjoy them again.

Woolwich

Woolwich was a major manufacturing centre with factories, a dockyard and the Royal Arsenal situated on the banks of the Thames. Alongside a strong and independent civic identity, Woolwich also maintained a significant military presence: a legacy that lives on in pub names and street names such as General Gordon Square as well as the Royal Artillery barracks and the presence of the King’s Troop, Royal Horse Artillery. Recently, Woolwich has seen a period of great change. One of Historic England’s Heritage Action Zones, Powis Street has been declared a conservation area.