12th of May - Contributor Update
1st of June deadline for the Printed Festival Listing & the Open House Neighbourhoods plan
Hi all
The wheels of the Open House Festival are well and truly turning, and things are looking in good shape! There is a lot to cover in this update so for those who prefer to watch/listen, there is a video of me explaining all of this in a video.
On this page and in the video we are covering:
The neighbourhoods plan
The printed festival listing and the deadline of the 1st of June
The first deadline of the 1st of June and what happens after
Printed festival listing- 1st of June deadline
Printed Festival Listing - 1st of June
This year the charity is producing a printed festival listing for the first time in two years. The listing will have a similar look and feel to the Alternative Guide to London Boroughs, spotlighting this year's neighbourhoods and highlights of contributors opening or running events for the festival. It will then list contributors that are opening or running events for the festival more generally.
Key points:
If you would like to be considered to be in this year's printed listing, please have your submission ready on the festival website by midnight on the 1st of June.
The listing is created from the 40 word ‘Description’ that you have written and added. To have a better chance of being included in the listing, make sure this Description is error-free, accurate, compelling, and free of marketing-jargon if you are a commercial building.
If you want some help with it, sign up for the Mentoring Programme where you will find a specific video with help on writing and taking photos of your place.
The printed listing will not include exact details of opening times therefore if you are definitely contributing to the festival but need some time to work out exactly what you want to do (opening times etc) you still have time to work that out and add it to the festival website.
If you have listed your contribution by the 1st of June, this is not a guarantee it will be included in the printed festival listing.
After the 1st of June
Of course we want as many in the relaunch of the printed festival listing as possible and would urge you to submit their contributions by the 1st of June to be considered. However between the 1st of June and the end of August there is still a lot you can do, you can:
Open your neighbourhood or join an open neighbourhood
Opt-in to hosting an event, workshop, talk, activity run by an individual, community organisation who do not have a space to open for the festival
Propose to run an event, workshop, talk or activity that can be hosted in a space that is open for the festival
Submit a contribution to the festival website
Change some details of your contribution on the festival website, but not the date
Mentoring Programme and Pay as you feel
If you would like to be a contributor but would like support from online resources and staff, join the Mentoring Programme.
If you have signed up to be a contributor and you are in a position to do so, we are running a pay-as-you-feel model to support the festival to be financially sustainable.
Not sure about doing it
And if after that you’re still not sure, we want to re-share that for the festival’s 30th birthday, our mission is to have the biggest and most diverse range of buildings and places open. We want to do away with misconceptions that only architecturally outstanding buildings are welcome in the festival. If you have a story to tell about your home, workplace, neighbourhood or somewhere you find fascinating, then the festival is for you. If it’s special and interesting to you, it will be to others too.
Neighbourhoods
This year we are organising the festival around the ‘neighbourhood’. The aim is for clusters of openings that create dense festival activity with buildings, places, landscapes and infrastructure all open at the same time within the same area. There is more information here about the aims here.
We also want it to help you as a festival contributor:
It should help manage the flow of visitors, for instance one building's queue could be easily diffused by having neighbours or other buildings nearby open just a few streets away.
If you’re worried that your place won’t take a lot of time for visitors to explore, being able to recommend a neighbours or someone else a few streets away will relieve this sort of pressure
New openings will benefit from the people visiting more established buildings in the same area.
Who knows, perhaps it will even spill out into the neighbourhoods squares and streets, maximising the feeling of openness and celebration.
This year
To launch this way of organising the festival we have identified a handful of neighbourhoods that we are supporting to open and use them as inspiration for other neighbourhoods to open up in a similar way.
Below are the neighbourhoods we are spotlighting and the weekends we have earmarked for their coordinated opening.
Golders Green - 16-18th
Somers Town - 9-11th
Cambridge Heath - 9-11th
South Norwood - 16-18th
Greenwich Peninsula - 16-18th
Kennington - 9-11th
Tooting - 16-18th
Shepherds Bush - 9-11th
The aim is for buildings, places and events based within these neighbourhoods, or within a 20 min or walk from here, to open over the same weekend. Therefore if you are in one of the above neighbourhoods or are walkable to it (for instance, Somers Town and Kings Cross, Cambridge Heath and London Fields, Shepherds Bush and Notting Hill), our recommendation is to open over the same weekend as the listed neighbourhoods.
If your neighbourhood hasn’t been spotlit by us, this does not mean that you, your neighbours, community and area can not open as a neighbourhood for the festival. We very much encourage any neighbourhood that is inspired by the idea to try it themselves.
There needs to be at least five things open or events run at the same time to constitute a festival neighbourhood. There is more information here.
If you want to open your neighbourhood at the level of the street, you can look into the Play Street initiative. A play street is where neighbours agree together to close their road temporarily to through-traffic so that young people can play; in the case of Open House it’s a great way of opening up your neighbourhood and trying out if you want to then run a playstreet regularly.