The Guildhall’s Great Hall once hosted Chopin’s final public performance. The Lloyd’s building turns 40 this year, still deliberately inside-out. Zaha Hadid’s own archive is opening its doors for the very first time. This is where we’re heading during Open House Festival, 12–20 September 2026.
Open House Festival is what Open House London rebranded to, run by the charity Open City, and it’s still the same idea: hundreds of London buildings that are normally closed, locked, or simply too grand to wander into unannounced, all open their doors for free across all 33 boroughs. The 2026 edition is the 35th, running 12–20 September, with 621 listings and counting.
Most of the programme is free, drop-in access, no ticket required. The busier venues need advance booking, and that opens at midday on Wednesday 19 August via a free account on the festival’s programme site, so if there’s one date to put in your diary before reading on, it’s that one.
Our picks for Open House Festival 2026
BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir
Neasden, NW10 8LD
Europe’s first traditional Hindu stone temple is one of Open House’s most reliably astonishing picks, and it’s confirmed again for 2026. Every piece of limestone and marble was hand-carved in India before being shipped and assembled in London, and the result doesn’t really look like it belongs in Neasden at all, in the best way.
We’ve written a full guide to visiting, if you want the detail before you go.
Fitzrovia Chapel
Pearson Square, Fitzrovia · Monday 14 to Friday 18 September
Easy to miss from the outside, and genuinely hard to believe once you’re in. The Byzantine-style interior is covered in gilded mosaic tiles, lined with green onyx, and built from 17 different marbles, which is roughly 16 more than most London chapels bother with.
It’s a dreamy wedding venue too, if you’re taking notes for other reasons. Read our full guide here.
Guildhall
City of London · Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 September, 10am–4pm, drop-in
The City’s seat of government since the 12th century, and still in daily use for civic business today. The Great Hall is the third-largest of its kind in England, survived both the Great Fire and the Blitz, and once hosted Chopin’s final public performance, in 1848.
No booking needed for this one, just turn up between 10am and 4pm on either day.
The Lloyd’s building
One Lime Street, EC3M 7HA · Saturday 19 September, hourly tours 10.15am–4.45pm
Richard Rogers’ 1986 headquarters for the Lloyd’s of London insurance market turns 40 this year, and it’s aged into exactly the building it was always meant to be: lifts, ducts and stairwells all worn on the outside, famously turning the whole structure inside-out. It’s been Grade I listed since 2011, the youngest building in London to hold that status when it was awarded.
Advance booking required, opens midday 19 August.
Zaha Hadid Foundation Archive
28 Shad Thames, SE1 2YD · Saturday 12 September only, tours at 10.30am, midday and 2pm
A first for Open House: the Foundation’s working archive, roughly 300,000 items of Zaha Hadid’s models, drawings, furniture and paintings, has never opened for the festival before. Tours are guided only, capacity is genuinely limited, and sensible shoes are recommended, this is a working storage facility, not a gallery.
Advance booking required, opens midday 19 August.
Senate House
Malet Street, WC1E 7HU
The University of London’s Art Deco tower is one of the great overlooked buildings of interwar London, self-guided and expert-led tours both run through the festival, taking in the library and the building’s rather more famous reputation as a source of inspiration for Orwell’s Ministry of Truth.
Lincoln’s Inn
WC2A 3QA
One of the four Inns of Court, and the only one that’s kept a genuinely continuous history back to 1422. Expect a proper mix of medieval, Victorian and Georgian architecture across the site, with hourly history talks running through the day for anyone who wants more than a wander.
National Theatre Studio
83–101 The Cut, SE1 8LL
Not the auditoriums, the workshop. Guided tours go behind the scenes of the Studio’s Brutalist space to see how the National actually builds a production, from set-piece construction to rehearsal rooms, rather than what it looks like once the curtain’s up.
Union Chapel
19b Compton Terrace, Islington, N1 2UN · Saturday 19 September, 11am–9pm
Islington’s Grade I & II* listed Gothic venue and charity throws its whole day open, guided tours of the interior, a lunchtime recital on the historic 1877 Willis organ played by teenage students, and family workshops building one-octave organs out of wood.
The evening moves into the newly restored Sunday School Hall for a run of community performances: a new Cardboard Citizens theatre piece on homelessness, a Steam Down spoken word set, a fashion show from Grassroots Arts Studios’ youth panel, and a closing DJ set from Asian Underground pioneer DJ Ritu MBE. Self-guided access is free all day; ticketed events need free pre-booking from midday on Wednesday 19 August.
BT Tower
45 Maple Street, W1T 4BG
The most in-demand ticket of the festival most years, and 2026 has an added edge: BT Tower is being converted into a luxury hotel due to open in 2029, so this is a rare, and possibly final, chance to take the high-speed lift up to the revolving 34th floor and see London laid out below before it changes hands for good.
Booking essential, and it goes fast, opens midday 19 August.
Canada House
Trafalgar Square · Saturday 12 September only
The Canadian High Commission’s neo-Hellenic building on Trafalgar Square opens for one day only, with grand staircases and a genuinely good collection of Canadian art that most people walking past have no idea is sitting behind that facade.
Shoreditch Town Hall
380 Old Street, EC1V 9LT · Saturday 19 September, drop-in tours 11am–4.30pm
You’ve almost certainly partied here, or at least perched on the steps waiting for a night bus. The tours tell the building’s other story: suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst’s connection to the hall, and Henrietta Girling OBE, its first female mayor. No booking needed, tours run roughly every 30 minutes and last about 45.
City Hall and the Royal Docks
Kamal Chunchie Way, Royal Docks, E16 1ZE · various dates
Visit City Hall (Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September, 10am–4pm, no ticket needed) opens up The Crystal, WilkinsonEyre’s Siemens-commissioned building that started life in 2012 as an exhibition centre and think tank before reopening in 2022 as the home of the Mayor of London and the London Assembly. It sits inside the Royal Docks’ Green Enterprise District, right next to the London Cable Car terminal at Royal Victoria Dock, so it’s an easy one to combine with a wander along the water.
Flavours of Royal Docks: Food, Architecture & Memory (Saturday 19 September, 11am–1pm) is a different kind of Open House pick entirely, a two-hour participatory walking tour tracing how global food trade, factories and migration shaped this stretch of East London. It takes in ten historic stops, from towering grain silos and flour mills to Millennium Mills and the old Tate & Lyle site, with optional sensory prompts along the way, think spices, teas and tasting samples, and an invitation to add your own food memories to a travelling archive. It starts outside City Hall and finishes near King George V Dock.
Stanley Arts
12 South Norwood Hill, SE25 6AB · Sunday 13 and Sunday 20 September
The oddest building on this year’s programme, and it isn’t close. Stanley Halls was designed in 1903 by William Ford Robinson Stanley, a self-taught inventor who made his fortune in drawing instruments and then drew up his own public hall without troubling an architect. Pevsner called the result “one of the most eccentric efforts anywhere at a do-it-yourself free-style”. It has stained glass, a marble staircase inlaid with ceramics, and windows he wired to open electrically, in 1903.
Guided tours run at 10am and 3pm on Sunday 13 September, with The Future of Stanley Arts: Capital Conversations in between (12pm–2.30pm), a talk and public consultation on the regeneration works coming to the building. That last one is worth the trip on its own: the halls were saved by a community asset transfer in 2015 after local residents fought for them, and this is those same residents being asked what happens next. A South Norwood Heritage Zone walking tour follows on Sunday 20 September, 2pm–4pm. All free.
Open House Festival 2026: practical tips
- Browse the full 621-listing programme, and find anything near you, at programme.openhouse.org.uk.
- Advance booking for ticketed events opens midday Wednesday 19 August, and the busiest venues (BT Tower especially) go quickly.
- Most of the programme needs no ticket at all, just turn up and queue.
- Open City is a charity that relies partly on donations to keep the festival free. You can donate here if you’d like to support it.
The London x London Take
Open House works precisely because it doesn’t sort neatly into one kind of building. In the same nine days you can watch teenagers play a Victorian pipe organ at Union Chapel, wander a working Hindu temple carved by hand on the other side of the world, and stand inside an insurance market that decided, forty years ago, to wear its own plumbing on the outside. The BT Tower slot is the one everyone will be fighting for this year, understandably, given it won’t be free to climb again once the hotel conversion starts. But the quieter picks, Lincoln’s Inn’s hourly history talks, Senate House’s self-guided wander, are just as worth the trip, and considerably easier to actually get a ticket for.
