Open House Festival 2026

Open House is the one week a year when the answer to «what is that building?» is «come in and see». The 35th edition runs from Saturday 12 to Sunday 20 September 2026, and everything in it is free.

What it actually is

Buildings and sites across all 33 London boroughs open to the public: private houses, working offices, infrastructure, places of worship, studios, and the occasional thing that is not really a building at all. The organisers describe it as opening up and celebrating the city’s built environment, which understates it — in practice it is the only legal way most people will ever stand inside a good deal of this city.

The festival is run by Open City, and it exists because people volunteer to open their doors. The contributors are householders, architects, institutions and community groups, not a venue programme.

The part people get wrong

Most of Open House is walk-up: turn up during the open hours, queue if there is a queue, go in. A smaller set of sites is ticketed, and those are the famous ones — the tall towers, the private houses, the buildings with a lift and a capacity limit.

Ticketed bookings for 2026 went live at midday on Wednesday 19 August, and they require a free account registered in advance. If that date has passed by the time you read this, it does not mean the festival is closed: it means the ballot-like scramble is over and the several hundred walk-up sites are all still there.

The programme itself was published on 15 July, on the festival’s own website.

How to spend it

The instinct is to chase one famous building. The better use of the week is to pick a borough — ideally one you do not live in — and treat its open sites as a walking route. The festival’s reach across all 33 boroughs is the point of it; the towers are simply the part that photographs.

Access requirements can be discussed with the festival team in advance, and the organisers ask people to get in touch rather than turn up hoping.