Other than my quick flit to the City, I spent the rest of this year's Open House in farther flung suburbs. Specifically I visited four very damp London boroughs, two each day, and will now report back on each in turn. Starting with Sunday, Borough One.
They're not lying when they say this is one of Open House's most special gems. The Granada in Mitcham Road, Tooting, was to be a new style of cinema experience when it opened in 1931. Owner Sidney Bernstein took inspiration from New York's super cinemas and, for the brand name, exotic Andalusia. He employed a Russian theatre producer to design the interior, who combined Venetian style with Eastern European folklore and conjured up a confection of dazzling excess. It sings, it captivates, and it's now used for bingo.
You know you've hit the Open House jackpot when you discover your tour guide is Elain Harwood, 20C architecture guru extraordinaire. She has a special fervour for the nation's best picture houses (and getting them listed), and I can think of nobody else I'd rather have been shown round by. Tooting's now Grade I listed, officially the finest cinema in Britain, which saved it from demolition when Sidney walked in one day, saw less than a dozen in the audience and closed the place down.
The double-height foyer is impressive enough, with chandeliers and glitzy Gothic plasterwork, as twin staircases climb to a terrazzo landing for those with tickets for the upper circle. It'd be even more impressive without the slot machines. These have been slotted in wherever Gala can fit them, here and all along the passage into the main auditorium lest any opportunity for casual gambling be missed. Thankfully there aren't any on the upper landing or the gilded hall of mirrors which stretches beyond, but that's only because the bingo audience isn't large enough for the toplevel seating to be required.
If the size of the main auditorium doesn't make you draw breath, the decoration will. Murals adorn the walls like some kind of Orthodox cathedral. The emergency exits are crowned with ornately patterned arches. The entire ceiling ripples as if constructed from a grid of chocolate box trays. The effect would be a lot more impressive if the screen hadn't been replaced by a caller's podium and an electronic advert, and the entire downstairs hadn't been flattened and crammed with punters'tables, but somehow even these have a pleasing symmetry of their own.
The Wurlitzer endured a bittersweet 2007 - first restored, then flooded after a particularly heavy downpour, and painstaking repairs still continue. The organ ducks back down below the stage during normal service, otherwise the all-important ball-selection would be obscured. And bingo is the reason why Open House can only allow you inside on a Sunday morning between nine and noon, before the players return and licensing rules kick in (two small bottles of wine, £5.90). Don't knock the bingo, it's kept the Granada afloat these last forty years, but the jackpot remains the building itself, a genuine must-see. [6 photos]
Almost as hard to break into as Wandsworth Prison, and considerably smaller, is the tiny museum which tells its history. It used to be based in a garage, but a few years ago was transferred to a purpose-built hut in the corner of the car park where its 400 items can be displayed in slightly less cramped conditions. Admission is usually by appointment only, but on Open House Weekend anyone can wander in and learn some grisly truths about this former House of Correction. The corner given over to the death penalty is the most unnerving, including a black cap, execution notices once pinned to the front gate and photos of the killer trapdoor before it was dismantled, although the rope and heavy bagged weight are actually props from a movie. Other evocative exhibits include the handwritten book in which Ronnie Biggs' escape was recorded, a letter Reggie Kray wrote to his future wife, and a stash of cuffs, staves and batons. Everyday life in the prison is also showcased, if you've ever wanted to see an inmate's food tray, a BT Prison phonecard or the denim jacket deemed appropriate uniform in the 1970s. Everything's meticulously labelled, and often eye-opening, in this labour of historical love.
Always ahead of the curve, architects Foster + Partners spotted the potential of riverside offices topped by a residential tower way back in 1990. Their main London presence slots in between Battersea Bridge and Albert Bridge, with the design team gifted a long waterfrontstudio filled with parallel workbenches. F+P put a vast amount of effort into model-making, because clients love to see what their landmark buildings will eventually look like, hence their studio is stacked high with 3-D renderings of towers, terraces and terminals, old and new. The mezzanine is used to showcase their latest triumphs, including multiple geometric options for a Shanghai bank, a glittering private hospital complex destined for Aswan, and a slice through the new Bloomberg building I'd seen in the flesh the day before. The model for Apple's new campus and circular HQ is so large they've had to stash it downstairs. Staff were on hand at the weekend to point the way around and to explain what some of the quirkier miniatures were, and the sense was given that this is a cheery focused place to work. Several other F+P buildings occupy land further back from the Thames, including a Materials Research Centre where designers can select precisely the right chunk of durable external polymer, but overall this Battersea complex isn't quite as arresting as the global portfolio it's helped generate. [5 photos]
