Yesterday's Open House tally was seven.
Here's a quick summary.
• The historic one I once went to for a work company briefing, but we were too bored by the upbeat objectives and too distracted by the strange saucy meat to be fully impressed by the building's impressive heritage.
• The weird one where I think they expected everyone to sit and watch a film for 35 minutes but I was more intrigued by finding a street of crocodiles in a box in the basement.
• The concrete one that was more Closed House when I arrived and found a locked gate, but thankfully two other visitors found the buzzer down the street. Also ditch the exit survey guys, it was ridiculously complicated.
• The domestic one ruled by a cat, which meant that when a visitor arrived with a dog they both had to stay outside on the pavement.
• The transformed one where I'd just missed a tour so the volunteer sped me upstairs to join them, except he added me to a different tour who were just about to finish and five minutes later I was back in reception.
• The miserable one which leapt straight into my Ten Worst Open House Experiences.
• The quirky one I reached just before closing time, and when I stepped inside I did literally go "oh wow bloody what?", and this is why you should always take full advantage of Open House every September.
Let's do four of those in more detail (not necessarily in the above order). (all four are also open today)
They had a thing about concrete in Camden in the 1960s, hence architects Howell, Killick, Partridge and Amis were given free rein to knock up a chunky grey secondary school near Tufnell Park station. Acland Burghley thus ended up with three radial towers, an L-shaped main block and a separate hexagonal Assembly Hall connected to the main building by a covered walkway. I can show you the original architects' model because they had that on display, and can confirm that the overall effect is like nowhere you went to school unless you are perhaps Eddy Grant, Sarah Brown, Ms Dynamite or one of the other alumni.
The jewel that helped the site get Grade II listing is the lowslung toplit Assembly Hall, a confection in timber and concrete with full public access for Open House. The aesthetic's softened somewhat by a galleryful of pupil's art around the walls, also an incongruous glitterball, but still strikingly of of its time. It's also a tad dark because it wasn't toplit enough and because the entire perimeter is taken up by a service corridor rather than windows. I can only imagine how different the hexagonal floor looks when covered with plastic chairs. Meanwhile outside is a peculiar dipped amphitheatre comprising all kinds of blocks from a previous school building, part-crumbled to the point where you probably wouldn't risk taking a class al fresco.
The whole thing's a now maintenance nightmare because running a school in a listed building's not easy, so Acland Burghley have come up with an imaginative solution which is A Hall For All. They want to invite the public in, particularly for arts events, also to improve acoustics, heating, accessibility for the school and the community alike, and what's more they were successful to the tune of £1m with a lottery grant earlier this year. Perhaps the most exciting part of the plans is to create the UK's first Museum of Brutalist Architecture, or MoBA for short, which'd be quite a coup for Tufnell Park. Obviously what you can do with somewhere that hosts school assemblies is limited, so I see the plans are only for "a physical presence in an allocated area of the Hall as well as a digital profile", which might be quite disappointing but fingers crossed it'll be somewhere worth visiting.
Open House:Triangle House (West Hampstead) The Micro One
One of the mainstays of Open House is the private home, particularly a private home occupied by the architect who designed it, well chuffed to show it off to an admiring audience. So here we are on a backstreet between Mill Lane and the Midland Main Line on a tiny triangular site which used to be occupied by a mechanic's workshop and is now a teensy place to live. Constrained by a ban on building upwards, architect Richard Brown contrived an open plan living room and a secondary bedroom/office area, plus a small leafy courtyard out front and ablutions in the back corner. It's full of clever space-saving touches like a staircase that doubles up as a chest of drawers, also the unusual feature that "the bed slides away under the bathroom". They've even slipped a piano in. See the architect's website or Instagram to get a fuller flavour, or drop round today between 11 and 4 to see how you can build a house for way less than £100k.
When the Kilburn estate was built in 1863 they went cheap on a church and built it from corrugated iron. By the turn of the century it was no longer needed and relegated to hall status, then in 1948 the lease was assigned to the Willesden Sea Cadets Corps for use as a ‘training quarters and social club’. So far so normal. Where things take a turn is the late 1950s when the hall was fitted out to represent the decommissioned naval ship HMS Bicester, a transformation undertaken with unusual zeal. The interior thus contains the ship's bridge, a lifeboat, several sheeted cabins and (in pride of place at the far end) a Bofors 40mm anti-aircraft gun. Step into one metal cabin to find old ropes and how to tie all the necessary knots, step into another to learn about ensigns and shackles, and a third to find the altar from the ship's chapel. The overall effect is extraordinary.
It may not continue. The Sea Cadets moved out in 2011, despite the sign on the door still saying they meet on Mondays and Thursdays (new recruits always welcome). The building is now in the care of volunteers who hire out the space as much as possible (rehearsals, theatre, record fairs, whatever), and also open up for a few hours maybe every couple of weeks while attempting to sell tea and cake to visitors. But the upkeep's expensive, the lead volunteer's nervous for the future and now for some reason the Navy want their anti-aircraft back. There's even a planning notice in the porch for "Listed building consent for internals work to remove two historic military guns and reinstatement of floor", so if you want to see Kilburn's jawdropping nautical secret best come soon.
Open House:Not Saying (somewhere in northwest London) The Godawful One
I'm not going to confirm which venue this is because that'll allow me to slag off my visit more freely. I turned up in good time to enjoy a walk-up tour, initially uncertain where to enter because nobody had hung a green Open House banner or poster anywhere on the property. I risked the main door and enquired, receiving full-on banter from others present before the Open House steward finally made themselves known. "We have some others waiting," he said, "they're upstairs reading the posters, you can wait up there". I went up just as the others appeared to be leaving and found myself in a long white corridor outside the toilets. There were indeed posters so I read them and waited, and waited, occasionally getting the side-eye from visitors popping up to use the loo. "Surely someone'll come up and tell me when the tour starts," I thought.
Nobody came up so after half an hour of loitering I went back down and looked around - nothing. Eventually someone pointed towards the end of the car park where the tour was in full swing and had been, apparently, almost since I'd gone upstairs. "Oh I forgot you were here," said the steward before continuing a dull anecdote about trains. I thought I must have missed all the good stuff, but after a few minutes it became apparent the bloke didn't have any good stuff, just long rambling anecdotes. He reeled off a lengthy summary of a YouTube video, showed us a culvert behind the bins, praised German engineering and eventually led the mute party back inside the building. Here he offered us a business card and I was shocked to discover he was the managing director, not just some well-meaning volunteer wheeled in for the day. When he then said "I must show you the pictures upstairs" I winced and took the opportunity to slip away, and it wouldn't surprise me if the poor sods who followed him are still trapped up there.
I'll tell you about the other three venues later, also those I hope to visit today before the rain sets in. In the meantime I've started off this year's Open House album on Flickr although it's still early days yet.
