If you've ever walked through Orpington's ornamental Priory Gardens and seen the medieval-looking building in the corner called The Priory, you might have assumed it was once a priory. If you've ever been shown round the building by members of the Orpington and District Archaeological Society you'll know this was not the case, indeed had it drummed into you in a reassuringly authoritative way. It was at best a rectory and most of the time not really even that, more a base for ecclesiastical overlords from Canterbury to stay when surveying their properties in Surrey and west Kent. A few 13th century features survive, also several later medieval expansions, not to mention the unsympatheticpublic library bolted onto the side in 1959. 'Complex' doesn't even begin to cut it.
It was easier to visit The Priory when it was home to Bromley Museum, but this was closed in 2015 to save money and a weedier unstaffedcollection opened in Bromley Central Library instead. Orpington's shell has since been leased to an arts collective who hire out historic rooms as studios, so for example the upper storey is now a tour-resistant yoga stronghold and the Garden Room hosts an upright piano for practice and recordings. That meant there wasn't a lot to see on Saturday, the one day a year the building's open to a wider public, although there was a vastly undervisited craft sales opportunity inside Seely & Page's controversial library. Local people on the tour tutted at the extension's very existence.
You see more from outside, that is so long as nobody's parked a silver coffee caravan outside to cater for yoga patrons. The oldest walls are impressively flinty and timbered, and the ODAS guide kindly dished out laminated building plans to all of us to help identify which flanks were built when. I thus know where the oldest Reigate Stone blocks lingers, and also where they're pretty sure an underground passageway once linked the main house to the Tudor kitchens. A third guide led us round the Arts and Craftsgardens added when the house's final owners wanted a better view from their bedroom window than a sloping croquet lawn. Volunteers now try to keep the beds up to scratch, but local people on the tour reminisced about how much nicer it all was when the council had actual money to spend.
ODAS are a fine and intellectual organisation, also so old school that if you want one of their publications by mail you have to send a cheque to an address in Sidcup. They oversee a large domain including Fordcroft Roman Bathhouse and the moated site at Scadbury - open the previous weekend - and certainly had all the answers at The Priory. You don't have to go far from central London for heritage to have a very different feel, almost that of a provincial town, and Orpington & District is all the better for it.
Time was when boroughs had a shining civic presence exemplifying the ethos of their main settlement. The Municipal Borough of Bromley thus built a finetown hall soon after their creation in 1903, then added an Art Deco extension in 1939 as the place expanded. Times are harsher now, indeed the council moved out to Bromley Palace in 1982 and something cheaper at Churchill Court last year. Meanwhile the Old Town Hall has inevitably ended up in the ownership of a shared workplace company who've opened a complex of contemporary serviced offices and added a two-storey boutique hotel on top. The contrast between private wealth and council penny-pinching is severe.
Open House visitors were permitted to wander round the buildings on an intuitive route, generally unstaffed, with occasional information boards getting in the way of all the best photos. The Art Deco opening half was the most impressive, especially the symmetricalcolumned staircase leading to the council chamber (which is now available for board meetings and weddings). Lots of the decisions those Orpingtonians hated were made right here, I thought as I perused the selection of Teapigs herbals.
After WW2 a substantial bomb-damaged stripe of Pimlico was transformed by Westminster council into a highly original estate, swapping 200 houses for 1000 slotted flats. It was built in three stages, initially in redbrick and concrete and later with additional aluminium panels, with a cunning emphasis on 3D geometrical repetition. In the earlier blocks all the flats are identical but individually tucked back or thrust forward creating a complex stepped frontage, and also necessitating some particularly jagged internal corridors. Densely packed around some impressively spacious areas of greenery, Lillington Gardens looks nothing like a typical 1960s council estate, and that'll be why two-thirds of it is Grade II* listed.
We were fortunate to get the perfect tour guide - an architect who's been a resident on the estate for over 20 years so understood the place inside out and loved it too. She pointed out the difference between the studio units and the three-bedders, explained how the flats cunningly tessellated and mused on the difficulty of persuading modern jobsworths not to replace heritage assets to tick safety boxes. We spotted the join between neighbouring stages, noted the ubiquitous tubular railings and were taken up to the sports pitch on the roof of the electricity substation. And by the end we were probably all thinking it might be great to live here but there'd be constant challenges to maintain everything at its best.
At the heart of the estate, both surrounded and echoed by it, is the Victorian Gothic church of St James the Less. It has a campanile tower that pokes above the flats from key locations and a complex polychromatic interior that demonstrates the visual power of extraordinary brickwork. It'd be even more dazzling had it all been cleaned properly but that's expensive so they're fundraising for a good scrubdown. And all this is tucked away less than 10 minutes from Victoria station, if only you knew it was there, which is one reason why Open House is always such a brilliant eye-opening opportunity every year.
This year's Open House album on Flickr is now up to its final complement of 90 photos from 24 different locations across 14 boroughs, so I encourage you to have one final look to see what you missed, or perhaps also saw.
