This year it's my 25th Open House, which is quite something.
This year the overall programme felt sparser than usual, or maybe I've simply been to all the good places before.
Alas this year I was in Spain on the crucial day the booking went live, so have only visited places you could simply drop into.
And yes, for the 25th time I am about to blog about lots of special places you can no longer visit.
An Open House staple each year is an architectural practice throwing open its doors so you can see what a lovely building they work in. Latest to the table is Thomas Heatherwick and his team in their new HQ at Making House, a former fashion HQ just south of King's Cross. Hundreds of visitors were welcomed with a smile and a colour map, also an employee obsessively filming the flow of people to confirm officially how well the entire event had gone down. We got to explore the ground floor which is all one long room (plus adjacent workshops) and which had been packed out with even more examples of the practice's work than usual. Just inside the door is the backside of a New Bus For London, artfully chopped off, also a plant-filled hanging garden module from a project in China. Nothing Heatherwick's make is 'normal', indeed avoiding boring architecture is their entire philosophy.
Up front we wandered through models of objects that have ended up in cities, or in several cases become focal urban neighbourhoods in the Far East. A weird airport, artificial island or business district has every chance of being a Heatherwick. Further back were quirkier structures on a smaller scale, like the model for the Olympic Cauldron, Birmingham City's new Powerhouse Stadium and a non-winning design for the Queen Elizabeth Memorial in St James's Park. I looked in vain for a Garden Bridge but it was in the leaflet so they must still be proud of it. A number of times I went "oh that was one of yours was it", for example when presented with Coal Drops Yard, Google's HQ groundscraper and the new rooftop kerfuffle at Olympia. Straight lines are not generally a main feature if the architects can possibly avoid it.
In the workshop I met an employee adding bushes to the model of a proposed Chinese development, then spraypainting them. To one side another employee tried to get me to embrace the company's campaign to humanise the built environment, maybe even buy the book, then made do with handing me a map highlighting properly characterful buildings around Kings Cross. On more than one occasion I thought 'blimey, would anyone really want to live or work in that?' before reminding myself that a capital city rammed with tedious brick-effect cuboids isn't exactly where you'd want to be either. Later in the day I visited a lowlier architectural practice who design social housing estates and 3D print them in drab white plastic, definitely important work but it reminded me that our built environment really does need more pizazz, just here and there, and Heatherwick is seemingly extremely keen to make it.
Sometimes you think you're getting one thing and you end up getting something far better. I grinned throughout. The Art Workers Guild emerged from the Arts and Crafts Movement in 1884, initially bringing together young architects and designers to celebrate the all things handmade. Today more than 400 craftspeople across 60 creative disciplines still connect and meet to share their skills, their HQ being in Queen Square at the heart of Bloomsbury. I was thus expecting a nice look round a finely-decorated Georgian building, and indeed the swirling glass lampshade hanging above the hallway appeared to confirmed this. Instead I was handed a guide to the Table Top Museum, an annual open day where 30 members bring along a small collection to display, the more eclectic the better. You would have loved it.
The scene was set by a collection of snowglobes depicting scenes from around the world, then a 'Snippy Museum' of diverse pairs of scissors, then a tableful of 150 ceramics (must be small, must be white). The joy isn't just looking, it's interacting with the collector and asking how it all started, what their favourite piece is and how they decide what's in and what's out. Jon's 'Museum of Threaded Things' thus included screws, clamps and hand drills, not needles. Hugh's glass Christmas decorations all had to be Soviet era, hence a lot of cosmonauts and red stars. All Kavel's Coca-Cola cans were flattened by vehicles in Thanet in 2018/19. And Mark's 42 slides all featured animal sperm in close-up, thankfully found in a job lot at a market rather than collected separately. He handed me a postcard so I can now tell the difference between the ejaculate of a rabbit, a hamster and a vole.
It's hard to say which was my favourite but possibly Sally's collection of Salmon map postcards. Over 60 illustrated county maps were drawn by M.F. Peck between 1953 and 1974, starting with her home county of Norfolk. You'd recognise a Peck if you saw one, a line drawing with a green background and handwritten placenames with illustrations of several points of interest. I'd much rather have picked one of these from a holiday rack than a beach scene or bawdy cartoon. Sally says Maisie's designs probably inspired her own artistic style, at least when it comes to drawing map graphics. Participants are barred from bringing a similar collection next year so who knows what you might see laid out at the Art Workers Guild next September. I'm sure I could cover a tabletop with my collection of early 1980s chocolate biscuit wrappers, should anybody ask.
Everyone knows about Joseph Bazalgette's genius project to protect Victorian London from cholera and the Great Stink. But the gently-sloping sewers left the low-lying borough of West Ham with a levelling-up problem, specifically that all their pipes were too low to feed into it. Their solution was a mechanical pumping station built alongside the Northern Outfall Sewer, just off Abbey Road, a chimneyed building I have walked past hundreds of times without ever realising what it was. Twin beam engines pumped away 24 hours a day from 1900 onwards, apparently with the ability to raise 360 bathtubsworth of sludge per minute. Initially the nine boilers also helped generate electricity for the local area, but high population growth (and rapid expansion of the tram network) soon required a better facility elsewhere. Only when a separate pipe was built to Abbey Mills in 1972 did the engines finally fall silent, then the doors were locked shut and the interior was left to rot away.
The rest of the pumping station building has been repurposed as a vocational training centre for apprentices and an evangelical church. Now a separate organisation called the Heritage Engineering Learning Trust has stepped in to protect and restore the engine house, and hopefully to establish a visitor attraction focusing not just on these metal behemoths but also the industrial heritage of the wider Lea Valley. They have an exceptionally long way to go because getting a lottery grant really isn't easy, but thankfully the main fabric of the engine house is in pretty good nick and for Open House they were able to throw open the doors to hundreds of the general public for the first time. I'm impressed so many people turned up given HETL failed to put a sign outside the entrance so a lot of people got lost, also the event was described in the Open House listings as a 'Guilded Tour', and if they want that lottery money sure passion is important but so is attention to detail.
The pumphouse is surprisingly capacious, mainly in an upward direction, with two great big wheels to either side and two mighty pumping arms about halfway up. A crane dangling metal chains sits astride the lot, ready to move whatever maintenance should require. "Please don't all stand in the same place," said our tour guide, the floor panels covering a basement of much rustier pipes and chambers below. After 15 minutes of well-delivered exposition the highlight was the opportunity to climb the metal stairs, just as generations of workers would have done, and explore some of the mechanics from higher up. First to the top of the pistons, the metalwork clearly labelled Lilleshall Shropshire 1897, and then a single steep stair to beamthrust level. Many visitors of a mechanical bent were clearly thrilled by the opportunity. I can see this making a decent visitor attraction but I wonder if London doesn't already have too many preserved beam engines, far more dazzling than this, so it'll all come down to how the local angle plays out.
