For the second day of my Open House weekend I devoted my attention to the London borough of Southwark. Three pages of venues to choose from, including City Hall (already been), Dulwich College (fully booked) and the top of the Oxo Tower (damn, Saturday only). But there were still plenty of goodies to view instead, including shiny South Bank towers, elevated millennial libraries and an awful lot of arty people's bedrooms.
1) One street back from the Thames, where once stood Europe's largest 1950s office block, rise three Bankside towers. One of these is the Blue Fin Building, named after the aluminium panels randomly-spaced around the outside, and now home to 2000+ employees of IPC Media. If you read Woman's Own, NME or Country Life then your magazine originates here. IPC HQ forms a bold collection of elevated offices anchored around an airy atrium. It's all very glassy, even the vertigo-inducing walkways that span the central void. For Open House, visitors were allowed to use the lifts unsupervised (that's a rarity, I can assure you) to explore four of the building's eleven floors. Half price magazines (and archive leatherbound Look Ins) on 3. The very non-glam offices of various female-oriented lifestyle periodicals on 7 (Ugly Betty this is not). On the very top floor, the main restaurant (which would have served lunches to visitors had anybody wanted any) [photo]. And down one on 10, as well as a ring of transparent meeting rooms, the opportunity to amble out onto the roof terrace and soak in the view. Oh yes, this is why I do Open House, for the chance to view London in an unfamiliar location from above. The London Eye encircling the Shell Building like a halo [photo]. The Dome of St Paul's peeking out from behind the tower of Tate Modern [photo]. And a few nice plants and two circles of astroturf should employees ever tire of the outward panorama. Unlikely, I suspect.
2) When Southwark council sought to revitalise the centre of Peckham in the late 1990s, their eyes turned to the "temporary" post-war library Hut beside the High Street. As a replacement, they commissioned architect Will Alsop to design a landmarkpublicbuilding, and were delightfully surprised by the result. From end-on, Peckham Library looks like a copper-clad inverted 'L' [photo][photo]. The books and public stuff are all at fourth floor level, with stilts to prop up the suspended edge from below. This makes it rather awkward to change your books if the lifts aren't working, which they weren't on Sunday afternoon, causing several elderly or pregnant visitors to abandon their visit and head home. Our tour group was lucky enough to see some of the behind the scenes areas, including the various 'meeting pods' on the fifth floor. The central pod is shaded by the orange tongue that sticks out over the edge of the roof. Alas the other two aren't quite so well ventilated and can get a bit warm inside, not that readers sitting in the main library underneath would ever realise [photo]. The building's Stirling Prize medal is kept on the top floor in a cabinet, while from the stairwell there's a great orange-shaded view north to the skyline of Central London. On the staff-only 3rd floor we got to peer down below the overhang to watch Peckhamites scuttling across the paved square beneath. And on the 2nd floor we entered Southwark's Local History Library, where the borough archivist greeted us with an eclectic selection of historical documents and shared some Alsop tales. It came as no surprise to discover that the new Peckham Library had boosted visitor numbers sevenfold. If you choose to check in too, keep your fingers crossed that the lifts are working.
3) 4) 5) 6) 7) If you're one of the nine readers who've actually visited my flat, you'll know that interior design isn't one of my obsessions. Nevertheless I spent a considerable proportion of Sunday taking lessons from the experts by poking around inside their stylish abodes. Bunch of show-offs, the lot of them, but then they had a spectacular amount of good taste to show off. At 15½ Consort Road, Peckham, Monty Ravenscroft has crammed an astonishing house into a narrow scrap of unwanted wasteground. The garage at the front doubles up as his wife's dance studio. A glass roof glides across the hole in the top of the living room when it rains [photo]. The bedroom has a showerhead embedded in the ceiling and also a fully functioning bath stashed underneath the bed. It's no surprise that Channel 4's Grand Designs have been here, and maybe that's what drew Sunday's fascinated queues to the front door. Half a mile away, at Quay House, an art studio and architect's residence have been shoehorned into a converted milk depot. I loved the fire-escape-style landing suspended above the hallway, unnecessarily rising and falling to reach four small upper rooms, and I was also particularly taken by an unexpected recycled artwork in the back yard [photo]. Meanwhile, behind the unassuming facade at 49 Camberwell Grove, widower Nick has built an eco-friendly retirement-proof bolthole. His centrepiece is a cylindrical lift to link the two floors, which would have completely replaced the staircase had not Southwark's "bloody" planning department insisted that he put a flight in. But Nick's a mere eco-amateur compared to the owner of 2 Coleman Road, whose two-up two-down is reputedly carbon-negative. Obsessive adherence to an environmentally-friendly lifestyle enables Donnachadh to export electricity to the National Grid (and, for a fee, he'll audit your home to help you do the same). With bags more character than all the other houses put together, however, was the 300 year old townhouse at 67 Grange Walk, Bermondsey. Sympathetically restored, its imperfect angles and slanted stairs had visitors grinning with "I want to live in a house like this" covetousness. Of all the houses I visited, the owners here had made the least attempt to hide away all their belongings, resulting in an 18th/21st century culture clash of most appealing proportions. I may never aspire to live anywhere even vaguely similar, but Southwark's Open House weekend permitted several opportunities to learn from the experts.
Just for a change, I thought I'd spend my Open House weekend scouring two individual London boroughs. And the (unlikely) borough I picked for Saturday was Haringey (think Highgate, Tottenham, and all points inbetween). Haringey merits but a single page in the Open House guide, and few of its attractions will ever draw large crowds from further away. But I did get the chance to do Open House "like a local", in an area I don't know all that well, and there were some real gems along the way.
1) When the London borough of Haringey was created in 1965, one of the urban districts it swallowed up was Hornsey. This left Hornsey Town Hall (on Crouch End Broadway) without a key municipal role, and over the years many parts of the building have fallen into disrepair. Which is a shame, because this flagship 1930s block is one of Britain's first Modernist public buildings. It looks a bit like a mini Tate Modern, with a tall central tower above a stark brick facade. The designer was a New Zealander, not yet 30, and had won a competition against hundreds of more established architects. He blessed the interior with bold light-filled spaces and all-natural finishings (such as marble, limestone and cork). Local people weren't initially taken by their new seat of government, some describing it as a "jam factory", but Uren's radical design has passed the test of time better than many most modern buildings ever will. For Open House we were treated to tours of the interior led by a knowledgeable guide, taking in the old theatre (now used for storage), a basement reception room (EastEnders used it for a wedding aftermath, apparently) and the formal civic wing. The tour was greatly enhanced by a series of understatedcameos from a handful of in-character actors, which really added to the 30s atmosphere (round of applause to the organisers, bravo). The entire town hall is about to undergo major renovation and, by the look of the decaying horse-hair-filled leather chairs in the abandoned council chamber, there's a heck of a lot to be done.
2) 3) One of the joys of Open House in the suburbs is the opportunity to poke around inside other people's houses. Householders may ask you to take your shoes off before venturing within, or to stick blue plastic bags over your shoes to protect the carpet, but that's a small sacrifice compared to allowing the public indoors to scrutinise your hallway clutter, book collection and bedroom arrangements. At Linear House, in leafy Highgate, an award-winning newbuild home has somehow been crammed into a sloping patch of land without intruding too much on the neighbours. This two-winged hillside house has a green roof that links seamlessly to the garden below, and a spacious modern interior to get very jealous about. The centre of the house is based around a glass cube, with the lounge below and a remarkably open bedroom above looking out over the formal swimming pool. Another very different modern family home is to be found across the trees at 30 Cholmeley Crescent, carved out inside a typical 1920s semi. A sympathetic rear extension has created one large lounge at first floor level and a capacious kitchen below, from which stepping stones lead across a koi-filled moat to a ramped (but otherwise fairly ordinary) garden. It could only be the house of two married architects (whose bedroom naturally takes pride of place in the resculpted attic), battling to reach a compromise against council planning regulations. Both of these Highgate homes oozed style and character, and money for once put to excellent use.
4) On the banks of the Lea over Tottenham way (you may remember), lies Markfield Park, and within stands the Markfield Beam Engine. Built in the 1880s to transfer the sewage out of Tottenham, its 100 horsepower pumping engine is a rare survivor of that post-Bazalgette era. Yesterday marked the long-awaited reopening of the museum after an expensive facelift, and the Victorian workhorse was pumping away to the delight of the volunteers who've put in so much effort to maintain it. The flywheel is enormous - nine metres in diameter and weighing 17 tons. It was extremely therapeutic to watch it spin, accompanied by the clonking of the overhead beam and the wheezing of the steam engine below. It was easy to see why so many retired engineers are drawn to spend their time keeping the old beast purring. But as a museum attraction I'm not quite so convinced. The pump house is a marvellous airy building, but once you've watched the engine whirring for ten minutes there's not really much else to keep visitors occupied. Apart from the brand new cafe around the corner, that is, whose entrance I eventually found beyond a semi-vandalised skatepark. I was one of the first-day customers at Pistachios in the Park - a freshly-franchised operation who seemed more than delighted to serve me. I have my doubts that this out-of-the-way park will sustain their fledgling operation, but were I more local I'd be popping by for a chocolate and marshmallow brownie more often. [inaugural steam weekend continues today]
5) One of the joys of Open House weekend is being taken around a building by one of the architects who designed it. Try this in the suburbs and you might even get the architect to yourself. So it was at the Triangle Centre - a community space on St Ann's Road in South Tottenham - where Tom was waiting for someone, anyone to pop in for a visit. "Are you an architect?" he asked. Alas not, but I ventured to sound intelligent as I quizzed Tom during our lengthy walk through the building. We discussed the graffiti-proof green-shield cladding below a layer of already-weathered zinc. We investigated the air-conditioning louvres and mused upon the environmental merits of non-opening windows. We admired the beech-lined central hall and its flexible multi-generational functionality. We explored dedicated areas for the nursery and after-school club, seamlessly linked to their surroundings via lightwells and carefully-oriented windows. Even emptied of its toddlers, teenagers and pensioners, the entire building reeked of deliberate yet understated excellence. Places like this are never going to be popular on OH weekend, and yet its here in the underprivileged suburbs that architecture's really making a difference to the lives of so many.
And I also visited... 6) 7) Two very different places of learning: Highgate School, where a blazered sixth former directed me to the 19th century chapel; and Coleridge Primary School, whose vibrant new infant block evolved out of the former Hornsey School of Art. 8)Alexandra PalaceTheatre, a desperately-in-need-of-renovation Victorian treasure, recently deemed unsafe and sealed off. I would have re-visited the BBC's original TV studio nextdoor, but alas the queue was an hour long. 9) 10) Two other locations, one at the start of the day and one at the end, neither of which were in Haringey. I may have 'done' Haringey in five hours flat, but its buildings are just as worthy of exploration as the City's historic jewels and shiny towers.
Earlier in the year, chatting over beer, blogger M@ from Londonist posed me an intriguing question. "What's the most surprising place in London you haven't actually visited yet?" he asked. I had to think for a bit, because I've had more than four decades to explore the capital and I've covered a heck of a lot of it. But I eventually decided that the most iconic place I'd never actually visited was Buckingham Palace. Everyone's done the outside, but I'd never managed to get myself inside. But now I've been to Buckingham Palace, so I can tick that off my list. Which leaves me thinking where's now the most famous place in London I haven't yet been?
I've done Parliament (Commons and Lords, but not yet the trip up the Clock Tower). I've done the Tower (fortress and Bridge, but not yet the Ceremony of the Keys). I've watched the acrobatic show at the heart of the Dome (but never quite felt the urge to go watch any performance at the O2). I've done all of Visit London's Top 10 London Attractions (although I was only little when I visited Madame Tussauds, and wild horses wouldn't drag me back now). And, thanks to London Open House, I've even done the inside of the Hoover Building, the depths of Churchill's Neasden bunker and the top floor of the Gherkin.
Mid-September, and it's London Open House weekend again! Another excellent opportunity to venture inside buildings I've never been inside before. Except that this is now my eighth London Open House, and I sort of feel I've done most of the really special places already. It didn't help that when booking opened for this year's invite-only buildings, I was sitting on a rain-lashed train somewhere outside Blackpool and therefore missed signing up to any of them.
So this year I thought I'd try something completely different. I thought I'd stick to Open Housing in just two London boroughs - one on Saturday and one on Sunday. One'll be north of the river and one south, one'll be central-ish and one rather further out, and both will (I think) be unexpected. I shall see some of the more ordinary special places for a change, and hopefully enjoy the experience all the more.
In the meantime, if you're out Open Housing this weekend, here are ten suggestions for places you might try: • Freemasons Hall (Sat): ornamental inner temple in Holborn, and HQ of the rolled-up trouser brigade (trowel not essential) • Village Underground (Sat): tube carriages on top of a viaduct in Shoreditch (now used as artists studios) • Royal Courts of Justice (Sat): behind the scenes of this vast Gothic building, including courts and cells (a great couple of hours) • Broadgate Tower (Sat, Sun): the new skyscraper north of Liverpool St station (ooh, that's quite special, innit?) • No 1 Croydon (Sat, Sun): otherwise known as the 50p building(because it looks like a pile of coins) • Barnardo's Village (Sat, Sun): charitable village for poor Victorian urchins (get the tube to Barkingside) • City Hall (Sat, Sun): Boris doesn't allow the public in as often as Ken (but you can do roof and ramp this weekend) • Foreign Office & India Office (Sat, Sun): opulent Whitehall building, paid for by the fruits of empire (queues likely) • Slice of Reality (Sun): that sliced ship moored just north of the Dome (yes, you can go aboard) • Roof Gardens (Sun): unlikely horticultural hideaway above Kensington High Street (arrive very early!)
Oh, and the the most famous place in London I haven't yet been? I'm thinking it might be Wembley Stadium. How hard can that be?
1) One street back from the Thames, where once stood Europe's largest 1950s office block, rise three Bankside towers. One of these is the Blue Fin Building, named after the aluminium panels randomly-spaced around the outside, and now home to 2000+ employees of IPC Media. If you read Woman's Own, NME or Country Life then your magazine originates here. IPC HQ forms a bold collection of elevated offices anchored around an airy atrium. It's all very glassy, even the vertigo-inducing walkways that span the central void. For Open House, visitors were allowed to use the lifts unsupervised (that's a rarity, I can assure you) to explore four of the building's eleven floors. Half price magazines (and archive leatherbound Look Ins) on 3. The very non-glam offices of various female-oriented lifestyle periodicals on 7 (Ugly Betty this is not). On the very top floor, the main restaurant (which would have served lunches to visitors had anybody wanted any) [photo]. And down one on 10, as well as a ring of transparent meeting rooms, the opportunity to amble out onto the roof terrace and soak in the view. Oh yes, this is why I do Open House, for the chance to view London in an unfamiliar location from above. The London Eye encircling the Shell Building like a halo [photo]. The Dome of St Paul's peeking out from behind the tower of Tate Modern [photo]. And a few nice plants and two circles of astroturf should employees ever tire of the outward panorama. Unlikely, I suspect.
2) When Southwark council sought to revitalise the centre of Peckham in the late 1990s, their eyes turned to the "temporary" post-war library Hut beside the High Street. As a replacement, they commissioned architect Will Alsop to design a landmark public building, and were delightfully surprised by the result. From end-on, Peckham Library looks like a copper-clad inverted 'L' [photo] [photo]. The books and public stuff are all at fourth floor level, with stilts to prop up the suspended edge from below. This makes it rather awkward to change your books if the lifts aren't working, which they weren't on Sunday afternoon, causing several elderly or pregnant visitors to abandon their visit and head home. Our tour group was lucky enough to see some of the behind the scenes areas, including the various 'meeting pods' on the fifth floor. The central pod is shaded by the orange tongue that sticks out over the edge of the roof. Alas the other two aren't quite so well ventilated and can get a bit warm inside, not that readers sitting in the main library underneath would ever realise [photo]. The building's Stirling Prize medal is kept on the top floor in a cabinet, while from the stairwell there's a great orange-shaded view north to the skyline of Central London. On the staff-only 3rd floor we got to peer down below the overhang to watch Peckhamites scuttling across the paved square beneath. And on the 2nd floor we entered Southwark's Local History Library, where the borough archivist greeted us with an eclectic selection of historical documents and shared some Alsop tales. It came as no surprise to discover that the new Peckham Library had boosted visitor numbers sevenfold. If you choose to check in too, keep your fingers crossed that the lifts are working.
3) 4) 5) 6) 7) If you're one of the nine readers who've actually visited my flat, you'll know that interior design isn't one of my obsessions. Nevertheless I spent a considerable proportion of Sunday taking lessons from the experts by poking around inside their stylish abodes. Bunch of show-offs, the lot of them, but then they had a spectacular amount of good taste to show off. At 15½ Consort Road, Peckham, Monty Ravenscroft has crammed an astonishing house into a narrow scrap of unwanted wasteground. The garage at the front doubles up as his wife's dance studio. A glass roof glides across the hole in the top of the living room when it rains [photo]. The bedroom has a showerhead embedded in the ceiling and also a fully functioning bath stashed underneath the bed. It's no surprise that Channel 4's Grand Designs have been here, and maybe that's what drew Sunday's fascinated queues to the front door. Half a mile away, at Quay House, an art studio and architect's residence have been shoehorned into a converted milk depot. I loved the fire-escape-style landing suspended above the hallway, unnecessarily rising and falling to reach four small upper rooms, and I was also particularly taken by an unexpected recycled artwork in the back yard [photo]. Meanwhile, behind the unassuming facade at 49 Camberwell Grove, widower Nick has built an eco-friendly retirement-proof bolthole. His centrepiece is a cylindrical lift to link the two floors, which would have completely replaced the staircase had not Southwark's "bloody" planning department insisted that he put a flight in. But Nick's a mere eco-amateur compared to the owner of 2 Coleman Road, whose two-up two-down is reputedly carbon-negative. Obsessive adherence to an environmentally-friendly lifestyle enables Donnachadh to export electricity to the National Grid (and, for a fee, he'll audit your home to help you do the same). With bags more character than all the other houses put together, however, was the 300 year old townhouse at 67 Grange Walk, Bermondsey. Sympathetically restored, its imperfect angles and slanted stairs had visitors grinning with "I want to live in a house like this" covetousness. Of all the houses I visited, the owners here had made the least attempt to hide away all their belongings, resulting in an 18th/21st century culture clash of most appealing proportions. I may never aspire to live anywhere even vaguely similar, but Southwark's Open House weekend permitted several opportunities to learn from the experts.
1) When the London borough of Haringey was created in 1965, one of the urban districts it swallowed up was Hornsey. This left Hornsey Town Hall (on Crouch End Broadway) without a key municipal role, and over the years many parts of the building have fallen into disrepair. Which is a shame, because this flagship 1930s block is one of Britain's first Modernist public buildings. It looks a bit like a mini Tate Modern, with a tall central tower above a stark brick facade. The designer was a New Zealander, not yet 30, and had won a competition against hundreds of more established architects. He blessed the interior with bold light-filled spaces and all-natural finishings (such as marble, limestone and cork). Local people weren't initially taken by their new seat of government, some describing it as a "jam factory", but Uren's radical design has passed the test of time better than many most modern buildings ever will. For Open House we were treated to tours of the interior led by a knowledgeable guide, taking in the old theatre (now used for storage), a basement reception room (EastEnders used it for a wedding aftermath, apparently) and the formal civic wing. The tour was greatly enhanced by a series of understated cameos from a handful of in-character actors, which really added to the 30s atmosphere (round of applause to the organisers, bravo). The entire town hall is about to undergo major renovation and, by the look of the decaying horse-hair-filled leather chairs in the abandoned council chamber, there's a heck of a lot to be done.
2) 3) One of the joys of Open House in the suburbs is the opportunity to poke around inside other people's houses. Householders may ask you to take your shoes off before venturing within, or to stick blue plastic bags over your shoes to protect the carpet, but that's a small sacrifice compared to allowing the public indoors to scrutinise your hallway clutter, book collection and bedroom arrangements. At Linear House, in leafy Highgate, an award-winning newbuild home has somehow been crammed into a sloping patch of land without intruding too much on the neighbours. This two-winged hillside house has a green roof that links seamlessly to the garden below, and a spacious modern interior to get very jealous about. The centre of the house is based around a glass cube, with the lounge below and a remarkably open bedroom above looking out over the formal swimming pool. Another very different modern family home is to be found across the trees at 30 Cholmeley Crescent, carved out inside a typical 1920s semi. A sympathetic rear extension has created one large lounge at first floor level and a capacious kitchen below, from which stepping stones lead across a koi-filled moat to a ramped (but otherwise fairly ordinary) garden. It could only be the house of two married architects (whose bedroom naturally takes pride of place in the resculpted attic), battling to reach a compromise against council planning regulations. Both of these Highgate homes oozed style and character, and money for once put to excellent use.
4) On the banks of the Lea over Tottenham way (you may remember), lies Markfield Park, and within stands the Markfield Beam Engine. Built in the 1880s to transfer the sewage out of Tottenham, its 100 horsepower pumping engine is a rare survivor of that post-Bazalgette era. Yesterday marked the long-awaited reopening of the museum after an expensive facelift, and the Victorian workhorse was pumping away to the delight of the volunteers who've put in so much effort to maintain it. The flywheel is enormous - nine metres in diameter and weighing 17 tons. It was extremely therapeutic to watch it spin, accompanied by the clonking of the overhead beam and the wheezing of the steam engine below. It was easy to see why so many retired engineers are drawn to spend their time keeping the old beast purring. But as a museum attraction I'm not quite so convinced. The pump house is a marvellous airy building, but once you've watched the engine whirring for ten minutes there's not really much else to keep visitors occupied. Apart from the brand new cafe around the corner, that is, whose entrance I eventually found beyond a semi-vandalised skatepark. I was one of the first-day customers at Pistachios in the Park - a freshly-franchised operation who seemed more than delighted to serve me. I have my doubts that this out-of-the-way park will sustain their fledgling operation, but were I more local I'd be popping by for a chocolate and marshmallow brownie more often. [inaugural steam weekend continues today]
5) One of the joys of Open House weekend is being taken around a building by one of the architects who designed it. Try this in the suburbs and you might even get the architect to yourself. So it was at the Triangle Centre - a community space on St Ann's Road in South Tottenham - where Tom was waiting for someone, anyone to pop in for a visit. "Are you an architect?" he asked. Alas not, but I ventured to sound intelligent as I quizzed Tom during our lengthy walk through the building. We discussed the graffiti-proof green-shield cladding below a layer of already-weathered zinc. We investigated the air-conditioning louvres and mused upon the environmental merits of non-opening windows. We admired the beech-lined central hall and its flexible multi-generational functionality. We explored dedicated areas for the nursery and after-school club, seamlessly linked to their surroundings via lightwells and carefully-oriented windows. Even emptied of its toddlers, teenagers and pensioners, the entire building reeked of deliberate yet understated excellence. Places like this are never going to be popular on OH weekend, and yet its here in the underprivileged suburbs that architecture's really making a difference to the lives of so many.
