Open House London 2026: how it works and the buildings worth queuing for

Open House 2026 ran from Saturday 12 to Sunday 20 September and has finished for this year. Open City has not yet published 2027 dates, and the festival has fallen in September every year, so this page stays up as the guide to how it works. What it is: nine days of getting inside buildings that are closed for the other three hundred and fifty-six. The 2026 programme carried more than eight hundred entries across every borough, all of them free, with 384 of them on the opening weekend. Two were worth the planning and are a good guide to what the programme does: the Zaha Hadid Foundation opened its archive on Shad Thames on the first Saturday, and the Lloyd’s Building, forty years old this year, opened on the second Saturday rather than the first.

How it works

Two kinds of opening. Most of the programme is drop in: turn up, queue, go in. The rest is ticketed, and ticketed here still means free, booked through the programme site with a visitor account that also costs nothing. Make the account before the weekend rather than on the doorstep. Slots for the popular buildings do go, but not always as fast as their reputation suggests: when we looked on 6 September 2026, the Lloyd’s Building still had most of its Saturday slots open. The programme site is the only reliable source and it changes daily during the festival.

Doing it well

Pick a neighbourhood, not a list. Three or four buildings within a walk of each other on one morning is a good day; six across the city is a day on the tube. The City is the richest cluster and the busiest, so go on the Sunday morning when it is empty. Private houses are the best openings and the smallest, so expect to queue and to be moved along. Take something to read for the queues and do not take a big bag, because several buildings will not let you in with one.

The ones that are always worth it

The Lloyd’s Building, on the second Saturday. Any of the modernist estates in Camden and Southwark where residents open their own flats, which are consistently the best thing in the programme and the hardest to get into. Out of the centre, the Victorian pumping stations and the odd Georgian house in a suburb nobody has heard of. Search the programme by neighbourhood rather than by name and you will find more.

Our rule for this page

The list below is our picks from the programme, checked against the organiser’s own site. The 2026 dates and booking arrangements here were checked on 6 September 2026, and the festival was confirmed as finished, with no 2027 dates published, on 24 September 2026. The programme is the source; this is the edit.