The best places to visit at Open House London, from Peter Cushing’s Home to the National Audit Office

Bookings open on 21st August for the capital’s free festival of architecture – here’s everything you need to see

Once a year, London unlocks its secrets to property fans and architecture enthusiasts. Open House returns to the UK capital next month (September 14-19) – but you have to be quick off the mark.
This annual extravaganza sees 700 buildings in 32 boroughs across London open their doors to the public, from grand offices of state to historic residences and social housing estates. The festival is free, and hugely popular – last year’s event attracted nearly 227,000 people; this year organisers are planning for more than 250,000. But navigating its programme can be bewildering – and competitive. There are three systems for entry, so a plan of action is essential. 
Some buildings are open on a drop-in basis. Others require pre-booking a timed entry slot, while entry to those buildings in highest demand is decided by ballot – you register interest and winners are allocated at random. (To complicate matters, opening times and days vary – not every building is open all through festival week). 
Online pre-booking opens on August 21 at midday (you need to register for a visitor account first). And timed entry slots for the most popular buildings disappear fast, so be quick. Ballots for some buildings, including 10 Downing Street, BT Tower and Broadcasting House, are open for registration now.
Once you’ve cracked the system, though, it all works remarkably well. A preview of the Open House programme is live online now for browsing, and organisers say they expect to add more buildings in the weeks ahead, so check back. 
But what to see? Here’s a selection of London’s grandest, most captivating and most unusual buildings taking part. 
2 Temple Pl, Temple, WC2R 3BD
The closest London gets to the glamour of New York’s Waldorf Astoria. Commissioned as a private office by William Waldorf Astor, the American property magnate and then one of the richest men in the world, and completed in 1895, it is a dizzying delight inside and out, a building that embodies the aspirations – and perhaps anxieties – of an émigré determined to impose himself. 
Astor had left the US for England in 1890 to escape threats of kidnap, family arguments and because he regarded America as “no fit place for a gentleman”. In need of an office, he hired John Loughborough Pearson, an English architect better known for elaborate churches than offices, and set about commissioning a neo-Gothic fantasy like no other – Loughborough Pearson’s budget was unlimited.
The Portland stone exterior is cod-Elizabethan. Highlights of the interior include a mind-bending hall, inlaid with semi-precious stones: marble, porphyry, onyx and jasper, and oak panelling. Look out for carved figures of D’Artagnan and other characters from The Three Musketeers, Astor’s favourite book. Don’t miss the Shakespearean-themed friezes.
Three more with dazzling interiors: 
50 Mitcham Road, Tooting, SW17 9NA
Another Gothic fantasy. From the outside, the former cinema looks like any other old 1930s picturehouse; inside it’s a mediaeval fairytale complete with frescoes and enormous Wurlitzer organ, which explains why it’s Grade I listed. “Miss the Tower of London if you have to, but don’t miss this,” said the architecture critic Ian Nairn. 
12 Holland Park Road, W14 8LZ 
George Aitchison’s extravagant home for Frederic Leighton, president of the Royal Academy, and built from 1865 to 1895. A recent restoration and extension, unveiled in 2022, took ages (14 years) to complete but is exquisitely done. Come to marvel at Leighton’s fittingly magnificent collection of artworks and paintings. 
2 Pearson Square, Fitzroy Place, W1T 3BF
Another John Loughborough Pearson fantasia with one of London’s most elaborate interiors, all tiles and golden mosaics. This Grade II* listed, 1892 chapel is now somewhat stranded in a sea of astroturf on a dreary plaza just off Oxford Street. 
157-197 Buckingham Palace Road, SW1W 9SP
The UK’s public-spending watchdog has not always occupied this Grade II listed, slabby, 1930s monolith on a main road near Victoria station. The building first belonged to Imperial Airways, which became British Overseas Airway Corporation (BOAC), then British Airways, who all used it as an airport terminal, from which passengers boarded coaches to Croydon airport for flights to the continent. 
Around the back, they could step directly onto platform 17 – now platform 19 – of Victoria station to catch the “Empire Special” train to Southampton for flying boat services to the colonies. But the building’s new bureaucratic tenant – the National Audit Office moved there in 1986 – also suits its civic-austere style. The interiors have been sensitively overhauled in recent years by architects tp bennett.
Two more set-piece stunners:
Black Friars Lane, EC4V 6EJ
The oldest and most elegant of London’s nearly 40 surviving livery company halls (many weren’t rebuilt after the Great Fire of London in 1666, and the Blitz), with intact 17th-century interiors including dramatic Irish oak panelling. 
Mattock Lane, Ealing, W5 5EQ 
Weekend house of Sir John Soane (1753-1837), architect of the Bank of England and Dulwich Picture Gallery, among countless others. His more celebrated house on Lincoln’s Inn Fields is open over the festival, too. Pitzhanger was refurbished in 2019 – it’s a lovely job.  
Cross Deep, Twickenham, TW1 4QG
The last-surviving fragment of Alexander Pope’s grand, 18th-century villa and gardens, which once stood on the banks of the Thames. This Grade II listed, quartz-encrusted folly is a secret, subterranean marvel.
Pope – poet, essayist, translator and sharp satirist of the English Enlightenment – first built his grotto in 1720, partly as private, underground access (tunnelling under the road, Cross Deep) to his five-acre garden; partly as an intellectual investigation into the mysteries of geology; and partly for pleasure. 
He first studded the walls with shells and stones, though later, when he became interested in mining and minerals, Pope had the chambers re-encrusted with glittering rocks and fossils from around Britain, adding mirror fragments. Many of his minerals are still there – cleaned, conserved, illuminated (somewhat disappointingly by LED candles) and richly glowing. It’s a bit like wandering around a Seussian cave.
Pope’s villa was demolished in 1808, but somehow his grotto survived. It now sits beneath a school and has just been restored by specialist conservation architects Donald Insall Associates and a dedicated preservation trust. The only way into the grotto, which now runs directly beneath a main road, is through the school. 
More secret marvels:
32A Blackhorse Lane, E17 6HJ
Take a tour with the engineers and owners, and learn about the company’s history dating back to 1932 when it began manufacturing public address systems, radios and televisions for public use in the Second World War. 
St Mary’s Church, 30 St Mary’s Road, Wimbledon, SW19 7BP
A mysterious obelisk monument of Portland stone built for Sir Joseph Bazalgette (1819-1891), the civil engineer behind the London sewer system, which is still largely in use today.
Markfield Park, Markfield Road, South Tottenham, N15 4RB
A masterpiece of Victorian engineering, this elaborate engine provided London with a vital public health facility until 1964: a sewage treatment works and pumping station.
165 Battersea High Street, SW11 3JS
Not a barber shop, and not owned by anyone called Costa – at least not any more (the name is in tribute to a hair salon that once occupied the site). This is a high-street shop of bog-standard proportions, recently converted into a compact yet comfortable home and architecture studio – all self-built by its architect residents.
It’s a manifesto for how we might live, work and reconfigure thousands of empty shops. Architects Brisco Loran took over the empty shop a few years ago, taking advantage of recently expanded “retail to residential” permitted development rights that allowed such conversions in some circumstances. 
Take a look around their enviably chic apartment at the back, then admire their architectural office at the front – an unusually public domestic arrangement, which the owners say “explores how domestic life need not retreat meekly towards the private but could instead join commercial activity”.
More adapted buildings:
Arnold Circus, E2 7ES
A Grade II listed Victorian former London Board school on a quiet road near Brick Lane, beautifully refurbished in 2016 by Quinn Architects as office and galleries.
Bermondsey, SW1 
The apartments on this riverside street next to Tower Bridge were in the 19th century part of London’s biggest warehouse complex. Search for Open House’s free, bookable guided walk on “renewal, reuse and refurbishment” along Southwark’s riverside, which starts at Shad Thames. 
Beckenham, BR3 4EA 
What does a south London allotment have to do with New York art-rockers the Velvet Underground? This clubhouse used to be the Crystal Palace Bowl concert venue dressing room, where acts from Bob Marley to Pink Floyd performed in the 1970s and 80s. It’s now been refurbished, but this is still a chance to look around the building where Lou Reed applied his white face make-up.
15 Cicely Road, SE15 5HW 
Architects Tom Surman and Percy Weston bought an infill corner site on a south London side street on which to build this intriguing, monolithic-looking family home behind a curved timber fence. It’s made from low-carbon materials, veiled in hit-and-miss brickwork. Its lack of windows is the first thing that passersby are likely to notice; its homely, keyhole doorway is the second. 
This is not a big, grand house, but it is a charming and intelligent one, with experimental details that prove new housing need not be bland nor regressive in style (housing secretary Angela Rayner should take note). Look out for covetable interior details, including a blue steel handrail on the staircase, timber stairs, and the glass rooflight that doubles as a greenhouse.
Winner of this year’s Royal Institute of British Architects’s RIBA London Project Architect of the Year Award. 
More fascinating private homes:
32 St James Road, Purley, CR8 2DL
This 1920s modernist house was once the swish home of the British actor, star of Hammer horror’s Frankenstein series of films, and Star Wars.
5 Maryland Park, Stratford, E15 1HB
A self-build conversion unlike any other, and winner of the Don’t Move, Improve! 2024 Transformation Award. This bog-standard Victorian terrace was overhauled by architects Khan Bonshek a few years ago using tricks like double-height volumes and the blurring of inside and outside to build an illusion of space.
Vauxhall Bridge Road, Pimlico, SW1V 2LF 
Built between 1961 and 1971, architects Darbourne and Darke set a new standard in high-density public housing with this estate of medium-rise buildings with private gardens and balconies, which Nikolaus Pevsner called “the most interesting recent housing in inner London”.
London Open House opens for bookings on August 21. The festival runs from September 14 to 22. Visit Open House for a preview of the programme, to be released in full on August 21.