The only reason I’m an architecture critic is because I’m a right old Nosey Parker. There are few conversations at the next table that I don’t find more interesting than my own, few half-open doors I don’t want to have a sneaky peek past.
That’s the magic ingredient in this month’s annual Open House Weekend and Heritage Open Days. They allow the inner Nosey Parker of the Great British Public to run riot. Don’t say you’re not just a wee bit curious about what goes on in the shiny, sexy dome on top of the Gherkin, or whether the tongue and groove in that drop-dead gorgeous pad Kevin McCloud drooled over on Grand Designs really cuts the mustard off the TV screens. Go on, take a peek.
Britain’s built a whole culture out of repressed individuals living behind closed doors, and signs barking “Get orrf my Land”; no wonder we’ve bred a nation of curtain twitchers and Heat readers. We’re not generally a nation given to wanton displays of collective beauty. This isn’t France, you know.
Lottery projects aside, many of our architectural wonders do not lie in public hands. We prefer private magnificence to civic largesse. We keep our treasures locked up for civil servants and wealthy bankers. So, the minute they’re unlocked? Well, few other things could get hundreds of thousands of Brits onto the streets than a chance for a good nose round behind the locked doors of buildings normally clamped shut.
Heritage Open Days, let’s be frank, are the slightly worthier of the two events, all tithe barns and almshouses. Not that they aren’t damned fascinating. It’s just that London’s Open House, set up by the one-woman architectural whirlwind Victoria Thornton 14 years ago, has more verve and range. It’s got the almshouses and the latest slinky designer houses, curios such as Neasden’s underground bunker and the shiny, sexy dome on top of the Gherkin. It’s also got more radical ambitions. Open House, indeed, is more than just one weekend. It’s a 365-days-a-year educational charity dedicated to transforming the way the British see quality architecture. You can read about it, look at pictures, but there is no substitute, says Thornton, for seeing “architecture in the flesh”. That’s the point of architecture. You’ve got to inhabit it, explore it with all the senses. The Open House Weekend does two great things: it gets you into the buildings, and it gets you to feel them.
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But there’s more to the events than just noseyness and lessons in architectural aesthetics. I’m always wittering on about the early-20th-century eccentric Scottish polymath Patrick Geddes who, aside from being a social reformer, conservationist, biologist, Scottish nationalist, community activist and possessor of magnificent eyebrows, also found time for architecture. He built a building in Edinburgh — The Outlook Tower — like Open House, designed to help people to really look at the city, and themselves, afresh. He was passionate about civic values. Architecture, he thought, was where it all came together. If you wanted a humane society, full of active citizens rather than hoodies, you had to give them a humane, inclusive environment. Get people to see, understand and love where they live, and you’re halfway towards changing the place, the person and the nation for the better. Architecture is about more than just nice-looking buildings. It’ s about identity and belonging.
And these weekends are more than just a chance to have a good snoop. They’re a chance to see incredible architectural beauties, then to shout to the politicians, developers, architects and planners who lord it over our landscapes: “Oi, why aren’t you building more of these?”