Open House
A Saturday trip up to London wouldn’t be a trip unless Thamestink were randomly cancelling trains and messing up plans to get into London early. We were heading up to make use of one of the days of the Open House festival. It now runs over two weekends and parts of the week in between. For those who haven’t heard of it, Open House offers the chance to visit and get inside buildings which aren’t usually open to the general public.
Our planning for the day was a bit last minute dot com and so the free guided walks and tours had all been fully booked, but there were still plenty of places with open doors and welcoming faces. So many in fact that even a hastily prepared short list was still far too many to get around in a single day, and even when we narrowed it down further to just include venues in the City of London there were still too many for us to get around.
The final plan was based around the halls of the Livery Guilds. These traditional guilds of industries and trades dating back as far as the twelfth century. I had optimistically marked down seven of them on the list for the day, but we only got to four of them. Over the whole of the Open House festival most of the thirty-nine halls were open at some point. Not all the guilds have their own halls. Some share, some hire other guild’s halls for use for their functions.
A question I heard at all four guild halls we visited was how many guilds are there. And at each one there was a different answer. And as it turns out, depending on what is included in the count, all four were correct. There are one hundred and eleven currently, two more are in the process of becoming full guilds, a further two have started the application process to become full guilds, and there are two others who are considered as guilds even though they have never applied to be, and are unlikely to ever apply.
Away from the individual guild’s halls, we also had the main London Guildhall and two churches on the list of buildings to visit, and we did these, and even squeezed an extra church in, so the well-known plan of see two churches, get a third one to view free.
And in between the venues participating in Open House there are London streets to walk around with the usual mix of spectacular, historic, unusual, or just odd buildings around every corner.
Yes, blue plaques were involved, but in the City of London they don’t tend to be the English Heritage round ones, they are a larger, deeper blue, rectangular shape, and more often that not they are to commemorate the site of long-lost buildings rather than the people who may have lived in them.
When we eventually got to London it was into Farringdon. And after a brief detour to look at a moo-ral.
We found ourselves wandering through the centre of a deserted Smithfield Market. It was after ten in the morning and the bits that are open as refurbishment takes place are open from 2am to 10am. The building is huge and such a grand space for a market.
And it is a wonderfully colourful place inside with the greens, blues, and purples and the old red telephone boxes.
From there we wander past the side of St Bartholomew’s the Greater church which we have visited before, and continue along Cloth Fair (have I mentioned the array of wonderful street names we pass wandering around?)
Coming to the Founders Hall. It is a more modern building, the third different site for it.
(We passed at least one blue plaque for previous sites later in the day.)
The livery guilds no longer serve their original purpose of regulating their trades or industries, but instead mainly concentrate on charity work, education, and community involvement. But all the ones we visited have long storied histories and the treasures to show that, and examples from the work of their trade or industry.
So in the Founders Hall there are lots of metal worked examples. Bells (I was persuaded to resist pulling the rope and ringing the big one in the entrance hall), sculptures, and miniature versions of famous statues from around the city. And long lists of all the previous masters of the guild.
From there we headed to the Coopers Hall, the longest walk of the day. We pass the Barbican and walk along London Wall, encountering little pieces of the old Roman walls.
And it was remarkably quiet. Partly with it being a weekend and the City of London all but shuts, but also due to the roadworks closing most of London Wall, meaning there was no incidental passing traffic, a London rarity.
The route took us past Liverpool Street station, and the shiny metal sculptures in place outside. Work the Founders might have had something to do with possibly?
We cross over Bishopsgate and into Devonshire Square and the Georgian Houses Coopers Hall occupies.
It is the guild hall furthest east. They also host the Firefighters Guild there. It seems a smaller space but that may have been because it was busier in there.
Coming out we detour slightly to poke around Devonshire Square and more wonderfully named, and wonderfully quiet streets before crossing back over Bishopsgate to head to hall three of the day.
But first a spot of lunch out in a side street at a very nice (and cheap) café under the watchful slabs of stone buildings opposite.
Which have another impressive doorway for my collection.
Hall three is the Carpenters Hall. Which looks much grander than the previous two we have been to, at least from the outside.
And it is massive inside. I was surprised to find the guild didn’t get going until the late fifteenth century, over a hundred years later than the two guilds we had already been to. Surely carpentry has been going for as long as man hasn’t been inhabiting caves. (And who cut the wood for the Coopers to make their barrel?)
It is difficult to take the scale of somewhere like this as a home for a trade guild. It is an impressive building.
Only for it to be outdone by the last of the halls we would get to see — Drapers Hall.
The front of their building on Throgmorton Street doesn’t give too much away, but inside? Just wow.
You walk into a room and think, this is grand,
only to walk into another room and change your mind, that wasn’t grand, this is grand.
Only to then wander into the much bigger and better third room and realise, no, no, this is grand.
The Drapers Guild is the third most prestigious of the guilds, which means that next year we need to get planning early and see the two above it in the ranking to see how they could manage to outdo this place.
On out initial list we had had the Bank of England museum, and the Guildhall art gallery as places to visit, but as both of them are open to the public normally (if for a charge) we give them a miss and head for the church in the Guildhall Square — St Lawrence Jewry.
Which had its bells going full pelt. For hours. I’m hoping they are rung by a machine, otherwise some poor sod is going to have no arms left at the end of the day.
The church is a lovely Wren number, and inside were some representatives from the society which look after the City of London’s churches. They gave us a leaflet and map of where all the churches are, and pointing us in the direction of the usually closed St Verdas who were open and having a craft fair, and selling tea and coffee for Open House. There was also a stand in the church selling medieval and Tudor maps, so merchandise was bought.
After looking around the church we headed to the suggested St Verdas, somewhere not on out original list, and on the way to it we pass several other Guild Halls, some open, some not, and we manage not to get sidetracked into visiting the open ones.
St Verdas is a lovely church and there is a quiet hidden courtyard, not really big enough to be called cloisters even with the covered walkways around it, but it is a lovely place for a drink and a recharge.
Then it was back to the Guildhall.
We probably left it a bit late in the day. Helen caught up with a tour in there and I got to rush around taking photos of the halls, and the crypts, but I wasn’t in time to get to the old library.
Again something for another year.
Most of the Open House places were closing at four, but there was one more church on our list which was open after this — St Margaret Pattern.
To get there we passed the junction at the Mansion House, ceremonial home of the Lord Mayor of London (not the elected, political, ineffective one).
Roads go off at all angles from this junction and on each corner is a spectacular behemoth of a building.
It is busy here; traffic and people have reappeared. It would be a wonderful spot to sit and watch the world go by on such a sunny afternoon. To take photographs, to paint, and to write, but today is not the day.
We continue and cross over Bishopsgate once again making our way between some of the tallest towers in the city, and finding our way into another of Wren’s churches.
It is a guild church, home to the Basket Weavers, and to the now defunct guild of the Pattern Makers. (I hadn’t known what patterns were, but they were overshoes, into which people would place their usual shoes to walk through the muddy streets, they were raised up on a circle of metal to lift them out of the mud and to keep their smart shoes clean.)
St Margaret Pattern were taking the Open House theme very seriously. The vestry is open (the city parish map was unfortunately screwed to the wall).
The upstairs rooms were open as well, and there was a door out onto the lead roof over the chapel behind the tower/spire.
The spire is the third tallest of any spire in the City of London, and doubtless would have been viewable from all over when built.
Now it pales in comparison with the Walkie Talkie just across the road from it. and that gives is more of a feel for just how large these more recent towering blocks are.
By this point we are all toured out. And so is my camera which has now run out of battery with me clicking away with it all day. It is time for food, and we head back past Cannon Street station. I hadn’t been past here in years, and it has had the same kind of modern makeover as London Bridge and Blackfriars and is so much better for it.
We have found an Indian restaurant for the traditional Saturday night curry. It is down a side street with all the buildings around it having City of London blue plaques on them, including the one next door which was where Dick Whittington lived. It says nothing about his cat though.
The restaurant is underground in curved cellars which probably held casks and bottles of wine in previous days. Not just curry eating winos. After dinner it is time to head home. We wander over the Millenium Bridge with St Paul’s Cathedral behind us and the Tate Modern in front, and once over the river we pass the pub on the river — The Founders Arms — so topping and tailing the day with Founders. And then we are into Blackfriars station for the train back to Crawley.
A good day and many thanks to Open House. They are well worth supporting and signing up for their mailing list to get the chance to see often unseen buildings. Well, at least once a year.
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