Fifteen buildings and walks in Dulwich, Peckham and Camberwell open free from 12 to 20 September. The Pioneer Centre needs booking, Nunhead's crypt does not.

Fifteen buildings, houses and guided walks in Dulwich, Peckham and Camberwell will open free to the public during the Open House Festival, which runs from 12 to 20 September. Five of them need a ticket, and booking has been open since midday on 19 August.

The festival is run by the architecture charity Open City and is now in its 35th year. Everything on the programme is free. The only cost is time, and on the busiest day there is more on within a mile of Peckham Rye than one person can reach.

Book this one first: the Pioneer Centre

The building on St Mary’s Road, SE15, where the Peckham Experiment ran is open for guided tours on Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 September. There are four 90-minute tours a day, at 10am, noon, 2pm and 4pm, and each one has to be booked.

It is worth the effort. The Pioneer Centre is Grade II* listed, was designed by Owen Williams and finished in 1935, and Walter Gropius called it “an oasis of glass in a desert of brick”. It housed the Peckham Experiment, the family health scheme that George Scott Williamson and Innes Hope Pearse started on Queen’s Road in 1926 and moved here in 1935. The building was converted into private flats in 2000, and the indoor pool survives. The Open House listing says there is step-free access to the ground floor exhibition apartment and a lift down to pool level.

The Peckham Experiment itself turns 100 this year. The South London Gallery’s archive records that it began at premises on Queen’s Road in 1926, closed there after three years, and reopened in the purpose-built St Mary’s Road centre in 1935.

What you have to book

All five are free, and all five need a free Open House visitor account.

Open House 2026: ticketed events in Dulwich, Peckham and Camberwell
WhatWhereWhen
Pioneer Centre toursSt Mary's Road, SE15 2EESat 19 and Sun 20 Sept, 10am, noon, 2pm and 4pm
Peckham in the Balance walk, then a sketching workshopMeet under the Peckham Arch, 89 Peckham High Street, SE15 5RS; workshop outside Peckhamplex, 95A Rye LaneSat 19 Sept, 1pm to 3.30pm and 4pm to 6pm
Caribbean Heritage walking tour of PeckhamWalmer Castle Court, 102 Peckham Road, SE15Sun 20 Sept, 11.30am to 1.30pm
All's well in Camberwell: a local government history walkCamberwell Green, SE5 8RTSat 19 Sept, 10am to 12.30pm
String House guided tours, 45 minutes124 Grove Lane, SE5 8BPFri 18 Sept 12.30pm and 2pm; Sat 19 Sept 10am and 11.30am

Two of those are campaigning as much as sightseeing. The Peckham walk is led by Peckham Heritage, Peckham Vision and the Peckham Society, and the listing is blunt about the angle: it is about “campaigns against insensitive overdevelopment”. The Caribbean Heritage tour, run under the Gentrification and African Presence in Peckham project, covers the spaces the Caribbean community occupied in Peckham between 1960 and 1990.

What you can just turn up to

Ten more open with no ticket at all.

  • Nunhead Cemetery, Linden Grove, SE15 3LP. Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September. Guided tours of the cemetery at 2pm and 3pm, and 20-minute guided visits to the Anglican chapel and the crypt beneath it at 1.45pm, 2.30pm, 3.15pm and 4pm. The chapel is not normally open to the public. There is no wheelchair or pushchair access to the crypt, and children have to be with an adult for it. Free parking at the Linden Grove gates.
  • Christ’s Chapel of God’s Gift at Dulwich, 14 Gallery Road, SE21 7AD. Wednesday 16 September, 2pm to 3.30pm, and Saturday 19 September, 10am to 4pm. Consecrated in 1616, with a George England organ of 1760.
  • St Giles Parish Church, Camberwell, Camberwell Church Street, SE5 8RB. Saturday 19 September, 10am to 3pm, belfry tours every half hour. George Gilbert Scott, 1844, with an east window designed by John Ruskin.
  • Herne Hill Velodrome, 104 Burbage Road, SE24 9HE. Four race meetings with free spectator entry: the Condor Women’s Track League on Saturday 12 September from 5.30pm, the Dulwich Team Champs on Sunday 13 September from noon, the Convene Track League on Wednesday 16 September from 6pm, and the Sprint and Pursuit League on Saturday 19 September from 5.30pm. A ticketed evening on Friday 18 September lets you ride a lap yourself on your own bike, followed by films in the clubhouse.
  • Kaymet, 52 Ossory Road, SE1 5AN, off the Old Kent Road. Factory tours on Saturday 12, Sunday 13, Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 September, 10am to 4pm. About a dozen people there make roughly 40,000 anodised aluminium trays a year, sold in some 200 shops in about 40 countries.
  • outhouse gallery, inside Brunswick Park, SE5 7RH. Open noon to 5pm on Saturday 12, Sunday 13, Friday 18, Saturday 19 and Sunday 20 September. It is an artist-run gallery in a former public toilet, opened in March 2024.
  • Longfield Hall, 50 Knatchbull Road, SE5 9QY. Sunday 13 September, tours at 10am and 1.30pm. The late Victorian building housed the first black-led theatre company and survived the Blitz. Two ticketed Minet Legacy guided walks leave from it the same day, at 11.45am and 2.15pm.
  • Harfield Gardens House, 70 Harfield Gardens, SE5 8DB. Saturday 12 and Sunday 13 September, 11.30am to 1.30pm and 2.30pm to 4pm. A British modernist house given a second storey in 2024.
  • Grove Lane, 114 Grove Lane, SE5 8BJ. Saturday 12 September, 10am to 4pm. A Grade II listed neoclassical villa of 1821 with a full-width rear extension.
  • Easi-house, 64 Waghorn Street, SE15 4JZ. Saturday 19 September, 10am to 4pm, with the architects there to answer questions.

Saturday 19 September is the day to clear

The nine days are not remotely equal. Ten of the fifteen are open or running on Saturday 19 September. Monday, Tuesday and Thursday have nothing on at all.

Open House 2026 openings per day in Dulwich, Peckham and Camberwell Bar chart of how many of the fifteen local Open House entries are open or running on each day of the festival. Saturday 12 September has six, Sunday 13 has six, Monday 14 none, Tuesday 15 none, Wednesday 16 has two, Thursday 17 none, Friday 18 has three, Saturday 19 has ten and Sunday 20 has five. Ten of the fifteen are on one Saturday Local Open House entries open or running each day, Dulwich, Peckham and Camberwell, 12 to 20 September 2026. 3 6 9 0 6602031050 Sat 12Sun 13Mon 14Tue 15Wed 16Thu 17Fri 18Sat 19Sun 20 Source: Open House Festival 2026 programme listings, read 27 August 2026. Graphic by Dulwich Today
The Pioneer Centre, St Giles, Christ's Chapel, Easi-house and both Camberwell and Peckham walking tours all fall on Saturday 19 September.

Just outside the patch

Two more are close enough to walk to, but they are not in Southwark, and it is worth knowing that before you set off.

  • Brockwell Hall, Brockwell Park, Herne Hill, SE24 9BJ, is in Lambeth. Guided tours of the restored Regency villa on Sunday 13 and Sunday 20 September, 11am to 12.30pm, led by Lambeth Tour Guides. Booking required.
  • The Walter Segal self-build houses, Walters Way, Honor Oak Park, SE23 3LH, are in Lewisham, about a mile and a half east of Forest Hill Road. Ground floors of two houses open on Sunday 13 September, 12.30pm to 6pm, no booking. Thirteen houses built in the 1980s by people on Lewisham’s housing waiting list, most with no building experience.

What it means for you

  • Everything is free. The ticketed events cost nothing either. The ticket exists to cap numbers.
  • You need an account to book. Open House asks you to create a free visitor account and log in before you can take a ticket. Bookings for this year’s ticketed activities opened at midday on Wednesday 19 August, so the popular ones have had a week’s head start on you.
  • Drop-in venues cannot be booked at all. Turning up early is the only tactic that works.
  • Check the access notes on the listing, not the building. Nunhead’s crypt has no wheelchair or pushchair access even though the cemetery paths are mostly manageable, and the Pioneer Centre has a lift to the pool but is a converted block of flats.
  • Nunhead Cemetery is the one with parking. Most of the rest are in controlled parking zones with hours that change street by street, and the two council car parks are both in Peckham.
  • Linden Grove closes the day after the cemetery weekend. Southwark has ordered the road shut outside 105 to 109 Linden Grove from 14 September to 2 October for drainage works, which is after both Nunhead Cemetery days. Our roadworks page has the rest of September’s closures.

Sources