London’s Open House Festival returns this September, offering a rare inside look at more than 700 buildings across all 33 boroughs between 13 and 21 September 2025. According to the festival organisers, the annual programme is expressly educational and community‑focussed, providing free public access to architecture that is usually closed to visitors. For a second year the Architects’ Journal has curated an AJ Collection of recent AJ Architecture Award winners and commended projects, inviting the practices behind them to open doors for drop‑in visits and guided tours during the nine‑day event.

Among the AJ Collection is Archio’s 200 Becontree Avenue, a 2022 completion that the practice describes as a new villa typology within the historic Becontree Estate. Commissioned by Be First for Barking and Dagenham, the scheme delivers 19 affordable homes and a ground‑floor community space across two buildings, and is rooted in detailed research into the estate’s neo‑Georgian character and garden‑city principles. The wider Becontree development, built between 1921 and 1935, remains notable for its scale: by completion it contained roughly 26,000 homes and has long been described as the largest public housing scheme in the world—context that helps explain why sensitive density and material dialogue were central to Archio’s approach.

Dalston’s Bradbury Works exemplifies another strand of the collection: retrofit and social value. The Y/N Studio project refurbished a Victorian terrace and added two storeys, wrapping the upper levels in a lightweight polycarbonate and aluminium skin that transforms circulation decks into terraces. The scheme provides roughly 1,100m² of flexible workspace — including around 30 studios and ten retail pods — intended to be operated by Hackney Co‑operative Developments, and was conceived to strengthen connections with the busy civic life of Gillett Square.

Lion Green Road (previously Red Clover Gardens), by Mary Duggan Architects in collaboration with RUFFARCHITECTS, illustrates a landscape‑led route to higher density. Delivered for Croydon’s former development vehicle and set within newly created parkland, the project arranges 157 homes across five sculpted pavilions, each composed to respond to the sloping topography and to maximise views and accessibility. The designers emphasise communal open spaces, retained trees and pinwheel apartment groupings that aim to dissolve conventional front‑and‑back hierarchies between building and landscape.

The AJ selection also showcases conservation and inventive infill across the city. Purcell’s Boston Manor House in Brentford has been sensitively repaired and reimagined as a community and creative hub, complete with restored interiors and exhibition galleries. Hawkins\Brown’s work at Central Foundation Boys’ School has upgraded a tightly constrained inner‑city campus with new laboratories and an innovative subterranean sports hall while retaining and reusing existing buildings where possible. Smaller‑scale, entrepreneurial approaches are represented by Nelson Wright Architects’ Leybourne Road pair of townhouses, and Grafton Architects’ Parcels Building on Oxford Street demonstrates how a careful re‑envelope and interior refit can create modern mixed‑use workspaces and public event spaces out of a 1950s structure.

The AJ Architecture Awards programme — now in its eighth year — remains the underpinning thread for the collection. According to Architects’ Journal, the national awards celebrate design excellence across multiple categories; the 2025 shortlist announcements are slated for 18–22 August, with the awards ceremony scheduled for 27 November 2025 at the Royal Lancaster London. The awards process, the journal notes, involves site visits by the judging panel and a category structure intended to recognise everything from small projects under £500,000 to large housing schemes.

Practical details for visitors follow the festival organiser’s guidance: bookings are free but often require registration, and attendees are advised to consult the Open House programme for event‑specific access, booking instructions and accessibility information before they travel. The festival also outlines contributor guidance and volunteering opportunities for those who wish to get more directly involved.

Taken together, the AJ Collection offers a compact reading of current priorities in London practice: the repair and reuse of existing buildings; inventive approaches to affordable housing within sensitive historic contexts; landscape‑led masterplanning; and projects that embed workspace and community provision into neighbourhoods. Those themes reflect both the festival’s community remit and the Architects’ Journal’s recent award‑making, and they provide an accessible programme for anyone interested in how technical design decisions are shaping London’s public and domestic spaces.

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Reference Map:

Source: Noah Wire Services