Open House London 2019: A chance for some to take a peek at world's most interesting buildings

Open House London, the event that started the movement that now involves 35 global cities, is in its 27th year and goes way beyond the original charter of demonstrating how “good design helps make great cities”.

It now attracts 250,000 annual visitors desirous of rubbing shoulders with 800 man-made structures that either “history has made great”, or that form part of “the glittering glass forest of the new city of London”.

Among the new-age skyscrapers so distinct they have nicknames, we have potential access (please note, potential) to the highest; Renzo Piano’s 95-level Shard, and the most distinct, Sir Norman Foster’s Gherkin, acknowledged as “a landmark second only to St Paul’s” but by a second moniker as “the Crystal Phallus”.

Many fancy global company headquarters and lots of fabled government departments open their doors. Many embassies do too, including new $1 billion, sustainable and super-safe US Embassy at Vauxhall, The Sugar Cube.

Many architects invite visitation to their offices, including Foster + Partners. Many also show off their latest or best residential projects, scattered across the 30 participating London boroughs.

Because and in spite of all the fires, riots, wars, and ravages of time and modification London has tended to value its 3D history, the list is so rich and diverse you can peruse it by period: medieval, Tudor, Stuart, Georgian, Victorian, interwar, etcetera; by facility type – cemeteries, clubs, churches et al; or by neighbourhood.

It’s such a glutton’s temptation that doing neighbourhood selections is prudent. The better one is getting in really early and booking into the handful of London buildings you feel you must see before you die.

The cabinet room in The Admiralty. The improbably magnificent Fishmonger’s Hall and the nearby Roman Baths near the Thames. The Lodge which is Tottenham Hotspurs’ new accommodation option. Westminster’s remarkable Gap House that starts at the street at 2.4 metres wide, and the evocative Emery Walker house, one of several in the showing touched by William Morris.

Four Georgian tailors’ shops in Saville Row are open to hoi polloi this year. So is the Royal Institution of Chartered Accountants. Anyone?

In the advance publicity of the event, a handful of buildings are always specified as accessible only if you are selected from a ballot: They include Boris and Carrie’s new digs, 10 Downing Street (William Kent 1735), The Shard, and New Scotland Yard for which you are required to submit your name, probably give your fingerprints and hope for the best.

For a lark, and because I wanted to see what the UK’s 55th PM and his consort have done for the place since moving in a few months ago (decor style: chaos?), as soon as this year’s registration site went live in mid-August, I jumped onto the ballot to go behind the world’s most famous black front door.

Fat chance. Only 50 people on just one day get that privilege and the organisers weren’t swayed by the idea that I was coming from so far away. “Get in the queue.”

Having forgotten the Brits’ predilection for queuing, and presuming such a numerically dense architectural festival would be as leisurely as, say, Melbourne’s Open House weekend, it wasn’t until some days later when checking what I might see did I learn that unless you’re out in the fringe boroughs, get in the queue is the refrain attached to most of the good things on offer.

Downing Street? No deal. Scotland Yard? Booked out. Spencer House? Try next door. The Reform Club? Sold out. The pending new Museum of London at the vacant Spitalfields market? Turn up on the day.

The Guildhall? Long queues. The Royal Automobile Club’s HQ in Pall Mall? No denim. No hoodies.

I’m on the list for Lancaster House, the last of the private Georgian palaces that stands in for Buckingham Palace in The Crown and Downton Abbey.

Doing Open House London well is an exercise that begins in similar style to targeting tickets to a superstar concert. Unless you’re in at the get-go with a specific list, you’ll be on the wait list or in a long line, hoping there’s a public loo when you do get inside.

But once here, you won’t care about the long queue factor because there is just so much storied architectural history, that even without crossing a threshold you could never be bored.