8 places to explore during Heritage Open Days 2026

Open House gets all the attention, but it’s not the only festival throwing open doors this September. Heritage Open Days runs alongside it, from 11 to 20 September 2026, and its shortlist skews a little different: fewer grand civic buildings, more of the odd, small-scale, run-by-enthusiasts places that don’t always make it onto the bigger lists. It’s also, this year at least, where you’ll find a couple of genuine favourites that Open House itself left out. Below are eight I’ve picked out: a modernist icon, a private tea museum that’s never normally open to the public, a Victorian beam engine that quietly saved a borough from disease, a working waste facility that answers the question nobody thinks to ask, a crypt usually reserved for paying tour groups, a neo-Gothic mansion built for a press baron, a Victorian ice warehouse, and the hospital wing that houses two of England’s most important interiors. Some are grand. Some are strange. All of them are the kind of thing worth going out…