In This Economy: 12 Actually Good Things You Can Do for Free During Heritage Open Days
Twelve free days out across England that are actually worth leaving the house for — including hidden tunnels, robotic book cranes, Langar lunch and a museum about spectacles.
Header photo: Kaushik Mahadevan / Pexels I love a free thing. I am slightly less enthusiastic about the sort of “free day out” where you drive for 45 minutes, pay £8 to park and discover that the main attraction is three laminated information boards and a gift shop. Fortunately, Heritage Open Days is not that. It started yesterday and runs until 20 September. There are more than 6,200 in-person events across England this year, and more than 4,000 of them don’t even need booking. Some are places that normally charge admission. Some are buildings you normally can’t get into at all. Others are frankly quite odd. Those are usually the ones I like best. So this feels like a good place to start In This Economy , our new collection of things that are free, surprisingly cheap, or just much better value than I expected them to be . I went through the programme. These are the 12 I’d actually consider doing. If you’re anywhere near Northampton tomorrow, start here The Sikh Museum Northampton and SGSS Gurdwara are inviting people in for a traditional Langar lunch, followed by a guided visit to the Gurdwara and museum. Langar is the communal meal served at a Gurdwara and is open to everyone, regardless of background or belief. The visit also covers Sikh history and culture, with exhibitions including Sikh involvement in the First World War and the story of Princess Sophia Duleep Singh. This is exactly the sort of thing I want from Heritage Open Days. You’re not just wandering around an old building. Somebody is inviting you into their community and helping you understand something you may know almost nothing about. It is on Sunday 13 September in Northampton. Booking is preferred, and if you’re reading this on Saturday you’ve got until 11pm tonight to do it. Head covering is required and shoes come off before entering the Gurdwara. The British Library has giant robots fetching books Which, obviously, I want to see. Not at the British Library in London, either. This is its huge Boston Spa site near Leeds, where enormous amounts of the national collection are stored. Normally the public doesn’t get to wander around the storage buildings. For Heritage Open Days, tours are going into the National Newspaper Building, conservation and digitisation areas, and the Additional Storage Building. That last one contains robotic retrieval cranes which fetch material from the collection. I am aware that “watch a robot retrieve a book from a warehouse” probably isn’t on many conventional bucket lists. It is now on mine. 16 and 17 September, Boston Spa, West Yorkshire. Booking required. Silverstone, but without having to own a Ferrari Silverstone Museum is running tiny archive sessions for just eight people at a time. You get to handle actual pieces from the circuit’s history, including trophies, signing-on sheets and lap charts, then go on a guided tour through the museum. This isn’t just “free entry to the museum on Tuesday”. It’s getting your hands on things that normally stay in an archive. Which is a recurring theme here: the best Heritage Open Days stuff is often the thing you couldn’t simply pay to do next weekend. Thursday 17 September at Silverstone Museum. There are only eight places per session, so this one needs booking. Go and walk around a 1,800-year-old village Chysauster Ancient Village, near Penzance, is one of the best preserved Romano-British settlements in Britain. Between the first and third centuries, somewhere around 50 to 70 people lived there in stone courtyard houses. The Heritage Open Days tour takes you around the village with an expert volunteer and gets into the tin trade and the wonderfully named fogous , the underground structures found around this part of Cornwall. I have no current requirement for a fogou in my life, but I am delighted to know they exist. Tuesday 15 September at 1pm. Booking is essential and places are limited to 15. Go underground in Dover This one is particularly good. Dover’s Western Heights is an enormous system of fortifications dating back to the Napoleonic Wars and the nineteenth century. The North Entrance contains tunnels, gunrooms, defensive ditches, old drawbridge mechanisms and huge underground water tanks. Parts of it have been sealed since the 1960s. And for one weekend, they open it. That is a proper thing to do. Forty-five minutes underground somewhere you normally can’t get into beats another Saturday wandering around Bluewater by some distance. 19 and 20 September in Dover. Tours need to be booked in advance. It is uneven, dark and involves steps, so accessibility is limited. Bletchley Park, except the interesting bit is where everyone slept Bletchley Park itself hardly needs selling. What I like about this particular event is that it isn’t another retelling of the Enigma story. At its peak, nearly 9,000 people suddenly arrived to work around Bletchley. The local area was completely unprepared for them. So this talk looks at the ordinary bit: where everyone lived, ate and slept while they were busy doing extraordinary things. It uses Bletchley Park’s oral histories, and afterwards you get free entry to explore the site. There’s something about the everyday side of famous history that I always find more interesting. You know Alan Turing helped crack German codes. You probably haven’t given much thought to who found him somewhere to live. Saturday 19 September. Booking required. The house where railway stations basically started becoming railway stations There is a restored house on Liverpool Road in Manchester called the Station Agent’s House. It was part of the development of Liverpool Road Station for the Liverpool & Manchester Railway and became the home of its first Station Agent, Joseph Green. Around this site, loads of things we now take completely for granted started appearing: waiting rooms, signals, tickets, ticket offices and the station agent’s role itself. So if you’ve ever stood on a platform staring at a departure board and wondering why railway stations are the way they are, part of the answer is here. Admittedly, the Victorians failed to invent the £4.90 station coffee at the same time. Progress took a while. It’s open today and tomorrow, 12 and 13 September, in Manchester. Booking is preferred but not essential. The Bowes Museum is just free this weekend Sometimes you don’t need a complicated angle. The Bowes Museum is an enormous French-style museum sitting in Barnard Castle. This weekend admission is free. There are guided tours, workshops, object-handling sessions and access behind the scenes to the museum vaults, as well as the permanent collection and its famous mechanical Silver Swan. If you’re somewhere vaguely nearby and have never been, this seems a fairly straightforward decision. Today and tomorrow, 12 and 13 September. No booking required. Stowe is free for ten days Stowe Gardens is one of those places where “garden” rather undersells it. There are 250 acres of lakes, temples, monuments, views, paths and eighteenth-century landscape design, and entry is free throughout Heritage Open Days. Then on 19 and 20 September, some of the stranger bits open too, including Dido’s Cave and the Temple of Concord and Victory. There is also rare access to the Gothic Temple, although you need to book that bit. You can make this one as energetic or as lazy as you like. Personally, I support any historic attraction where “wander around for a few hours and look at nice things” is a perfectly acceptable level of participation. Free until 20 September, near Buckingham. No booking needed for the gardens. There is a restored Norfolk trading wherry called Maud I had to look up what a Norfolk wherry was. It is a traditional sailing boat once used for moving cargo around the Broads. And on Sunday, a restored one called Maud is visiting the Museum of the Broads in Stalham. You can go aboard, watch demonstrations of cargo loading and ropework, see the pop-up museum about her restoration and learn a surprising amount about boats you probably hadn’t thought about ten minutes earlier. This is one of my favourite types of thing to do. Nobody wakes up thinking, “Today I really need to understand historic Norfolk cargo boats.” Then somebody opens one up for the day and suddenly it sounds quite good. Sunday 13 September. Free, and no booking required. A museum about spectacles. Hear me out. The College of Optometrists has a museum in two Georgian townhouses just off the Strand in London. It contains old spectacles, objects relating to sight testing and eye care, a library, paintings and various bits of optical history. It is also, apparently, haunted. I appreciate we have moved some distance from Stonehenge and Buckingham Palace here, but that is rather the point. You can even bring along an old pair of glasses and ask the experts what they can tell you about them. Would I travel from Kent specifically to London just to inspect historical eyewear? Probably not. Would I absolutely pop in if I was already nearby? Yes. Sunday 13 September, 12–5pm. No booking required. And finally, a free railway museum day On Sunday 20 September , Buckinghamshire Railway Centre is opening its museum and 25-acre site for free. There are steam locomotives, historic carriages, freight wagons and a visitor centre inside the former Oxford Rewley Road station building, which was dismantled and rebuilt at Quainton. The full-size steam trains aren’t running that day, and the miniature railway costs £1.50 if you want a ride, but admission to the museum and site is free. If you have a train-obsessed child, partner, parent or self, you probably don’t need me to explain this one any further. You may also want to add a ride on a heritage steam railway to the list. The point isn’t really that they’re free Well, it is a bit. Everything costs enough at the moment. But what I like about Heritage Open Days is that quite a few of these aren’t cheap versions of something better. They are the better version. You can visit museums and historic buildings all year. What you can’t normally do is walk into the closed tunnel, get into the archive, handle the object, meet the people who look after it or see the room that normally has a locked door in front of it. That’s why it works for me as a bucket-list thing rather than simply a money-saving exercise. There are thousands more running between now and 20 September , all over England. Over 4,000 currently need no advance booking at all. So have a look at what’s near you. And don’t automatically pick the famous one. Pick the weird one.