Heritage Open Days are an annual celebration of England's architecture and culture that allows visitors free access to historical landmarks that are either not usually open, or would normally charge an entrance fee. It also includes tours, events and activities related to architecture and culture.
Heritage Open Days were established in 1994 as England's contribution to European Heritage Days, in which 49 countries now participate.
Organised by volunteers — usually property owners or managers — for local people, Heritage Open Days are one of England's biggest and most popular voluntary cultural event, attracting some 800,000 people every year. Until April 2009 the Civic Trust gave central co-ordination and a national voice to the event; it is now organised and co-ordinated by English Heritage.
The event is usually held on the second weekend of September. The dates for 2009 were 10–13 September.
London stages a separate event, Open House London, which usually takes place the following weekend, the third weekend of September.
Famous quotes containing the words heritage, open and/or days:
“The heritage of the American Revolution is forgotten, and the American government, for better and for worse, has entered into the heritage of Europe as though it were its patrimony—unaware, alas, of the fact that Europe’s declining power was preceded and accompanied by political bankruptcy, the bankruptcy of the nation-state and its concept of sovereignty.”
—Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)
“Let a man learn to look for the permanent in the mutable and fleeting; let him learn to bear the disappearance of things he was wont to reverence; without losing his reverence; let him learn that he is here, not to work, but to be worked upon; and that, though abyss open under abyss, and opinion displace opinion, all are at last contained in the Eternal Cause.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Most days I feel like an acrobat high above a crowd out of which my own parents, my in-laws, potential employers, phantoms of “other women who do it” and a thousand faceless eyes stare up.”
—Anonymous Mother. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 2 (1978)