Enjoying a different view of London with London Open House

London Open House weekend has to be one of my favourite weekends in London. Hundreds of buildings throw open their doors and over the years I’ve visited some brilliant ones, from the Foreign and Commonwealth Offices to the Old Operating Theatre, Barnardo’s Village in Barkingside to Ally Pally and the London Eye.

Since having children we’ve visited less buildings but we’ve still managed to get out and about. Now the children are that little bit easier to manage and we live in a different part of London it feels like we have so many new places to visit. I look forward to seeing lots of new places in west London and this weekend we managed three properties, all completely different:

Swakeleys House – the most important house in Ickenham and only open to the public on one day every year (for Open House). It’s a Jacobean house dating from the 1630s and is absolutely beautiful, although empty.

Kempton Park Water Treatment Works – a 1928 industrial cathedral housing 2 triple expansion steam engines and 2 steam turbines.

Heathrow Pod – the world’s first commercially operational Personal Rapid Transit system from business parking to T5.

Kempton Park Works – currently set up as a biscuit factory for scenes in Midsummers Murder!

This weekend marks the end of the summer bucket list we started back in July so I’m pleased to be able to tick off go plane spotting at Heathrow. The Bugaboo Bee has been our faithful friend over the last couple of months and I’ve loved using it. I’ve written about some of my favourite features here and here.

The toddler starts nursery this week, it looks like we’ve finally mastered potty training and we’ve banned Little Sis from her dummy during the day. What adventures are next for the inhabitants of the gingerbread house?