Jenni in London: A Favourite September Tradition: Saturday

Open House London is an annual event that comes around on the third weekend of September. Nearly every borough participates (What's your problem, Barnet?) with both public and private buildings open for visits. Architects hoping to drum up new business offer their recent work, local museums and churches find it a great way to remind residents of their existence, and buildings which in the workaday world restrict entrance to members or employees grant access to the curious for this weekend. In mid-August a 70-page booklet begins to appear in libraries and participating museums listing this year's options by borough. Organised people can immediately get on the phone to reserve spots for places that require pre-booking. People like me, just page through and formulate a dozen possible itineraries.

Saturday was a half day because an important stamp show is held on this same weekend, and Bob is a keen philatelist. We did manage to see three churches on Saturday afternoon. Although Barnet does not participate, the Hampstead Garden Suburb, which is in Barnet, does have a special page in the Open House booklet. The Suburb is just one stop north of us on the Tube, and the bus that is still conveniently, but irritatingly, stopping across from our flat takes us there in a few minutes. Henrietta Barnett, a turn of the 20th century do-gooder, inspired by Ebenezer Howard's utopian urban planning volume Garden Cities for To-Morrow, embarked on her own project in 1907 by hiring visionary planner Raymond Unwin and architect Edward Lutyens to create a Garden City for London. Like most utopian suburbs, this one ended up expensive and populated by the upper middle-class who could afford Utopia.

Lutyens created an elegant Central Square with an Institute for adult education — a crucial element in Ebenezer Howard's plan for improving the working class masses who would, theoretically, make up a percentage of a Garden City's residents — on one side, flanked by two churches facing each other across the square. The Institute is now a highly academic girls grammar school named for Henrietta Barnett. Lutyens's St Jude-on-the-Hill (Church of England) is magnificent, with an interior completely painted with murals.

Across the Square is the Free Church, for Dissenting residents of the Suburb, a much simpler building with an undecorated interior.

We then traveled into Bloomsbury to visit a church that I had read about and was anxious to see. The Lumen Church is a Dissenting (United Reformed) Church with a long history connected to London's Gaelic population. Various church buildings came and went over two centuries. A York Minster imitation was damaged in wartime bombing and replaced in the 1960s with the present smaller building. The surrounding property was used for parking lots and church halls. A few years ago the congregation sold the adjoining properties for millions of pounds, and used the money to build a new church within the existing walls. The architecture partnership Theis + Kahn won a RIBA award for their work on Lumen and have since been nominated for the Stirling Prize.