Open House Festival 2025
On 14 September we welcomed visitors to our Mile End Campus for two social history tours, as part of Open House Festival 2025
/filters:format(webp)/prod01/channel_262/queen-mary-university-of-london/media/qmul/publicengagement/blog/20250914_110515282_iOS.jpg)
On Sunday 14th September we were pleased to invite for two fully-booked walking tours as part of Open House Festival 2025.
43 visitors joined us from all over London (and one from as far as Leeds!), including a Queen Mary alumna from the 1980s! The tour explored the hidden corners of Queen Mary University’s Mile End campus, and were led by two Queen Mary academics - Professor Nadia Valman (School of the Arts) and Professor Alastair Owens (School of Society and Environment).
Queen Mary University’s Mile End campus has evolved around pre-existing religious, welfare and educational buildings and institutions. The tour offered glimpses into the area’s eighteenth and nineteenth-century social history, in particular the lives of migrants, the working poor and the destitute, via these surviving fragments. The tour began outside the Queens’ building on the Mile End Road, and included the former People’s Palace and the Octagon Library (1877), Mile End Hospital (1858), a former workhouse, and the Sephardic Jewish cemetery (1733), the UK’s second oldest Jewish cemetery, which is located on our campus.
We finished the tours at BLOC, Queen Mary’s inclusive cinema, where we sheltered from the rain and enjoyed refreshments and further discussion, followed by some screenings of short films showcasing Queen Mary research in East London.
Thank you to all of those that joined us!
“Amazing tour, refreshments and movies!”
“As a local resident I didn’t realise the extent of the campus or the history and cemetery”
“I enjoyed the tour very much – thank you”
“The history of Queen Mary College was unknown to me. Fascinating.”
Open House Festival is a London-wide festival that opens up and celebrates the city’s built environment. Every year, buildings and other sites across all 33 London boroughs open to the public, so that Londoners can explore them for free. The festival runs until 21 September 2025. Find out more.