What is Heritage Open Days?
Heritage Open Days is England's largest festival of history and culture. For eleven days each September, more than 2,000 organisers and 46,000 volunteers open up over 5,500 hidden places: churches, vaults, towers, factories, parlours, completely free, to anyone who wants to visit.
5,500+ hidden places
Locked-up libraries, working mills, restoration workshops. Sites that spend most of the year gated, unticketed, or simply unknown.
46,000 volunteers
A nationwide act of unlocking. Run by local people, free for everyone, no booking required for most events.
Our role
We're building free, self-guided audio tours that travel the streets between the buildings, listening to the voices that used to fill them.
Everyday Histories
This year's festival is dedicated to the everyday histories of working life, through the ages.
We're focusing our 2026 collection on exactly that: tours about the ordinary working lives that built English towns and cities. The looms and potteries and steelyards, the high-street counters and clerks' offices, the bricklayers, dockers and smiths whose hands shaped the streets you walk down today.
How the free tours work
From 11 to 20 September 2026, every Heritage Open Day tour below will be free for everyone. No account, no card on file. You can also listen today, or buy one as a gift.
Available now
Listen today, or buy any tour as a gift. They're yours to keep, forever.
Free Sep 11 to 20
During the festival, every tour below becomes free for anyone, anywhere. No payment required.
Walk & listen
Offline-ready audio guides you through the streets. No data, no signal needed.
Tours for Heritage Open Days 2026
The festival is live. Every tour below is free until the end of 20 September.
local_activity Free now Cambridge Audio Tour: Bedders, Bargees and Booksellers
Cambridge is famous as a university town. This walk is about the other Cambridge — the carriers who delivered the post, the watermen who poled coal up from King's Lynn, the binders who stitched the books, the women who lit the staircases at dawn, the brewers who tied the inns, the masons who cut the stone, the printers who set the type, and the market traders who fed the lot. From the working wharves of Quayside, through the bookbinders' alleys and gown-makers' shopfronts of Trinity Street and King's Parade, into the chapel that was Corpus's parish before Corpus had a chapel, past the only galleried coaching-inn yard left in town, across the open market that has traded continuously for a thousand years, past the gates where Thomas Hobson the carrier kept forty horses, to the world's oldest publishing house and finally to the Mill Pond where the Bishop's and King's Mills ground Cambridge's grain — a couple of miles, a couple of hours, and most of a working town hiding inside a famous one.
local_activity Free now Southport Audio Tour: Hands to the Sea
Southport's grand hotels and gilded arcades belong to the visitors. The streets, the seafront, the pier and the railways behind them belong to a different town — the pleasure-boat crews who worked the Marine Lake before the tourists arrived, the bath-chair men who pushed invalids along the Promenade in all weathers, the pier workers who hauled the cable tram and kept its tramway running, the fourteen men of the Eliza Fernley who rowed into a Force 9 hurricane on 9 December 1886 and were almost all swallowed by it, the hotel landlord John Halfrey who kept the Bold Arms for over forty years, the Victorian entrepreneur John Humphrey Plummer who gambled his Lord Street shops on an indoor arcade lit by electricity in 1898, the cotton manufacturer William Atkinson who gave his town a library and never asked for his name on the door, and the Cheshire Lines clerks and porters who kept a Lord Street terminus running until the bus company inherited it in 1952. Heritage Open Days 2026 theme is Everyday Histories — the unsung working lives missing from the picture. This tour finds them at the water's edge and the end of the line.
local_activity Free now Oxford Audio Tour: Behind the Gown
Oxford's spires belong to the colleges. The streets between them belong to a different city — the boatmen who built college barges at Folly Bridge, the bleating-voiced sweetshop keeper Alice Liddell loved, the Town Hall librarians who issued tickets for seventy-six years, the medieval brewers and vintners killed in the bell-tower brawl of 1355, the 17th-century ostler whose house is now the Bear, the two prison guards who held Oliver Butler's arms in 1952, the brewer dynasty whose 132 tied pubs watered the town from 1743, the bargees who hauled hay and slate to Hythe Bridge for six centuries, the bicycle apprentice William Morris who bought and buried Oxford's coal wharf for the price of a Cotswold college, the Bocardo turnkeys of St Michael's North Gate, the David Johns and the Mitzi Fellers who supplied 350 Christ Church mouths a sitting, the marmalade widow Sarah Jane Cooper, Mrs Ducker who ran an Oxford shoemaker's for a fortnight after her husband died, and the same Morris who built his first car in a stable on Longwall. This is the town that fed, clothed, printed, shod, brewed and ferried the gown — and whose names rarely made it onto the plaques.
local_activity Free now Lancaster Audio Tour: Wages, Warrants and Warehouses
Lancaster's Georgian prosperity is written in stone — the Custom House, the Priory, the grand merchant houses on Castle Hill. But the story of who actually built, guarded, clerked, stocked and served this town belongs to a different set of names: the gaoler who managed the Pendle witch hangings, the housekeeper who outlived her judges, the cabinet apprentices who hand-cut mahogany legs in a Castle Hill workshop, the dock workers who loaded cargoes whose profits built the churches, the Quaker merchants who funded both chapels and slave ships, and the women who kept the linoleum looms running when the men went to war. Heritage Open Days 2026 theme is Everyday Histories — this tour names the unnamed.
local_activity Free now Sheffield Audio Tour: Crucible and Hull
Sheffield's cutlery and steel walked the world, and behind every Old Sheffield Plate teapot and stainless dinner knife stood a courtyard yard, a wet grindstone, a smoke-stained chapel and a thousand independent craftsmen the city called Little Mesters. This self-guided audio tour traces a Sheffield working day through the centre of the city, from a town hall whose facade carries the carved trades and whose Roman god of the forge still tops the spire, through the cutlers' company chartered in 1624, the radical newspaper editor jailed in 1795 for what he printed, the cobbled square where John Wesley met his largest weekday congregation and the Chartists were dispersed by troops, past the open ground where crucible-steel furnaces still lie beneath the dirt, to the Cultural Industries Quarter where eighteen separate little-mester trades worked one yard, and finally to Leah's Yard itself, the only city-centre courtyard restored as a living monument to the people who actually made Sheffield's name. Walk slowly. The buildings still hold their shape, and the trades still hold their names.
local_activity Free now Norwich Audio Tour: At Work
Norwich was rich long before England had factories. Six centuries of worsted weaving, a third of the population speaking Dutch, a 1583 'house of correction' that put women to spin and men to grind malt, a Wensum canal that floated Caen stone to the cathedral works yard, fifteen per cent of the city in shoe factories by 1900, an insurance giant born above a wine merchant's vaults, and an Edwardian architect who built the offices, arcades and department stores where the new clerks and shop-girls worked: it all happened inside one square mile. This self-guided audio tour walks that mile. From Strangers' Hall — the merchant's house where Mayor Sotherton lodged refugee Dutch weavers in 1565 — through a 1670 weaver's cottage, the friary where the Strangers worshipped in Dutch until 1929, the Elizabethan Bridewell that 'set the poor on work', the Norman market that has traded since 1086, the medieval Guildhall, a bespoke shoemaker still hand-stitching on the same shopfront since 1874, the only independent department store in the city, George Skipper's Art Nouveau arcade, the Marble Hall of Norwich Union, the keep where Robert Kett was hanged, the Anglo-Scandinavian first marketplace, the cathedral gate built by Agincourt's Sir Thomas Erpingham, the medieval water-gate that delivered the cathedral stone — and ending at the seven-bay medieval trading hall of merchant Robert Toppes, who exported the Norwich worsted that built it all. Walk slowly. The buildings still hold their shape, and the working lives still hold their names.
local_activity Free now Gloucester Audio Tour: No More Twist
Gloucester's spires, cloisters and dockside warehouses belong to the history books. The streets between them belong to a different city — the medieval stonemasons who invented fan vaulting under plague conditions, the tailor who finished a mayor's waistcoat by candlelight and pinned a note saying 'no more twist', the newspaper printer who started the Sunday School movement, the pin-wire workers at the Westgate bench who once employed one in five of the city's population, the Augustinian canons dispersed with a year's pension, the corn-porters who hauled grain to the top of Llanthony Warehouse, and the watermen whose trows ran salt and timber on the Severn before the canal cut them out. These are the working people who kept Gloucester going — and whose names rarely made it onto the plaques.
local_activity Free now Leeds Audio Tour: The Bell, the Bandsaw and the Bridge
A 15-stop walking tour of the working day of Leeds — from Michael Marks's 1884 penny stall in Kirkgate Market, through the 1711 White Cloth Hall and the ghost of the 1758 Coloured Cloth Hall under City Square, to John Barran's 1858 band-knife and the Hispano-Moorish tailoring palace it paid for, the Holbeck mills where Salamanca rolled out in 1812 and flax was spun under a grass-and-sheep roof, and finally to Leeds Bridge where the everyday traffic was filmed in October 1888 and a working morning became the oldest cinema in Britain.
local_activity Free now Winchester Audio Tour: Everyday Histories
Winchester's spires and royal halls belong to bishops and kings. The city between them belongs to a different cast entirely: the Norman mason who built the cathedral in 1079 on waterlogged peat; the deep-sea diver William Walker who spent five years underground in complete darkness replacing those rotten foundations with concrete, brick by underwater brick; the manciple John Bedell who provisioned Winchester College for nearly forty years; the tanner James Cooke who rebuilt the Saxon mill on the Itchen in 1743; the butter-sellers and cheese-sellers who traded from the Buttercross steps; the coaching-inn landlord who turned 270 years of trade into a bric-a-brac shrine; and the unnamed abbey workers whose bones were scattered by prison convicts in 1788. Heritage Open Days 2026 theme is Everyday Histories — the unsung people missing from the picture. This tour gives them their day.
local_activity Free now Harrogate Audio Tour: Taking the Waters
Harrogate's mineral springs made it the most fashionable resort in England. But every glass of sulphur water dispensed, every hot room maintained at the right temperature, every bath chair pushed up Montpellier Hill was the daily labour of working people whose names are rarely on the plaques. This tour follows the dipper elected Queen of the Wells, the Swiss pastry cook who arrived at King's Cross not knowing which city he was headed to, the engineer who became the town's greatest benefactor, the first park superintendent who shaped the valley for the public gaze, and the banjo player who recognised a famous novelist sitting quietly under a borrowed name. From the first spring discovered in the late sixteenth century to the great hydrotherapy palace opened at the end of the nineteenth, this is the story of the workforce that sold health to Victorian Britain.
local_activity Free now Reading Audio Tour: Biscuit Town
Reading made things the world wanted and the world rarely thought about who made them. This tour walks the working heart of the town — the stretch of King's Road and the Kennet where five thousand hands mixed dough, painted tins and stoked ovens at the world's largest biscuit factory, where draymen rolled barrels from the Bridge Street brewery into the Oracle's footprint, where seed-packet sorters worked through the night at the Market Place to meet the next morning's post, where a navvy named Henry West was killed by a gust of wind on a station roof six days before the trains began to run, and where the last abbot of Reading Abbey was hanged at his own gatehouse for high treason. Heritage Open Days' theme is Everyday Histories — the working women dismissed without reason in the winter of industrial unrest, the tin-printing apprentice who made the biscuit tin a national institution, the canal lock-keeper on the Kennet, the brewery worker who became a soldier without changing his employer. This is a walk through the places where Reading's name was built, mostly by people whose names were not put on anything.
local_activity Free now Brighton Audio Tour: Below the Promenade
Brighton's seafront looks like a holiday but is a working town in disguise. This self-guided audio tour walks the engine-shed, the kitchen, the service stair and the shingle beach that built Britain's pleasure resort — from Brighton Station, where two thousand men once built the locomotives that brought the visitors in, through the Pavilion kitchen where Carême cooked thirty courses while servants moved invisibly through Dutch-tiled corridors, past the Hippodrome where Charlie Chaplin and Sarah Bernhardt did two shows a night, the Town Hall basement where the first English chief constable was murdered at his own desk, the Grand Hotel where a 1984 night porter dug himself out of rubble, the Birch piers where one-legged divers ate breakfast on the water, and finally the shingle where Brighton's eighty-boat fishing fleet once landed mackerel by capstan and sold it by Dutch auction. Walk slowly. The Brighton you came to see was built by people you never saw.
local_activity Free now Guildford Audio Tour: Cloth, Keys and Waterways
Guildford's High Street belongs to the merchants and the mayors. The streets and waterways between them belong to a different town — the fullers who racked Guildford Blue cloth to dry at Millmead, the castle constables who kept the King's prisoners in the keep, the chalk-quarry cutters whose spoil built the castle and named the street, the London clockmaker John Aylward who gave the Guildhall its projecting timepiece in exchange for trading rights, the lawyer John Childe who built the finest house on the High Street and served as mayor three times, the almshouse brethren in their blue caps who swept the chapel and tended the garden under Richard Abbot the first Master, the grammar-school boys chained to the library that grocer Robert Beckingham's will funded in 1509, the brewer Charles Hoskin Master whose copper vessels made Friary Meux ale for a century, and the barge builders Edwin Edwards and his four sons who hammered the hull of the Wey Navigation's last working barge at Dapdune Wharf. These are the working people whose names made it into the ledgers — and the ones who didn't.
local_activity Free now Warwick Audio Tour: The Town Behind the Walls
Warwick belongs to the earls on its postcards. The streets beneath the castle walls belong to a different story — the armourers and mill-tenants who kept the castle running, the six named craftsmen whose contracts survive from the making of Richard Beauchamp's tomb, the five named workers who rebuilt St Mary's nave after the 1694 fire destroyed a quarter of the town, the veterans and their wives who have kept the same morning prayers since 1571, the wool-trading mercer Thomas Oken who made his fortune and gave it all away, the mason Francis Smith who was born in the ashes of one town and spent his life building the next. This is Heritage Open Days' 'Everyday Histories' — the working names Warwick nearly forgot.
local_activity Free now Colchester Audio Tour: Unsung Hands
Colchester has been Britain's oldest recorded town since a Roman centurion named Favonius Facilis had his tombstone raised here in AD 50. This tour is not about the Romans, Normans, or earls who commissioned the monuments. It is about the legionaries who mixed the mortar, the Flemish weavers who fled Alva's army and rebuilt a cloth trade in Maidenburgh Street, the monk who told Henry VIII to his face that he would not give up his abbey, the ordinary townspeople who ate cats and dogs through eleven weeks of Civil War siege, the maidservant Mary Last who kept nine Victorians fed and dressed, and the builder's men from Hythe Hill who laid 1.2 million bricks for a water tower their rector called an elephant.
local_activity Free now Liverpool Audio Tour: Below the Liver Birds
Liverpool's waterfront looks like an empire of merchants but is really a working hierarchy in disguise — clerks pen-pushing at Pier Head, sailors paid off on the dock road, dockers picked at the seven-o'clock pen, and women, children and Black seafarers cut out of the wage but doing the unpaid labour that ran the port. This self-guided audio tour walks the working day of a port city — from the Sailors' Church on Chapel Street, past the Cunard clerks' palace and the Royal Liver Friendly Society founded by nine working men in a pub, into the Albert Dock warehouses that handled bonded tobacco and the gates of the Sailors' Home that tried to break the crimps' racket, through the Bluecoat charity school for the orphans of the port, into the Cotton Brokers' Ring that ran the world cotton market from Old Hall Street, through the Cavern's lunchtime sessions where typists and apprentices spent their dinner-hour, onto the very plateau where on 13 August 1911 the police hidden inside St George's Hall baton-charged a strike rally of eighty-five thousand, up the steps of the Walker — free to the working public since 1877 — past Lewis's 'Friend to the People' department store, into the Catholic Cathedral built on the floor of the Brownlow Hill Workhouse where the city's poor picked oakum twelve hours a day, and finishing at the Philharmonic Dining Rooms — a pub built for the wage-earner by trade-school craftsmen and listed Grade I for its trouble. Walk slowly. The Liverpool you came to see was made by people who paid for it with their working day.
local_activity Free now Stoke-on-Trent Audio Tour: Fired Earth
Stoke proper — a square kilometre between the Minster, the Spode works, the station, and the canal — was the engine room of the British ceramics industry. This tour is not about the great potters' families. It is about the throwers and paintresses, the kiln-firers and flint-grinders, the navvies who cut the canal and the boatmen who legged through Harecastle in the dark, the railwaymen who carried the finished ware south and the hotel staff who fed and housed them. It is about Potter's Rot, the workers' cottages Josiah Spode II built at minimum standard in Penkhull Square, the named casualties on the North Staffordshire Railway's war memorial, and the memorial school that Herbert Minton's workers' skills paid for.
local_activity Free now Blackpool Audio Tour: The People Behind the Pleasure
Blackpool's towers and illuminations belong to the visitors. The streets and promenade between them belong to a different town — the tram drivers who ran Britain's first electric street tramway from 1885, the steeplejacks who fixed five million Accrington bricks into the sky, the ballroom organist who played for forty years without missing a Whit Sunday, the pier keepers who handed out deckchairs at dawn, the landladies on Charnley Road who took in mill workers by the dozen, the electricians who strung up eight arc lamps before Edison had patented the bulb. This is the Blackpool that the Blackpool Gazette and the boardinghouse registers remembered — the workers whose names rarely made it onto the illuminations.
local_activity Free now Birkenhead Audio Tour: Hammers, Hulls and the Means Test
Birkenhead grew not from commerce or culture but from sheer industrial necessity: a medieval priory whose monks ran the river crossing on a royal ferry charter; a Scottish ironmaster who started building ships from boiler plates; a town grid meant to be Edinburgh-on-Mersey that ended up crammed with Irish famine migrants; the first street tramway in Europe, inaugurated by an American showman in six weeks; docks that became Europe's largest flour-milling centre; a road tunnel dug by thousands of men with pneumatic hammers and gelignite; and a late-twentieth-century shipyard occupation whose workers lost their jobs, their pensions and their liberty. This walk follows the arc from Birkenhead Priory round Hamilton Square's overcrowded terraces, through the market and the tramway route, to the Cammell Laird gate where the occupation ended, and back along the heritage tram line. The visible built environment still carries every one of these threads.
local_activity Free now Exeter Audio Tour: Everyday Histories
Exeter's fame rests on its cathedral, its Roman walls and its role as the capital of the south-west. This tour belongs to the people those monuments required: the wool-workers whose trade made the city the third richest in England, the engineer who cut Britain's first pound-lock canal, the plasterer who decorated the Custom House ceiling, the masons who carved the Cathedral's longest medieval vault, the tunnel-diggers who plumbed the city's water supply through the rock, the Guildhall beadles who kept order for eight centuries, and the wardens who pulled people from the rubble when the Baedeker bombers came. They built the city; it rarely put their names on the plaques.
local_activity Free now Wolverhampton Audio Tour: Sweat and Shine
Wolverhampton's working history runs from Lady Wulfrun's wool grant to Ernest Bevin's forty-hour handshake — from the wool merchants whose money built St Peter's nave clerestory, to Edward Bird the japanning apprentice who became a Royal Academician, to Harry Inscoe who sat at his locksmith's bench for sixty years, to the young architects Lawrence Israel and Edward Lyons who won the Civic Hall competition aged twenty-two and twenty-five in what was their very first job, to John Baynton and John Brodie who were given a football by their headmaster and founded Wolverhampton Wanderers. These are the names the plaques missed.
local_activity Free now Northampton Audio Tour: Clicking, Closing and the Sound of the Town
Northampton's boots once walked the world, and behind every pair was a parlour, a workshop, a factory floor and a family. This self-guided audio tour traces a working day through England's shoemaking capital, from the open Market Square where shoemakers organised against the new machines, to St Crispin's altar at All Saints, through the cordwainer-chapel where Northampton's shoemakers learned to organise, to the very block where the first 'monster warehouse' broke the parlour trade and triggered the strike of 1858, and finally to a Victorian prison whose vaults now hold one of the world's great shoe collections. You will hear what a clicker actually clicked, why the closing rooms were full of women on rented Singer machines, and how a 1936 super-cinema, a leather-works in Pont Street Dutch brick and a 1940 youth club for the no-collar kids of the Boroughs all share the same streets. Walk slowly. The buildings still hold their shape, and the shoes still hold their stitches.
local_activity Free now Durham Audio Tour: Hands That Built Durham
Durham's skyline belongs to the cathedral and the castle. The rest of the city belongs to a different story — the Norman masons who signed their stones with a chisel mark, the boy choristers educated in exchange for their voices, the Bishop's kitchen staff who fed five hundred in a hall built around hierarchy, the medieval bridge-builders who raised Framwellgate and Elvet for the pilgrims and the traders, the market stallholders who gathered under Bishop Pudsey's charter, the 150,000 Durham miners who pooled their wages to build their own parliament on Redhills Lane, and the secretary William Crawford who made the Durham Miners' Association the largest miners' union in Britain. These are the people whose labour made the peninsula possible — and whose names rarely appear on any plaque.
local_activity Free now Preston Audio Tour: Ten Per Cent and No Surrender
Preston's story is written in cotton. The water frame that changed the world was tested in an arch off Church Street. The first total-abstinence pledge was signed at the Cockpit on Stoneygate by seven named working men — a weaver, a tailor, a joiner. The seven-month lockout of workers was led by Mortimer Grimshaw, the Thunderer of Lancashire, and George Cowell, the weaver's son from Mellor — the same dispute that drew Charles Dickens north and gave him Hard Times. The park on the valley slope was dug by cotton workers thrown out of their mills by the American Civil War. The church spire visible across three counties is said to have been raised with the pennies of Irish loom-workers' Sunday collections. The bus station its builder said should give ordinary people the luxury of air travel. These are the spinners, weavers, pledgers, strikers, navvies, dockers and overlookers whose names rarely made it onto the plaques.
Frequently asked questions
Everything you need to know about Heritage Open Days 2026 and our free audio tours.
What is Heritage Open Days?expand_more
Heritage Open Days is England's largest festival of history and culture. For eleven days each September, over 2,000 organisers and 46,000 volunteers open up more than 5,500 hidden places, completely free.
When does Heritage Open Days 2026 take place?expand_more
Heritage Open Days 2026 runs from Friday 11 September to Sunday 20 September 2026 across England.
What is the 2026 theme?expand_more
The 2026 theme is Everyday Histories: the lives of ordinary working people through the ages. Mills, shops, workshops, offices, and the people who filled them.
Are the AudaTours Heritage Open Day audio tours free?expand_more
Yes. From 11 to 20 September 2026, every Heritage Open Day audio tour on AudaTours will be free for everyone. No account or payment required. The tours are also available to buy and listen to at any time of year.
Which English cities are covered?expand_more
We're adding new tours every week in the run-up to the festival. Cities currently in production include Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds, Newcastle, Sheffield and Nottingham.
Do I need an internet connection during the tour?expand_more
No. AudaTours audio tours are designed to work offline. Download a tour over Wi-Fi, then walk and listen without using mobile data.
In support of
Heritage Open Days is run by the National Trust and made possible by 46,000 volunteers across England. Our audio tours are an independent contribution to the festival. We're not affiliated with the Heritage Open Days organisation.
Visit heritageopendays.org.uk open_in_newHear the stories your city was built on.
These tours are our small contribution to Heritage Open Days: a way to walk the streets of English towns and hear the everyday working lives that shaped them.
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