OPEN HOUSE 2025: Swedenborg’s London Guided Walk

Open House London is the world’s largest architecture festival, giving free public access to 800+ buildings, walks, talks and tours over one weekend in September each year. Swedenborg House has regularly taken part in Open House for the past 20 years, opening its doors to allow the general public to explore its meeting rooms, library spaces and special displays.

On Wednesday 17 September there will be the chance to join a small group for a guided walk of ‘Swedenborg’s London’.

Starting at Swedenborg House (20-21 Bloomsbury Way), where there will be a chance to get breakfast/refreshments from the Swedenborg Society’s new café, Arcana Coffee, the walk will proceed east to Cold Bath Square, where Swedenborg lived (and died), and then south to St Paul’s, where Swedenborg’s printers and publishers operated. Along the way the walk will also encompass Hatton Garden (where the first purpose-built Swedenborgian church in London once stood), Fetter Lane (where Swedenborg attended the Moravian church), and Fleet Street (where Swedenborg visited the new headquarters of the Royal Society, and where he once resided in Salisbury Court).

The walk will point out places of interest connected to Swedenborg’s life and to the groups of his readers in London who would go on to found institutions such as the Swedenborg Society and the New Jerusalem church.

The walk will be led by James Wilson, editor and former librarian of the Swedenborg Society.