| | by admin | | posted on 22nd January 2026 in Lincolnshires Radical History | | views 38 | |
Heritage Open Days (HODs) is England's largest annual festival of history and culture, held each September. For a short period every autumn
Heritage Open Days (HODs) is England's largest annual festival of history and culture, held each September. For a short period every autumn, buildings that are usually closed, overlooked, or difficult to access open for free public visits, guided tours, talks, walks, and exhibitions. The festival forms England's contribution to the wider European Heritage Days programme and celebrates local history, community memory, and unexpected stories.
Heritage Open Days 2026 will run from 11 to 20 September 2026, offering free access to historic sites, tours, walks, and talks across the country. In Lincolnshire, at least one event is already confirmed: Gunby Estate, Hall and Gardens in Spilsby will open on 19-20 September as part of the festival, with further local programmes announced closer to the autumn.
For Lincolnshire Radical History (LRH), Heritage Open Days is more than a diary entry. It is an annual opportunity to examine how people, places, and movements in the county have confronted power, negotiated authority, and shaped their communities. Open doors invite deeper questions: who built a place, who laboured within it, who was excluded, and whose stories have been smoothed away.
Recent Heritage Open Days programmes in Lincolnshire - particularly in 2025 - show how the festival repeatedly opens spaces charged with social and political meaning. These events allow visitors to step into buildings and landscapes shaped by religious nonconformity, labour, and local conflict.
Included in recent HODs listings, Gainsborough Old Hall offers a striking case. Known primarily as a medieval manor, it is also linked to early 17th-century Separatism through its owner William Hickman. Visitors can move through rooms once used for dangerous gatherings, reframing a grand domestic interior as a site of quiet resistance. Hospitality itself becomes radical when sheltering dissent carries legal risk.
Religious nonconformity appears regularly in Open Days programmes. Wesley's Chapel at Raithby by Spilsby connects visitors to the Methodist movement and its challenge to established parish authority. Such chapels were centres of lay preaching and voluntary organisation that reshaped village life in the 18th and 19th centuries. HODs encourages visitors to read these modest structures not simply as devotional spaces, but as engines of alternative community life.
Industrial heritage has featured just as strongly. The Lincolnshire Wolds Railway allows visitors to explore restored trackbeds and rolling stock. Railways reorganised work, accelerated migration, and produced new working communities. They also generated tensions over discipline, pay, and organisation. HODs turns engineering history into labour history.
Urban archaeology provides another entry point into contested pasts. The 2025 ‘hard hat’ tours of Greyfriars in Lincoln exposed buried traces of monastic life, dissolution, redevelopment, and modern regeneration. These layers reveal how authority shifts across centuries: religious houses suppressed, land repurposed, neighbourhoods reshaped. Visitors encounter not a single story, but successive waves of control and adaptation.
Walking tours extend this approach into whole townscapes. Events in places such as Mablethorpe, Skegness, Louth, and Horncastle have explored how coastal economies, markets, housing, and civic spaces evolved through tourism, industry, and social change. Streets become archives: routes of seasonal labour, migration, protest, redevelopment, and regeneration traced in shopfronts, sea defences, chapels, and public halls.
Taken together, these examples show how Heritage Open Days surfaces Lincolnshire's radical textures without always naming them directly. Buildings opened for curiosity become evidence of dissent. Transport heritage reveals labour politics. Archaeology uncovers suppressed religious worlds. Town walks chart struggles over work, housing, and identity.
For Lincolnshire Radical History, this is the festival's deeper value: an invitation to read familiar places against the grain and recover the conflicts, negotiations, and acts of conscience that shaped them.
Heritage Open Days is sustained by volunteers, local societies, parish groups, civic trusts, and heritage organisations who plan events, steward buildings, and share research. This labour is often unpaid and largely invisible, yet it is central to how history reaches the public.
In Lincolnshire, these networks assemble brochures, organise walking routes, train guides, and curate displays that frequently go beyond official narratives. They surface working-class histories, nonconformist traditions, local campaigns, and stories of survival that might otherwise remain marginal.
For LRH, this volunteer effort is itself a form of civic activism. It represents communities choosing to preserve their own pasts, challenge forgetting, and widen access to historical knowledge.
Heritage Open Days is often presented as a celebration of access and culture, but it also opens space for harder questions:
These questions sit at the heart of Lincolnshire Radical History's mission. The site is concerned not only with what happened, but with how communities responded - and how those responses echo into the present.
In this way, Heritage Open Days becomes more than a festival. It becomes a moment to practise historical attention: to look closely, ask carefully, and refuse easy narratives.
Heritage Open Days 2026 offers another opportunity to explore these questions across Lincolnshire from 11 to 20 September 2026, with confirmed events such as Gunby Estate, Hall and Gardens on 19-20 September and many more to follow as autumn approaches.
Whether you attend a walking tour, enter a rarely opened building, or listen to volunteers interpret their own town, Heritage Open Days can become a way to connect radical pasts with lived local experience - and to spark new conversations about what we preserve, why we preserve it, and who gets to tell its story.