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 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 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 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 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 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 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.
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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