Cirencester Heritage Open Weekend September 11-13th

Behind doors that stay locked the other 362 days a year

Cirencester Civic Society has run this heritage weekend for years, and the list of venues keeps growing: this year it's more than twenty stops, from an 18th-century folly built for the first Earl of Bathurst to the boardroom of a 1980s Mitsubishi headquarters now let out as office space. Most of these places have no regular opening hours at all. You get in because volunteers decide to let you, for three days only.

The spread runs from the grand to the properly obscure. Ivy Lodge, the castellated folly in Cirencester Park, opens with guides on site; the Parish Church runs hour-long tours promising to show where the devil is carved into the stonework and how Anne Boleyn's communion cup ended up in the collection.

The 1804 town lock-up, built to hold drunks and vagrants before being dismantled and rebuilt stone by stone on Trinity Road in 1837, is open across the weekend. Corinium Ales gives tours of its microbrewery inside the old kennels in Cirencester Park, and St James's Place is opening its rooftop garden for views over the Parish Church that almost nobody outside the firm normally gets.

Sunday closes with a walk from Horace the Hare tracing the town's newest heritage trail, and an archive film night at the Barn Theatre showing footage of the Queen's visit and decades of local life on screen.

Nobody plans a weekend around a lock-up and a brewery tour, but that's exactly what this event is built for.

Free entry.

Friday 11 – Sunday 13 September 2026 · Cirencester town centre, Cirencester, Gloucestershire · 10am–4pm