Deptford’s Open Studios and the Case for London’s Grassroots Art Spaces

Eva Parker | Sep 17

Event: APT Open Studios

Venue: Art in Perpetuity Trust (APT Gallery)

Location: Harold Wharf, 6 Creekside, Deptford, London SE8 4SA, UK

Dates: 19–20 September 2026

While London’s commercial galleries build their programmes around Frieze week and its accompanying wave of VIP previews, a different, quieter model of art-world access is on view in Deptford this month: APT Open Studios, staged by Art in Perpetuity Trust, gives the public free entry into the working studios of the artists based at its Deptford site, alongside a concurrent exhibition in the main APT Gallery space.

No Ticket, No Curatorial Framing

The contrast with the capital’s fair-driven autumn calendar is instructive. Where Frieze London charges up to £250 for a preview ticket and Gallery Weekend openings function largely as trade and collector events, Open Studios operates on the opposite principle: no admission charge, no curatorial framing beyond the artists’ own explanations of their practice, and direct access to working space rather than a finished, hung exhibition. Visitors can walk from studio to studio, speaking with artists about work in progress rather than encountering a single curated narrative.

A Precarious Model

Art in Perpetuity Trust, founded to provide affordable studio space for artists in a part of London that has seen substantial redevelopment pressure over the past two decades, represents a model that has become increasingly precarious across the capital as studio buildings face rising rents and redevelopment. That its Open Studios event continues to draw visitors, and that the organisation continues to operate a working studio complex in an area now surrounded by new-build housing, is itself a small piece of evidence about what sustains grassroots art infrastructure against significant economic pressure.

Value Through Direct Encounter

This is not a corrective to London’s commercial gallery and fair ecosystem so much as a genuinely separate mode of access existing alongside it — one in which value is established through direct encounter and community reputation rather than market pricing or institutional curation. For visitors more accustomed to the polished presentation of a Mayfair gallery or a major museum retrospective, an afternoon at APT offers something different: an unfiltered view of process, materials and working conditions that finished exhibitions, by their nature, tend to conceal.

Part of the City’s Art Ecology

As London’s autumn art calendar becomes ever more concentrated around a handful of high-profile, high-cost moments, events like APT Open Studios are worth registering not as a nostalgic alternative but as an ongoing, functioning part of the city’s art ecology — one that asks nothing of its visitors beyond curiosity, and offers, in return, a considerably more direct sense of how art actually gets made.

Website Art in Perpetuity Trust