10 Downing Street

10 Downing Street, commonly known as Number 10, is the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury, whose office has since the beginning of the twentieth century also been held simultaneously by the British Prime Minister. It is arguably the most famous street address in London.

Overview

The building is legally the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury, and is so labelled on the front door. This office is now inextricably linked with that of the Prime Minister, hence it is commonly known as the official residence of the Prime Minister. The last Prime Minister not to be the First Lord of the Treasury was Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister at the very beginning of the twentieth century (as a result, he did not live at Number 10).

Although the official residence, many Prime Ministers chose not to actually live at Number 10. Some 19th and 20th century Prime Ministers owned larger and more impressive townhouses with servants and in reality lived in them. Some Prime Ministers, notably in the 1950s and again in the 1990s, lived in Admiralty House (London) while Number 10 was undergoing rebuilding work, or in the 1990s following an IRA mortar attack. Harold Wilson lived in his own private home in Lord North Street during his second term as Prime Minister in 1974-76, but maintained the pretence of living at Number 10 for security and privacy reasons, while secretly exiting by a side door to return to his 'private' home. When he came into office, Tony Blair lived in the Chancellor of the Exchequer's apartment in Number 11, because the apartment there is larger and so more suitable for his family, while Chancellor Gordon Brown lived in the Prime Minister's apartment in Number 10. After Brown married and the Blairs had their fourth child Leo, the Blair family occupied both and Gordon Brown moved out to his own private flat nearby.

File:George ii england.JPG

George II of Great Britain presented 10 Downing Street to Sir Robert Walpole as an official residence

Numbers 10 and 11 were originally townhouses in which government ministers lived, with servants, but they ceased to be used as such in the 1940s. Instead they evolved into offices, with the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer living in small apartments at the top of the building created from rooms that had once been used by servants. Additionally, the walls between the houses on Downing Street and the corresponding houses behind them on Horseguards Parade were knocked through and the buildings integrated.

With the use of photography from the mid nineteenth century, pictures began to appear of 10 Downing St. They all showed a rather dark, dank street lined by black buildings. In the 1950s, it became clear that No. 10 was in such a poor state of repair that it was in immediate danger of collapse. (The pillars in the cabinet room that held the upper stories in place were themselves found to be held together by little more than two hundred years of layers of overpainting and varnish, with the internal original wood having rotted away almost to dust!) After considering demolishing the entire street, it was decided that, as occurred in the White House in the 1950s, the façade would be preserved while the interior would be gutted down to the foundations, and a 'copy' of the original building erected using modern steel and concrete, over which furnishings of the original interior could be grafted. When they examined the exterior façade, they discovered that it was not black at all; it actually was yellow, the black look a product of two centuries of severe pollution. After considering restoring the exterior to its original eighteenth century yellow look, it was decided instead to preserve its 'traditional' look of more recent times, so the newly cleaned yellow bricks were painted black to resemble their previous polluted colour.

The Prime Minister's Office

The Prime Minister’s office, for which the terms "Downing Street" and "No. 10" are synonymous, lies within 10 Downing Street and is headed by a Chief of Staff and staffed by a mix of career civil servants and special advisors. It provides the Prime Minister with support and advice on policy, communications with parliament, government departments and public/media relations.

The office was reorganised in 2001 into 3 directories:

Policy and government
Took over the functions of the Private office and policy unit. Prepares advice for the PM and coordinates development and implementation of policy across departments
Communication and strategy, contains 3 units:
- Press office: responsible for relations with the media
- Strategic communications unit
- Research and information unit: provides factual information to No. 10
Government and political relations: Handles party/public relations

Changes were intended to strengthen the PM’s office. However, some commentators have suggested that Blair’s reforms have created something similar to a ‘Prime Ministers' department.’ The reorganisation brought about the fusion of the Prime Minister’s Office and the Cabinet Office- a number of units within the Cabinet Office are directly responsible to the Prime Minister.

The Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister (currently Ivan Rogers) was formerly head of the Prime Minister's Office. It is now headed by the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff (Jonathan Powell). With the exception of the Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, and the Director of Political Operations (John McTernan), who are political appointees, all are civil servants.

History of the building

File:DukeW 1.jpg

Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, Prime Minister (1828-1830), refused to live in Number 10 because it was too small

Number 10 has been the residence of the First Lord ever since it was given to Sir Robert Walpole (often called the first Prime Minister) by King George II on behalf of the nation and the Crown. Walpole accepted on the condition that the house was a gift to the incumbent First Lord of the Treasury rather than to him personally. Ownership therefore passes to each incoming First Lord, which office, with rare exceptions, is also held by the Prime Minister. Britain's Prime Minister would first reside there in 1731.

Ten Downing Street with its unassuming front step and black entrance door was originally three separate houses. The fusion of these buildings was designed by the renown architect William Kent under a commission from Walpole. The three houses were: two on Downing Street (Number Ten and a small house next to it) and Litchfield House, a mansion located behind the other two. Little is known about the small house, except that it was occupied in the early 1730's by a man named Mr Chicken. Walpole asked Mr Chicken to vacate the property and move to another house on Downing Street. More is known about the history of the other two houses that eventually would make up Ten Downing Street.

Litchfield house, the "house at the back," was a mansion originally built for George Monck, 1st Duke of Albemarle, the general who made possible the Restoration of Charles II in 1660. Later, Albemarle was (until his death in 1670) figurehead leader of the Great Treasury Commission of 1667-1672. This Commission transformed the Treasury allowing it to more efectively control the King's government departments. In the process it also laid some of the legal foundations for the authority of whoever occupied the office of First Lord of the Treasury.

After Monck's death, the mansion has several more illustrious residents. Between 1673 and 1676, the Duke of Buckingham, a member of the so-called "Cabal Ministry," lived in it. Then from 1677 to and 1690, it was occupied by Earl of Lichfield, Master of the Horse, and his wife Charlotte, the daughter of King Charles II and his mistress, Barbara Villiers, the Duchess of Cleveland. In the early 1680's, Lady Charlotte protested to her father against the loss of her privacy due to the closeness of the fifteen houses then under construction behind hers, especially Number Ten which abutted Litchfield House. The King agreed that no one should be allowed to look into his favorite daughter's home without her permission, and instructed the surveyor to build a wall between her house and Number Ten Downing Street as " . . . high as you [Charlotte] please . . . "

For the next thirty years after 1690, Lord Overkirk (also Master of the Horse) and his wife Lady Overkirk lived in Litchfield House. In 1720, Count Bothmar, special envoy from Hanover and advisor to King George I, took up residency and remained there until 1732. Bothmar played a largely unsung role in the early evolution of the Prime Ministry under Sir Robert Walpole. The Count spoke English and also had a better understanding of British politics and government than King George. As the King's trusted advisor and as intermediary between the King and Walpole, Bothmar strengthened Walpole's position at court and in the government.

Ten Downing Street itself was built, along with fourteen other houses, in the early 1680's by George Downing.

Downing completed his fifteen houses in 1684. As far as is known, he never lived in any of them himself. They were an investment and Downing immediately started to rent them to recover his expenses. Downing died shortly after the completion of the street of houses named after him. He left instructions about his numerous properties in his will, mentioning particularly:

"My house in or near King Street . . . lately called Hampden House, which I hold by a long Lease from the Crown - the Peacock Court very near adjoining which I hold by lease from the Collegiate Church of St. Peter, Westminster, all of which are now demolished and rebuilt or rebuilding and called Downing Street." He listed, too, " . . .all those four great houses, being parcel of the premises held of the Crown, fronting Saint James Park West and North" - roughly the extent of today's Downing Street.

Downing left his considerable estates to his sons. They then passed to a grandson who was worthy of his thoroughly unprepossessing grandfather. This Sir George, the third Baronet "never cohabited with his wife; & for the latter Part of his Life led a most miserable covetous and sordid life."

The "upper end" of Downing Street, known as Downing Square, closed off access to St. James's Park. Elegant, chic, and conveniently located, the Downing Street houses had a number of distinguished residents between 1684 and 1735 when Walpole moved into the street. King Charles' eldest daughter Anne, also by the Duchess of Cleveland, lived in a large house on the corner thought to be the site of Number Twelve. The Countess of Yarmouth lived at Number Ten for a short time between 1688 and 1689. Lord Lansdowne resided there for four years from 1692 to 1696, as did the Earl of Grantham from 1699 to 1703. Nevertheless, from time to time, some of Downing's houses were vacant. An advertisement in The Daily Courant, dated February 26, 1722, for example, announced the availability of four:

"To be Let together or apart, by Lease, from Lady Day next - Four large Houses, with Coach-houses and stables, at the upper end of Downing Street, Westminster, the back fronts to St. James's Park, with a large Tarras Walk before them next the Park. Enquire of Charles Downing, Esq., Red-Lyon Square."

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 10 Downing Street was generally seen as a small, unimpressive, mediocre building that was far below the quality and standard possessed by leader peers. Hence a number of prominent Prime Ministers, notably the Duke of Wellington, chose to live in their rather more spacious and grand personal London residences, giving Number 10 over to be used by some more junior official. Between 1742 and 1780, only one Prime Minister (Lord North) actually lived in Ten Downing Street. After 1834, no Prime Minister lived there until Benjamin Disraeli moved into it in 1877. Indeed. between 1847 and 1877, it was completely vacant.

It was Disraeli who renewed the association of Ten Downing Street with the Prime Ministry (or more correctly, the First Lord of the Treasury).

When he became Prime Minister in the early 1920s, Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, faced a different problem. In an era when ministers of the Crown received only minimal pay and in effect had to subsidize themselves through their own private wealth, MacDonald, lacking the wealth of former 'grandee' Prime Ministers, found himself moving into an almost unfurnished house, surrounded by household staff he could not afford - some of whom, despite their low wages, earned more than he did.

During his last period in office, in 1881, William Gladstone claimed residence in numbers 10, 11 and 12 for himself and his family. This was less of a problem than it might have been, had he not been both Chancellor of the Exchequer and Prime Minister at the time.

By the 1940s, economic and social changes led to major change in the use of 10 Downing Street. Instead of being a large residence run by servants, it became a working office, with the Prime Minister and his office relegated to a small 'flat' created specially among the old servants' rooms in the roof-space. The cramped nature of that 'flat' and its location above what is now a busy office-complex, has led some Prime Ministers to 'secretly' live elsewhere, though both they (through being photographed entering the front door) and the media conspire, often for security considerations, to keep the fact hidden.

After the 1997 General Election in which Labour took power, a swap was carried out by the present incumbents of the two titles, Tony Blair being a married man with three children still living at home, whilst his counterpart, Gordon Brown, was unmarried at the time of taking up his post. Although Number 10 continued to be the Prime Minister's official residence and contain the prime ministerial offices, Blair and his family actually moved into the more spacious Number 11, while Brown lived in the more meagre apartments of Number 10.

In reality, two and a half centuries of use as government residences has led to so much interlinking between the houses that it can be hard to know where one ends and the other one begins.

Security

A police officer traditionally stands outside the black front door of Number 10 — a door which can be opened only from the inside. Gates were installed at either end of Downing Street during the Premiership of Margaret Thatcher, to protect against possible terrorist attack. However, on February 7, 1991, the Provisional IRA launched a mortar through the roof of a white van parked in Whitehall. The mortar shell exploded in the back garden of 10 Downing Street, blowing in all the windows of the cabinet room, whilst then Prime Minister John Major was leading a session of the Cabinet.

While the building underwent repair, Major was moved to Admiralty House nearby, which is generally used as a sort of 'alternative 10 Downing Street' when for whatever reason (from security and rebuilding work to simply rewiring and repainting) the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury has to move elsewhere.

Heavy security measures are present, if not always visible. The gated entrance holds a "box" where several uniformed heavily armed police stand guard. The Metropolitan Police Force's DRG (Diplomatic protection group) provides protection for ministers in London, acting on the Security Service's intelligence. Other security agencies are thought to aid them in this role also; however, the validity of this claim is unknown. More covert security measures exist, for example along the roofline of the street and in the vicinity of Whitehall itself (plain-clothed armed police etc.). No. 10 also utilises the heavy police presence of Whitehall. A bunker is thought to exist under the street, for use in a nuclear attack, which is linked to other government/transport amenities in the area. However, the validity of this suggestion is uncertain, and no official confirmation or denial has been released, due to security concerns.

People are allowed access to the street, providing prior security checks are run and they adhere to certain protocol up the street.

Media relations

Daily press briefings are currently given by the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman (PMOS) from Number 10. These are published on the Downing Street website and amplified at DowningStreetSays.org (see external links).

References

No. 10 Downing Street, Basil Fuller, Greenberg, 1936.

No. 10 Downing Street: The Story of a House, Christopher Jones, Harpercollins, 1986.

External links

Table: Residents of Ten Downing Street (and the house at the back): 1660-Present

Name of Resident	Office(s) held while in Residence (if any)	Years in Residence
The House at the Back (Litchfield House)
George Monck, Duke of Albemarle	First Commissioner of the Treasury	1660-1670
Duke of Buckingham	Member of the Cabal Ministry	1673-1676
Earl of Litchfield	Master of the Horse	1677-1690
Lord Overkirk	Master of the Horse	1690-1708
Lady Overkirk	None	1708-1720
Count Bothmar	Envoy from Hanover and advisor to George I	1720-1732
Ten Downing Street (before 1735)
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
Ten Downing Street, including the House at the Back (after 1735)
Robert Walpole	First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor Exchequer	1735-1742
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
Between 1847 and 1877, the living quarters of Ten Downing Street were not occupied.
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
Ten Downing St. was vacated in 1960 for extensive repairs, and not occupied again until 1964.
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*
*	*	*