A short history of Downing Street, 1750-2023

‘My vast, awkward house’,
William Pitt the Younger.

Downing Street SW1 sign on building in London

Number 10

Over the centuries, 10 Downing Street slowly went from being an occasional home for the Prime Minister to being one of the most famous and powerful addresses in the world. But the building was not without its problems; and the need for drastic (and expensive) restoration would be a long-running theme of the building’s history.

The 18th & 19th Centuries

After Walpole moved out, no Prime Minister lived in Downing Street for 20 years. The house’s poor condition was likely a factor. Most of the First Lords, or other high-ranking politicians, tended to have their own lavish London residences, and had no personal need to stay at Downing Street.

During the 1760s, renovations were carried out, adding, for the first time, the familiar black door and semi-circular fan light that have become the most famous emblems of British power in the world. During the 1770s, the black and white checkered flooring was laid in the entrance hall and the lion’s head doorknocker was added.

More work had to take place during the 1780s, overseen by the architect Robert Taylor. It was found that the Downing Street foundations had been built of wood and had largely rotted away, requiring further construction. The Cabinet Room (referred to as ‘My Lord’s Study’ in contemporary documents) was expanded and the pillars visible today were added to strengthen the ceiling. By the end of the century, maps showed the modern numbering of Number 10 Downing Street.

The Times, 14 July 1789:
‘Yesterday afternoon there was held a cabinet council at MR PITT’s house in Downing Street, which was attended by all the Cabinet Ministers. As soon as the council broke up, the Duke of Leeds forwarded the result to his Majesty at Weymouth’.

But ‘Number 10’ did not impress contemporary newspapers.  In 1783, one complained ‘Five hundred pounds per annum preceding the great repair, and eleven thousand pounds the great repair itself! So much has this extraordinary edifice cost the country! – For one moiety of which sum a much better dwelling might have been purchased’. The same sentiment was to reverberate down the ages.

Further reading

Gordon Riots, 1780

Downing Street was an open street, and therefore was exposed to public disorder. The most dramatic and violent outbreak of such disorder during the 18th Century was the Gordon Riots of June 1780. It was caused by Lord George Gordon’s angry opposition to the Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1778, and frustration at the continuing war in America.

Stability returned in the 1820s, when, helped by the repayment of a war loan by Austria, the Exchequer was flush with cash. Chancellor Frederick Robinson, later Viscount Goderich (1827-28) thus felt able to invite the distinguished architect, Sir John Soane, to visit Downing Street and redesign some of the rooms. He constructed the large wood panelled dining room and the more intimate small dining room. Number 10 at last had a grand dining space to entertain 50 or more guests at lunch or dinner.

The State Dining Room. 1964
Renovation of No. 10 Downing Street – London. The State Dining Room. 1964. Image credit: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Outside of Number 10, Downing Street itself went through some dramatic changes. The early 19th Century saw Downing Street consolidated as the heart of British government. In 1801, the Colonial Office moved to 14 Downing Street. The Foreign Office was ensconced in Number 14 and in 1825 took over Number 15 as well. The West India Department could be found in Number 18 and the Tithe Commissioners in Number 20. In Number 13 there was the Judge Advocate General. The Treasury had long been in the Kent Building, and the Home Office, which was established in 1782, was located in Henry VIII’s old Tennis Court. Therefore, for several decades during the early 19th Century, many of the administrative structures of the British government were located just a short walk from the front door of Number 10.

The Downing Street buildings were not periodically renovated like Number 10 and soon began to show their age. Few of them would survive the 19th Century. Number 1 (which housed the Axe and Gate Pub) to Number 9 were demolished during the 1820s when a new building was constructed for the Treasury and Privy Council. During the 1850s, the buildings on the other side of the street were also demolished, to make way for the George Gilbert Scott designed Foreign Office. After a major fire in 1879, Numbers 12 and 13 at the end of the street were demolished, replaced with the ‘stump’ – all that remained of their ground floor.

As a result of these demolitions, the character of Downing Street was transformed. At the beginning of the 19th Century, Downing Street looked like many other residential streets in London. By the end of the Century, only Numbers 10 and 11 remained as a tiny remnant of the 17th Century Cul de Sac, now looking isolated and forlorn amongst the grand government offices of the Victorian age.

Number 10 limped on through the 19th Century, loved by some of its incumbents, and despised or ignored by others.

In his brief first period as Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli (1868, 1874-80) asked the Foreign Secretary Lord Stanley if he could borrow the Foreign Office for a major event instead of Downing Street because his wife Mary Anne ‘can do nothing with Downing Street, it is so dingy and decaying’. In summer months, the building was smelly, hot, and suffered from blocked drains. By 1880, a large pool of stagnant water could be found semi permanently in the garden.

Many Prime Ministers simply chose not to live there. Several of Britain’s aristocratic premiers used the building as an office, and the Cabinet Room for meetings, but returned to their townhouse at the end of the day. Lord Salisbury (1885-86, 1886-92, 1895-1902) took it a step further, largely dispensing with Downing Street entirely, using a suite of fine rooms in the Foreign Office for Cabinet meetings and as his personal office, and living in his Arlington Street house. Though, on a technicality, Salisbury, who was Prime Minister without being First Lord of the Treasury, did not have an automatic right to live in Downing Street.

View of the old Foreign Office and other buildings on Downing Street, Westminster. 1827 Watercolour
View of the old Foreign Office and other buildings on Downing Street, Westminster. 1827. Watercolour by John Chessell Buckler. © The Trustees of the British Museum. Creative Commons License: CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

Further reading

Demolition?

During the mid-19th Century, plans were made for the demolition of Downing Street. Civil Servant, Sir Charles Trevalyan was particularly keen on congregating government offices, demolishing Downing Street entirely. Plans were drawn up for decades, some retaining Downing Street in some form, others proposing its demolition. James Pennethorne’s 1855 plan suggested the replacement of Downing Street with a ‘Downing Square’ that would have become the home of the Prime Minister.

Domestic life became a little easier after a more efficient hot water system and electric lighting were installed in 1894. Telephones were introduced shortly afterwards.

The 20th century

The Strand Magazine, April 1905:
‘The old official residence – now occupied by Mr Balfour – is certainly a grim, ugly sprawling pile, viewed from without; but within it is like most old London houses, very handsome and comfortable.’

Every Prime Minister since Lord Salisbury has lived at Number 10, though not all of them liked it very much. After becoming Prime Minister in 1905, Henry Campbell-Bannerman referred to Number 10 as a ‘rotten old barrack of a house’.

Further reading

You can't walk there sir!

During the 19th Century, the public still had access to Downing Street, which continued until the 1980s. During times of political crisis, or after momentous events, like elections, it was common for crowds to gather outside Number 10 to see the comings and goings, and to get the latest news.

10 Downing Street early 1900s
10 Downing Street early 1900s. Source: Look and Learn / Peter Jackson Collection. See page for author. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

During the First World War, Number 10 was at the centre of the Allied war effort with constant meetings, committees, and official visits (in a way that it was not during the Second World War). Lloyd George’s daughter Olwen later wrote that ‘I loved living at Number 10. Famous people came and went and Number 10 seemed to be the hub of the universe’. So great was pressure for space inside the building that huts were constructed in the garden in 1917 to house Lloyd George’s secretariat. Nicknamed ‘the garden city’, it provided offices for six statisticians and advisers for the Prime Minister. Though, the huts were deliberately constructed so they did not, according to official documents, ‘interfere with the Cabinet’s view across Horse Guards Parade’.

While the war was being fought, no attention was given to the state of the building. By 1922 cracks had opened up on the front wall of Downing Street. They began to spread and were soon even visible inside the house. Internal Whitehall reports show that ‘the whole of the floors are uneven’.

The deteriorating situation in Europe accelerated the pace of innovation. On the 9 August 1938, a Treasury note reported that ‘In connection with Emergency arrangements, it was decided that there should be installed at No. 10 Downing Street…permanent facilities for broadcasting ….’. Two days later, on the 11 August another note observed that the facilities ‘at No. 10 Downing Street…are really for the purpose of enabling reassuring messages etc to be sent out by the Head of the Government in a time of emergency’.  It was this equipment that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain used on 3 September 1939 at 11:15am to broadcast to the British people that the nation was at war with Germany.

The Second World War saw Number 10 come under an unprecedented battering. Like much of London, Downing Street suffered heavy damage during the war. During the Blitz, several bombs fell in the immediate vicinity, including in September and October 1940 which shattered Downing Street’s windows.

Further reading

14 October 1940

On 14 October 1940, a bomb fell near Downing Street. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was there at the time:

During the war, Number 10 was used less than it had been during the First World War. Many government functions were transferred to the underground Cabinet War Rooms. For much of the war, Churchill himself lived and worked in the ‘Downing Street Annex’ in the nearby Treasury building. Nevertheless, he still used Downing Street when he could, using the Cabinet Room as an office.

The great reconstruction, 1961-63

By the 1950s, Number 10 was beginning to crumble. A government survey in 1954 revealed serious problems throughout the entire structure: the building was rotting, it was becoming rickety, smelly, and increasingly dangerous. But Churchill baulked at the expense, and the decision would fall to a successor.

Shortly after Harold Macmillan (1957-63) became Prime Minister in January 1957, a new report was commissioned into the structure. Published in 1958, it found the layout ‘confused, inconvenient and wasteful, and the quality of the rooms poor; those used as sleeping quarters for night staff are particularly bad’. More alarmingly, it found that ‘Some of the floors are weak, notably in the Cabinet Room where the floor is largely supported by strutting in the room below…originally put in to make an air-raid shelter.’

The report warned of a potential ‘collapse’ of the Cabinet Room floor and called the staircases ‘old, dried and decayed’. The report also identified a risk of fire from the dried out woodwork. The timber foundations ‘have long since rotted’. Great cracks had appeared on the sides of the building. The report stated that the problems were historic, dating right back to Downing himself in the 1680s; the houses ‘were built originally as a speculation, these houses were not as solidly constructed as, say, the average family mansion intended to last for generations’.

The report considered a number of options, including demolition, which it rejected because of the history of the buildings. It described the Cabinet Room, the Soane Dining Rooms, and the State Drawing Rooms, as well as the staircases of Number 10 and 11, as ‘irreplaceable’. Instead, it recommended that the historic facades and features were kept, but that the interior was substantially rebuilt. The report further recommended the rebuilding of Number 12. It estimated the cost to be about £400,000.

The great reconstruction began in 1960. Macmillan moved to Admiralty House on Horse Guards Parade until the work was complete.

Raymond Erith was the architect selected for the project.  He described his task as ‘trying to preserve the best of Downing Street, not as it was 100 or 200 years ago but as it was when I took over’. He believed that Number 10 was notably well suited to fulfilling the function of the modern Prime Minister, and fought against altering the internal structure ‘my aim is…to improve the building by working within its established framework.’

Number 10 and 11 were effectively gutted and rebuilt. The foundations were freshly underpinned, floors, walls, and roofs were renewed, and an internal basement courtyard created, complete with two half sunken columns.

The restoration dramatically altered the appearance of Downing Street. The ‘stump’ that had existed since the 1880s was demolished, and Number 12 was reconstructed, recreating the sense of the square at the west end of Downing Street. Number 10 was extended by the width of two windows to the east over all four stories, and a bow windowed office was created on the east end. It was even found that the original brickwork was a yellow colour, not black, which was instead three centuries of accumulated grime and pollution. It was decided to paint Downing Street in the familiar black.

The roof of the ‘house at the back’ was redesigned. The pediment and small upper windows were removed, and replaced by new windows and a better upper floor. The height of the roof was raised, all creating vital extra living space for the Prime Ministers and their families. Overall, a floor space of 157,000 square feet had been restored, renovated, and renewed.

Internal Whitehall recriminations flared as costs continued to rise. The Treasury admitted that ‘one of [our] failures was that we did not draw the attention of ministers sufficiently firmly to what was likely to happen to a provisional estimate for work on an old building once that building was opened up’.  Numbers 10 and 11 proved to be in an even worse condition than anticipated. Archaeological remains were also found, including large sections of Whitehall Palace, and a decision was far-sightedly taken to incorporate remnants into the renovation of the old Treasury buildings.

By the time the work was completed at the end of September 1963, a year later than planned, the total cost was £2.65 million. This provoked an inevitable public controversy, a letter in the National Archives from March 1963 is not atypical: ‘The property could be bulldozed to the ground and rebuilt with the same front door and knockers for one tenth the cost, and when all is said and done it is only the front door and knocker that the public see.’

Harold and Lady Dorothy Macmillan moved back into Downing Street on the 2 October 1963. Macmillan’s press secretary Harold Evans wrote in his diary of ‘returning in 1963 to a rejuvenated No 10 – looking much the same, but safer, brighter and a little more spacious’.

After the restoration

During the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher (1979-90) appointed the architect Quinlan Terry to renovate the interiors of Number 10. The White Drawing Room and the Terracotta Drawing Room were refreshed and received new ceilings.

Technology drove further changes to Downing Street. A Xerox machine arrived at Downing Street just after the builders left in 1963. Electric typewriters and word processors were introduced in the 1970s, and the 1980s saw the first computer. By 1996, desktop PCs were installed at all workstations. 1996 saw the launch of the Number 10 website, and, after the arrival of the IT-literate Blair team, internet access was installed across all Number 10 desktops.

Further reading

Mortar Attack

At 10am, on 7 February 1991, the IRA attacked Number 10 using a mortar mounted on a white transit van parked outside the Banqueting House in Whitehall. They had hoped to mount the attack while Thatcher was in power, but she had left in November. Having parked the van, the terrorists fled on a motor bike. Only one of the three bombs exploded, in the Downing Street garden, about 12 metres from where the Cabinet was meeting.

In 2002, the first video conference facilities were installed. On 26 March 2008, Number 10 entered the social media age when it made its first Tweet. A press office briefing room was added to 9 Downing Street in 2020.

Further remedial work was undertaken to Downing Street during the Blair years. Number 11’s facade was found to be precariously unstable, and it was underpinned, quite literally, by 225 steel pins. The facade was also repainted to ensure that the yellow bricks beneath were invisible.

During the last few decades, there has also been a change to where the Prime Minister actually lives. In 1997, after his election victory, Tony Blair, who was married with children, chose to live in the more spacious flat above Number 11. Chancellor Gordon Brown, then a bachelor, lived in the smaller Number 10 flat. This set something of a precedent.

When Brown became Prime Minister in 2007, he moved into the Number 11 flat, while Chancellor Alistair Darling lived at Number 10. David Cameron (2010-16) also lived at Number 11 and Chancellor George Osborne at Number 10. Likewise, Theresa May (2016-19) and Boris Johnson (2019-22) lived in the Number 11 flat. Breaking with his predecessors, Rishi Sunak (2022-) has chosen to live in the flat above Number 10.

During the late 1990s, one senior aide argued that perhaps Downing Street had had its day. He suggested that the QEII Centre might make a better location for the Prime Minister’s offices and that Downing Street could become a museum. But, such an argument was no longer convincing. By then, Number 10 was too iconic as a symbol of the premiership. Who, after all, can resist a photograph in front of that famous door?

Prime Ministers, politicians and governments rise and fall, but Downing Street is, apparently, eternal.

Prime Minister Liz Truss making a speech outside 10 Downing Street
Outgoing Prime Minister Liz Truss making a speech outside 10 Downing Street, London before travelling to Buckingham Palace for an audience with King Charles III to formally resign as PM. Picture date: Tuesday October 25, 2022. Credit: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo. Photographer: Stefan Rousseau

References

Archival

National Archives Files:

  • PRO WORK 30/982
  • PRO WORK 30/984
  • PRO WORK 30/985
  • PRO WORK 30/977
  • PRO WORK 12/304
  • PRO WORK 30/977
  • PRO WORK 12/304
  • PRO WORK 12/587
  • PRO T199/7
  • PRO Work 12/579
  • PRO Work 12/579
  • PRO CAB 128/32
  • PRO WORK 12/587
  • PRO WORK 12/774
  • Work 59/13

 

Websites

Aedes Walpolianæce Or a Description of the Collection of Pictures at Houghton-Hall in Norfolk, (London, 1752), accessible at < https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/%C3%86des_Walpolian%C3%A6/-P0lYluwJU4C?hl>, accessed 6 October 2023.

‘10 Downing Street: Crown Lands and Estates’, Questions for the Cabinet Office, House of Lords, UIN HL4966, tabled on 14 December 2021, <https://questions-statements.parliament.uk/written-questions/detail/2021-12-14/HL4966/>, accessed 6 October 2023.

“No. 10, Downing Street,” in Survey of London: Volume 14, St Margaret, Westminster, Part III: Whitehall II, ed. Montagu H Cox and G Topham Forrest (London: London County Council, 1931), 113-141. British History Online, accessed October 6, 2023, <http://www.british-history.ac.uk/survey-london/vol14/pt3/pp113-141>, accessed October 6, 2023.

‘History, 10 Downing Street’, Gov.uk, <https://www.gov.uk/government/history/10-downing-street>, accessed 12 October 2023.

HC Deb (13 November 1972). Vol. 846, col. 33,

<https://hansard.parliament.uk/Commons/1972-11-13/debates/6c9538d5-acc2-40ad-957d-b2cdaae9d865/TreasuryPassage>, accessed 12 October 2023.

‘The Cabinet Secretaries – Lord Butler’, Mile End Group, c.2014 < http://www.cabinetsecretaries.com/>, accessed 13 October 2023.

Books

Richard Aldous, The Lion and the Unicorn: Gladstone vs Disraeli, (London, 2006)

Lucy Archer, Raymond Erith: Architect (London, 1985).

Andrew Blick and George Jones, At Power’s Elbow: Aides to the Prime Minister from Robert Walpole to David Cameron (London, 2013).

Colin Brown, Whitehall: The Street that Shaped a Nation (London, 2009).

Jack Brown, No.10: The Geography of Power at Downing Street (London, 2019).

Winston Churchill, The Second World War (London, 2013)

Earl of Crawford et al, Report of the Committee on the Preservation of Downing Street, (London, 1958)

Harold Evans, Downing Street Diary, The Macmillan Years 1957-1963, (London, 1981

Susan Foreman, From Palace to Power: Illustrated History of Whitehall: An Illustrated History of Whitehall (Liverpool, 1995).

Christopher Hibbert, King Mob: The Story of Lord George Gordon and the Riots of 1780 (London, 1959).

Roy Jenkins, Churchill (London, 2001)

Christopher Jones, Number Ten Downing Street: The Story of a House (London, 1985).

Anthony Seldon, 10 Downing Street: The Illustrated History, (London, 1999).

Robert Shepherd, Westminster: A Biography (London, 2012).

Henry B. Wheatley, London Past and Present: Its History, Associations and Traditions (London, 1891).

Jonathan Powell, The New Machiavelli: How to Wield Power in the Modern World (London, 2011).

John Major, The Autobiography (London, 1999).

Winston Churchill, The Second World War: Their Finest Hour (London, 1949).

Lucy Archer, Raymond Erith: Architect, (London, 1985).

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