Fall and Rise of Number 10
At the turn of the nineteenth century, Downing Street had fallen on hard times. Although Number 10 continued to serve as the Prime Minister’s office, it was not favoured as a home. Most Prime Ministers preferred to live in their own townhouses.
But by the 1820s, Downing Street had emerged as the centre of government. Prime Minister Viscount Goderich employed the brilliant, quirky architect Sir John Soane, designer of the Bank of England, to make the house more suitable for its high-profile role. Soane created the wood-panelled State Dining Room and the Small Dining Room for elegant entertaining.
But this wasn’t good enough for his successor, Lord Wellington, who only moved in while his own lavish home, Apsley House, was being refurbished. Later leaders such as Lord Melbourne and Viscount Palmerston used Number 10 only as an office and for Cabinet meetings. In 1828, Number 11 became the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s official residence—but the surrounding area was becoming seedier, with brothels and gin parlours multiplying. Things became so bad that by 1839 there were plans to demolish Number 10 and the other buildings on the north side of Downing Street to make way for a remodelled Whitehall.
Security also became an issue. In 1842, Edward Drummond, secretary to Prime Minister Robert Peel (1841–1846), was murdered in Whitehall on his way back to his home in Downing Street by a half-crazed assassin who mistook him for Peel. The prestige of Downing Street was reduced even further by the building of the magnificent new Foreign Office building at the end of the 1860s. George Gilbert Scott’s creation, with a huge open court and elaborate state rooms, dwarfed Number 10 opposite. It even had its own Cabinet Room in which the Cabinet sometimes met, rather than at Number 10.
By the time Benjamin Disraeli became Prime Minister, the house was in poor shape. The living quarters had not been used for 30 years and Disraeli described it as “dingy and decaying”. It was time for modernisation.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century saw 10 Downing Street transformed from a humble terraced house into a grand residence with modern facilities—a home and office fit for the most powerful politician in the country. Disraeli persuaded the state to pay for renovation to the entrance halls and public rooms, though he paid for the refurbishment of the private rooms himself. His own first-floor bedroom and dressing room were improved, and a bath with hot and cold water in the First Lord’s Dressing Room was installed for the sum of £150.3s.6d.
When William Gladstone moved into the house for the first time in 1880, he insisted on redecorating, spending £1,555.5s.0d.—an enormous sum for the time—on furniture. During his occupancy in 1884, electric lighting was fitted and the first telephones were installed.
The Marquess of Salisbury, who succeeded Gladstone on one occasion, was the last Prime Minister not to live at Number 10. Salisbury never liked the Cabinet Room, describing it as a “cramped close room”. Preferring to work in the larger Cabinet Room in the Foreign Office and live in Arlington Street, he offered Number 10 to his nephew, Arthur Balfour, who would later become Prime Minister himself. Balfour was the first inhabitant of Number 10 to bring a motor car to Downing Street.
Over the years, more and more changes and improvements were made to the house. When Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald first entered the house, he wanted Number 10 to regain some of the grandeur it had during the times of Walpole and Pitt. Missing a proper library (or at least, one containing more than just Hansard reports), MacDonald set about creating one. He started the Prime Minister’s Library, originally housed in the Cabinet Room. The custom of the Prime Minister and other Ministers donating books to the library continues to this day. Central heating was installed in 1937 and work began to convert the labyrinth of rooms in the attic, which had formerly been used by servants, into a flat for the Prime Minister.
