Welcome to the London History Podcast.
I am Hazel Baker, CEO of London guidedwalks.co.uk, and today
we're strolling down one of the most recognisable streets,
Downing St. There's far more to it than the
famous Black Door and the Prime Ministers who have stepped
through it. We'll be uncovering the streets
full length and history is Grant Houses, colourful residents and
the unexpected twists that have shaped this small but storied
corner of Westminster. This is a street where
aristocratic balls and government memos once collided,
where shoddy building work sat cheek by jowl with courtly
ambition, and where you could find a Venetian radical living 2
doors down from a civil servant spinster sister.
We'll explore not only its architecture, thin walls, fake
mortar lines and all, but also the extraordinary range of
people who have called it home. Forget the political headlines
for a moment. Downing St. has always been a
place of layered lives and surprising stories.
The story of Downing St. begins, fittingly, with its namesake, a
man who could survive any political storm and came out
richer on the other side. Sir George Downing was born in
Dublin, 1623, but his childhood was spent across the Atlantic in
the Puritan colony of Massachusetts.
He was among the first handful of graduates from the fledgling
Harvard College, destined, or so it seemed, for a life in the
ministry. But history had other plans.
Upon returning to England, Downing traded the pulpit for
the sword. In the chaos of the Civil War,
he rose to become Oliver Cromwell's chief intelligence
officer, effectively England's spymaster.
It was dangerous, shadowy work, intercepting messages, turning
agents and mapping the political loyalties of an unstable nation.
And then came the twist. With the protractorate finished
and the monarchy restored, George Downing made a
calculation. He switched sides, pledged
himself to Charles the 2nd and, most damningly in the eyes of
his former comrades, betrayed regicides who had once been his
allies. Opportunistic, certainly.
Effective, Without a doubt. His reward was a knighthood,
lucrative government posts and the means to amass significant
land holdings. By 1682, Downing had purchased a
prime stretch on the West fringe of Whitehall Palace, land ripe
for development. It was still, at that time,
little more than a Marshall market garden, but Downing saw
its potential. On this soggy ground, he would
stamp his name in London's geography.
Before the name Downing meant anything in Westminster, the
plot had centuries of history baked into it.
In mediaeval times, the site was home to the Axe Brewery, owned
by the Abbey of Abington, supplying ale to the area around
the Royal palace. By the 1500s, Elizabeth the
First had granted the land to one of her most trusted
courtiers, Sir Thomas Nivet. He was a man whose place in
history is sealed for a single night's work.
On the 5th of November 1605. It was Nibbett who seized Guy
Fawkes beneath the Palace of Westminster and unearthed the
Gunpowder Plot before it could devastate King and Parliament.
Nibbett built himself a substantial house here, later
known as Hampton House. His descendants lived with the
Royal palace almost in their front yard.
Imagine the view from their windows in January 1649 across
to Whitehall Palace, where a scaffold had been erected for
the execution of Charles the First, one of the most traumatic
moments in English history, playing out like theatre in the
open air for anyone who cared to watch.
Long before George Downing began sketching terraces, this patch
of ground had already witnessed monks brewing royal patriotage
and revolution. When Downing finally set his
redeveloping motion, his aim was simple.
Create homes for persons of quality, but without paying for
actual quality. He said to have engaged the
great Sir Christopher Wren, though historians debate how
much Wren really was involved with the plans.
But what is certain is that Downing overruled the Craftsman.
Whenever costs could be spared. The houses went up with shallow
foundations, walls so thin that some were actually hollow, and
facades where neat mortar joints were simply pasted on.
From a distance they looked like all the other new Georgian
residences springing up in London.
But close up, the illusions started to crack.
Samuel Peeps, the famous diarist, had pegged Downing
years earlier as a perfidious rogue, and more than two
centuries later Winston Churchill would sigh that Number
10 was shaky and lightly built by the profiteering contractor
whose name it bears and #10 itself.
It isn't just a single house at all.
It's it's hybrid Downing's modest terrace house at the
front, stitched to a much larger, older mansion at the
rear, creating a maze of rooms and corridors.
Newcomers to the building will get lost in its eccentric
layout, the product of expediency over elegance.
In its early decades, Downing St. was a surprisingly eclectic
address, though as George Villiers, Second Duke of
Buckingham, a courtier, poet, jewellist and schemer,
immortalised by Alexander Pope as the man who will be
everything, Buckingham wasn't just a visitor here.
He set up a residence in the grand mansion that would
eventually become part of #10. Fresh from a life packed with
jewels, courtly intrigue and political scheming, Buckingham
made Downing St. one of the liveliest addresses in
Restoration London. His home served as both a salon
for wit and the headquarters for intrigue.
It was here that Buckingham, a fixture of Charles the Second's
notorious Cabal ministry, entertained the great and the
good poets, actors, ministers amid lavish dinners and late
night debates. Known for his Quicksilver
intelligence and prodigal lifestyle, Buckingham's name at
Downing St. reflected the street's own character.
Ambitious, glamorous and always just a little bit unstable,
accounts from the era describe political meetings held in
candlelit dining rooms and scandals that drifted out into
the neighboring houses. The proximity to Whitehall
Palace, Downing St. the perfect base for advancing royal
policies and sometimes plotting against them.
Buckingham's household was notorious for its extravagance,
and more than once he found himself embroiled in both public
feuds and clandestine court business.
His time in Downing St. was a high point, an era when the
street itself was on the cusp of becoming the symbolic centre of
British power. For Buckingham, it became a
stage for both his ambitions and excesses, a place where
Restoration London's theatres of politics, pleasure and drama
played out on a daily basis. To his peers, Villiers was
dazzling and dangerous in equal measure.
Alexander Pipe immortalised him with the line The Man Who Would
Be Everything, a nod to his relentless pursuit of status,
pleasure and power. He also penned a famous verse on
his death in the worst Inns worst room with mat half hung,
the tables dingy and the carpet torn.
Great Villiers lies. Alas, how changed for him that
pleasure of life and that soul of whim.
Downing St. during the time of George Villiers saw a
speculative development in the hub of intrigue and power,
setting a tone that would linger for generations.
His legacy is built not just on the scandals and the wit for
which he became famous, but on shaping the very spirit of the
street itself, a place where drama was never far behind the
front door. The Countess of Litchfield was
also a resident of Downing St. Born Lady Charlotte Fitzroy, she
brought her touch of royal glamour to Downing St. in its
earliest days. As the acknowledged illegitimate
daughter of Charles the Second, she occupied the very mansion
what would soon be woven into the fabric of #10.
Known for her warmth, wit and social influence, the Countess
transformed her home on Downing St. into one of Restoration
London's most fashionable salons.
Inside those elegant rooms, the candles burned late into the
night, illuminating glittering receptions where aristocrats,
diplomats, playwrights and politicians mingled under her
generous hospitality. Hers was a household at the
heart of the city's social and political life, where stories
and alliances were born along laughter and gossip.
The Countess's receptions weren't just opulent, they were
strategic. Her father's ties and her own
place in court ensured that Downing St. was alive with
whispers of statecraft and royal favour.
Those who attended her gatherings may well have found
themselves discussing the shifting tides of England's
monarchy, all the intrigue brewing a few steps away in
Whitehall Palace. Over time, her stately mansion
became an integral part of the evolving #10 its walls and
floors silently absorbing the legacy of power and sociability.
The blend of personal and law and political gravitas that she
brought to Downing St. helps set a tone for the address.
A place not only where politics happens, but where people forged
connections, shaped culture and enjoyed the pleasures of London
life. Hans Kasper von Bertma's tenure
at Downing Street is one of the street's most intriguing
chapters. Equal parts high diplomacy,
personal drama and architectural complaint.
Bertma, the Hanoverian envoy to Britain, moved into what
eventually was known as now iconic #10 in the early 18th
century. He was more than just a foreign
diplomat. As chief advisor to the House of
her Norfa, Bullsma played a pivotal role in arranging and
securing the accession of George the First to the British throne,
a saga that would change the course of history.
From his Downing St. residence, Bullsma turned his home into a
centre of international intrigue.
From his Downing Street address, Bull turned his home into a
centre of international intrigue and sophisticated hospitality.
He maintained stables for his prized horses, a status symbol
and practical necessity for a man constantly navigating
London's political and social circuit.
Inside, his salons echoed with the voices of European nobles,
English ministers, and ambitious core personalities, all in orbit
around one of the period's most influential political operators.
Yet for all the power and opulence, Birdsmart was never
shy about airing his grievances, and most notably about the
ruinous condition of his Downing Street house.
In letters and official notes, he complained about leaky roofs,
crumbling plaster, and the damp that plagued so many of
Downing's quickly built terraces.
It's no surprise that these homes were infamous for their
shallow foundations and rushed craftsmanship.
Butman's frustration was so great that his successors
continued to grumble about repairs long after he left.
Butman's time at Downing St. was a fascinating mix of power and
inconvenience. He wielded more influence from
this address than most who followed, but the daily
realities of living in a poorly built London terrace were ever
present through grand entertainments and diplomatic
scheming. And in spite of the drafty
halls, Birdsma left his mark not only on the House but on the
trajectory of British royalty itself.
Among Downing St's more surprising residents was Tobias
Smollett, a man whose legacy straddles both medicine and
literature. In the 1740s, Smollett, a young
Scottish doctor with ambitions in London, opened a medical
practice right on Downing St. Though he hoped to build a
reputable character, his days as a physician were, by most
accounts, not wildly successful. Competition was fierce and the
patients often less glamorous than Downing St's address might
suggest. Yet Smollett's time, the down at
heel doctor on one of London's most prestigious streets, did
serve him well in another way. As raw material.
Observing the quirks, pretensions and private dramas
of neighbors and patients, Smollett honed his eye for human
folly, a gift that made his later novels both hilarious and
biting. Works like Roderick Random and
Humphrey Clinker were full of sharply drawn Londoners with
their vanities and schemes, and it's not hard to imagine that
this bustling, socially diverse community on Downing St. offered
a wealth of inspiration. His characters often lampooned
the medical profession, the status seekers and the
bureaucrats, groups he encountered daily in his failed
practice. In this way, the intrigue and
everyday life of Downing St. seeped directly into the pages
of his satire, making Smollett not just a cracker of Georgian
society but also one of its keenest critics.
In the winter of 1762, a young Scotsman by the name of James
Boswell took rooms on Downing St.
He was just 22, newly arrived in London, and is still years away
from securing his place in literary history as the
brilliant, if sometimes bubbling biographer of Doctor Samuel
Johnson. At that moment he was a law
student, an ambitious writer in the making and, by his own
candid admission, a man with a taste for both serious
conversation and lively diversion.
Boswell lodged with Thomas Terry, a chamber keeper at the
Office of Trade and Plantations, paying for a small but
respectable set of rooms right on Downing St.
In his journal he described the street approvingly as genteel, a
word that in George and London meant not just tidy and well
kept, but socially respectable, with the right sort of neighbors
to impress a young man anxious to make his mark.
The location could not have been any more convenient for him.
By day he could stroll to the coffee houses and legal chambers
off the Strand, or to the Houses of Parliament to observe
politics in action. A short walk took him to Saint
James's Park, the clubs of Pall Mall or the playhouses of Drury
Lane, and by night, well, Bosworth was never shy about
admitting that the pleasures of London after dark were as
important to him as his libraries and lecture pools.
From his Downing St. lodgings he could discreetly slip into a
world of Taverns, theatre audiences, private salons and
respectable gatherings without straying too far from home.
His journals from this period, famously frank, sometimes
shockingly so, reveal the double life he led here.
Mornings might find him drafting letters and recording his
impressions of eminent men he hoped to meet.
Evenings could see him in the company of actors, courtesans or
fellow Scots chasing fortune in the capital.
Downing St., with its blend of dignity and centrality, was the
perfect launchpad for this balancing act.
It's easy to picture him out the window on a crisp evening,
listening to the clip of the hooves and the cobbles, watching
ministers and messengers come and go, and feeling himself
close, tantalisingly close to the centre of power and culture
he so admired. For Boswell, three months on
Downing St. was more than a lodging arrangement.
It was a formative chapter in the making of a man who would go
on to capture, like no one else, the people and the pulse of his
age. For all its aristocratic
associations, Downing St. was never exclusively a noble
enclave. The surviving rental and
insurance records tell a more complicated social mix.
There was Count Zenobio, A politically troublesome Venetian
whose residency in the 1790s ended with being encouraged to
leave the country. There was Mary Sparrow, a
widowed landlady who owned and let several properties,
including numbers 22 and 25, to clerks, unmarried women and
junior officials. And behind the political facades
in the grand drawing rooms were smaller, humbler spaces,
servants quarters at the top of the house, single rooms in the
attic, modest parlours for middle class tenants whose names
rarely enter the history books. It was location rather than pure
social status that drew people here.
A senior civil servant might live 2 doors down from a
noblewoman. A clerk may share the same
cobbled St. as a celebrated diplomat.
In that sense, Downing St. was, even before it became a
government fortress, a place where the strata of London life
were pressed closely together. By the early 18th century,
Downing St. was a mixed neighborhood, Dukes rubbing
shoulders with diplomats, writers sharing walls with civil
servants. But in 1735, its destiny took a
decisive turn. This was the year Britain's
political heart found its official home, and it began with
a man who, rather like the street itself, had a knack for
turning circumstance into opportunity.
Sir Robert Walpole is often called Britain's first Prime
Minister, even though the title didn't officially exist yet at
the time. His role was First Lord of the
Treasury, a position with enormous influence.
When King George the Second offered him the use of the house
at #10 Downing St. Walpole accepted, but with one
shrewd condition. He insisted the property not be
a personal gift, but the official residence of whomever
held the office after him. In other words #10 would now
belong to the state, not to anyone, man or woman.
And the number 10 we think we know today wasn't yet the house
we would have seen. Then the transformation came,
thanks to architect William Kent, a man who could turn
modest plans into stately statements of power.
Kent didn't just spruce up Downing's old terrace house.
He joined it to the larger, older mansion at the rear, the
former home of the Countess of Lichfield.
Picture this, a modest brick fronting on the narrow
cul-de-sac that, once you stepped inside, opened up into a
labyrinth of over 60 rooms. Kent linked the two buildings
with a grand 3 Storey staircase, curved and sweeping, the kind
that made you instinctively straighten your jacket as you
ascended. There was a State Dining Room,
glimmering under candlelight, where political alliances could
be forged under venison and carrot.
There were drawing rooms and reception chambers where the
very air seemed thick with intrigue.
And of course, Kent built in spacious offices, turning the
residents into a functioning centre of government, a place to
live and to rule. This new arrangement set the
tone for the next 100 years and, like aristocratic houses in more
fashionable parts of town #10 became a working residence.
Somewhere, political business happened under the same roof as
a private life. Ministers could snip from supper
into strategy sessions without even putting on their coats.
Over time, the government's appetite for space began to
spread along the street. neighboring houses were annexed,
first for additional offices, then for ministerial residences
#11 became home to the Chancellor of the exchequer #12
took on various government uses from the Colonial Office to the
Chief Whips headquarters, 1 by 1.
The other houses that had once been left to diplomats,
merchants and writers were absorbed by the state.
By the mid 19th century, Downing St. as a social neighborhood was
gone. Only Numbers 1011 and 12
survived as residences, and even those were now more official
than personal. The rest have been swallowed up
by the machinery of government, their drawing rooms turned to
offices, their bedrooms into filing rooms, their gardens
paved for clerks and messengers. It was an irrevocable
transformation. What had started as a
speculative terrace built on soggy ground was now the address
synonymous with British leadership.
Downing St. had crossed the threshold from mixed-use London
backstreet to one of the most recognisable corridors of power
in the world. And that's where the streets
stayed. Guarded, official, it's old life
erased except in the faint outlines on the 18th century
maps. But as ever in London, if you
scratch beneath the surface you'll find those earlier
stories still hiding in the shadows.
By the time the Victorians left their mark in London, Downing
St. had already begun its retreat into the form we
recognise today. The long terrace that once
stretched further towards Whitehall was shortened into a
tidy cul-de-sac we see on the maps.
Gone was the Axon Gate pub, a survivor from the brewery days,
which at Whitehall corner for centuries, serving generations
of locals, diplomats and clerks. Gone, too, were the many of the
original houses built under Sir George Downing's speculative
eye, houses that had sheltered Dukes, diplomats, writers and
radicals in their time. The steady appetite of
government for offices had grown with the 19th century, and 1 By
1 the private residences were annexed or pulled down, replaced
by the grand new blocks of the Foreign Office, the Home Office,
and other departments of state. But survival came in part from
adoption. The last three houses #1011 and
12 remained standing, each with a new, overtly political
purpose. Their very survival made them
familiar fixtures, even as the street around them changed
beyond recognition. Then came the 20th century and
another kind of trial war. During the Second World War,
German bombing raids did not spare Whitehall.
Blast damage cracked masonry, shattered windows and tested the
already delicate fabric of Downing's cheaply built
terraces. The buildings limped on through
the war, patched in the blackout years until post war Britain
could turn its attention to repairing the heart of
government. In the 1950s, under Harold
Macmillan, the decision was taken to rebuild extensively
behind the preserved Georgian facades.
Inside walls were stripped back, Timbers replaced and services
modernised. But from the outside the classic
black brick and white trimmed elevations remained.
It was an operation that kept appearances and dated realities,
a fitting metaphor for Downing St's entire history.
Today, those 3 survivors have distinct roles #10 serves, as it
has since Walpole's day, as an official residence and office of
the Prime Minister #11 has become home to the Chancellor of
the Exchequer and #12 houses the Chief Whip and assorted
political staff behind their matching fronts.
Each address is its own Warren of offices, meeting rooms,
private spaces and humming with the daily business of
government. And, as we come to the Downing
St. of the present day, a street securely gated and guarded, A
metonym for power and a constant backdrop of nightly news.
Yet to see it only as a stage for prime ministerial briefings
is to miss its richer, quieter story.
Its walls hold the imprints of three generations of lives.
The Restoration courtiers who plotted and entertained behind
drawn curtains. The Hanoverian diplomats who
dined and schemed. The novelists like Smollett who
stitched together satire from their neighbors foibles.
The widows who supplemented their income with lodgers.
The middle ranking clerks and secretaries who hurried home
from Whitehall offices to modest garrets a few doors away.
Even the political exiles like the outspoken Count Zenobio left
their marks in the upstairs rooms where they baited and
dreamed. When you see that famous black
door, imagine the layers upon layers of history stacked behind
it. Picture the medieval monks
brewing ale on this plot. George Downing, the spy turned
developer cutting corners as he built his terrace.
James Boswell jotting in his nervel whilst watching the
street life below. The Countess of Litchfield
hosting her glittering salons and the dull thump of a wartime
bomb echoing through the corridors.
Downing St. has always been more than politics.
It has been a microcosm of London itself, merging commerce,
ambition, art, intrigue and the day-to-day of business of
living. If you know where to look, you
can still read that story in its bricks and its patchwork of
alterations, and in the stubborn survival of its last three
houses. The past isn't erased here.
It's just merely overpainted, ready to show through whenever
the light catches it just right. If you enjoyed this episode then
you might also enjoy Episode 78, Georgian Landlords and Episode
79, Georgian Landladers, where my guest Doctor Gillian
Williamson and I discuss how living conditions encourage the
rise of coffee houses and how lodging houses had their own
micro hierarchy. Find out what James Boswell did
to get kicked out of his lodgings in Downing St. and how
a fire in Soho provided a real life account of the assorted
neighbors. As usual, full transcript with
images can be found on our website
londonguidedwalks.co.uk/podcast. That's all we have for now.
Thanks for joining us. Until next time.