No. 10: The Geography of Power at Downing Street

By Jack Brown

Fronted by one of the world’s most iconic doors, 10 Downing Street is the home and office of the British Prime Minister and the heart of British politics. Steeped in both political and architectural history, this famed address was originally designed in the late seventeenth century as little more than a place of residence, with no foresight of the political significance the location would come to hold. As its role evolved, 10 Downing Street, now known simply as ‘Number 10,’ has required constant adaptation in order to accommodate the changing requirements of the premiership. 
Written by Number 10’s first ever ‘Researcher in Residence,’ with unprecedented access to people and papers, No. 10: The Geography of Power at Downing Street sheds new light on unexplored aspects of Prime Ministers’ lives. Jack Brown tells the story of the intimately entwined relationships between the house and its post-war residents, telling how each occupant’s use and modification of the building reveals their own values and approaches to the office of Prime Minister. The book reveals how and why Prime Ministers have stamped their personalities and philosophies upon Number 10 and how the building has directly affected the ability of some Prime Ministers to perform the role. Both fascinating and extremely revealing, No. 10 offers an intimate account of British political power and the building at its core. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the nature and history of British politics.  

• Language: English
• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Release date: May 15, 2021
• ISBN: 9781912208777

Jack Brown

Jack Brown's second book will focus on the enigmatic organization many UFO experiencers call The Federation of Light. A collective group of alien species that has come to Earth to help with our collective accession of consciousness. Pulling from eastern and western philosophies such as Confucianism, Taoism, Stoicism, and Existentialism, the author has created an organization that would help describe what that advance civilization would be like.

Book preview

JACK BROWN is Lecturer in London Studies at King’s College London, and Research Manager at Centre for London. From 2016–17, he was the first-ever Researcher in Residence at No. 10 Downing Street.

This first paperback edition published in 2020

First published in 2019 by

HAUS PUBLISHING LTD

4 Cinnamon Row

London SW11 3TW

www.hauspublishing.com

Copyright © 2019, 2020 Jack Brown

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British

Library

ISBN: 978-1-913368-03-6

eISBN: 978-1-912208-77-7

Typeset in Garamond by MacGuru Ltd

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd

All rights reserved.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Introduction

1The Building

2What Goes On Inside No. 10 Downing Street

3The Geography of Power at No. 10 Downing Street

4The Geography of Whitehall – and

Geography Subverted

5Reconstructing No. 10 Downing Street

6Living Above the Shop

7Hosting the World

8No. 10 Under Attack

9New Labour at No. 10

10 Concluding Thoughts

Image Credits

Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of the Researcher in Residence initiative at No. 10 Downing Street, itself the product of a unique collaboration between No. 10; the Strand Group, the Policy Institute, and the Widening Participation Department at Kings College London; university access charity The Brilliant Club; and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Without the involvement of these organisations, and the stewardship of Jon Davis of the Strand Group, there would be no Researcher in Residence role and there would be no book.

The book owes a great deal to the mentoring and encouragement of Jon and the whole Strand Group team. It was Peter Hennessy (Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield) who first generously observed that this project sounded like ‘more of a book than an article’. That escalated quickly.

Assistance from within No. 10, the Cabinet Office, the National Archives, Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) archives has been widespread and immensely helpful, but particular mentions are warranted for Helen Alderton, Simon Case, Mark Dunton, David Heaton, Jeremy Heywood (Lord Heywood of Whitehall), Peter Hill, Helen Lederer, Hannah Meyer, Andrew Riley, Roger Smethurst and Ed Whiting. I am also immensely grateful to those interviewees who spared me their time and shared their experiences and insights, not to mention making the whole process of researching this book a thousand times more enjoyable.

Chapter 5 of this book reproduces a series of posts written for the History of Government blog (https://history.blog.gov.uk/category/researcher-in-residence). They are reproduced with the kind permission of the publisher.

This book also benefits hugely from material provided by Research Assistant Can Gökçen, whose work was invaluable. Any errors in interpreting this research, however, are entirely the fault of the author and not the researcher.

I am of course most grateful to my extended and loving family, and particularly to Jo. Thank you for your love, and your patience.

The trouble with history is that there’s no future in it.

– Ken Clark to the author, circa 2014. He’s still right.

Preface

On Tuesday 31 March 2020, history was made. The UK’s first digital Cabinet meeting took place on this day via the online meeting platform Zoom.¹ Prime Minister Boris Johnson, Health Secretary Matt Hancock, and Scotland Secretary Alister Jack were all self-isolating after testing positive for COVID-19. The Cabinet therefore met via videocall from their own offices and homes, with backgrounds ranging from bookcases and paintings to a Union flag and their names displayed in various levels of formality below their images on screen. A small number of officials, including Cabinet Secretary Mark Sedwill, attended the meeting from the famous Cabinet table – spaced out at an appropriate social distance, of course.

The Prime Minister would go on to take several meetings via Zoom from rooms upstairs in Downing Street. He also worked in the Study at No. 10 and from the Chancellor’s Room in No. 11 due to its proximity to the entrance of the Prime Ministerial flat.² From 1945–97, the Prime Minister lived in the self-contained flat above No. 10 Downing Street. As described in this edition’s new chapter, however, Tony Blair’s premiership saw the Downing Street flats swap over, with the Prime Minister living in what was previously the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s flat, which extends above No. 12 Downing Street from an entrance within No. 11. This arrangement has continued ever since.

Cabinets have occasionally met in locations other than the Cabinet Room at No. 10, but this was the first time they had met virtually. And whilst the well-publicised first digital Cabinet meeting has since been used by some as an example of ‘what not to do’ in terms of Zoom etiquette and security,³ it is no overstatement to say that using video calls for Cabinet meetings could prove revolutionary for No. 10.

Throughout the UK’s pandemic-induced lockdown of early-to-mid 2020, I was asked to speak on the ‘geography of power’ at Downing Street – the topic of this book – at a series of virtual history events. One question was asked repeatedly, and always stumped me: was this the end of No. 10? The impact of technological change and the ongoing pandemic were at the top of attendees’ minds. In an age when ministers can talk to one another from halfway around the world with relatively little difficulty, what future is there for a comparatively small building that has previously contained such a concentration of power within its physical walls? Will there still be a scramble for the best offices, closest to the Prime Minister? Will buildings even matter at all?

This updated edition

I began researching and writing this book in early 2016, having had the great honour of becoming the first ever Researcher in Residence at No. 10 Downing Street. Just four years later, two more Prime Ministers and numerous political and official occupants of No. 10 have come and gone. Life at No. 10 can be fleeting. Throughout these four years, the Strand Group at King’s College London has continued to work with No. 10 on capturing its contemporary history, attempting to preserve Downing Street’s ‘institutional memory’ amongst the churn. A new Researcher in Residence, Michelle Clement, is now working on a newer (and, of course, better) research project. For my part, I have still not lost the sense of wonder that strikes me every time I have the privilege of entering through that famous front door. I remain more than happy just to sit idly in the waiting room, having left my mobile phone at the door, gazing off into the middle distance, contemplating the thousands who have sat in the same seat before me. What were they feeling as they waited? Would the meeting they were waiting for change their life, or the lives of others?

It has been an absolute delight to be able to update this book for its publication in paperback with a new preface and a substantial new chapter on No. 10 during the New Labour years (1997–2010). Both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown took notably different approaches to the ‘geography of power’ at No. 10, rearranging things significantly after decades of precedent. New interview material and other sources have provided great insight into how No. 10 operated under both Prime Ministers, the experiences of each making for an important contemporary scene-setter that helps us understand today’s comings and goings.

The writing of the new sections of this edition has been both helped and hindered by this new era of remote working. Like many of my fellow academics and authors, I entered lockdown thinking it might be a handy opportunity to write. I am sure I am not alone in discovering that these anxious, unfamiliar times are not necessarily conducive to calm, creative work. But we got there in the end. Particular thanks are due once again to Jon Davis, for enabling my research at the height of lockdown and in the midst of a global pandemic by sending scans from books that would usually have been loaned in person. Huge thanks are also due, once again, to interviewees for their time, cooperation and insights – and to all at Haus for their faith in me, their assistance and most of all patience. Ultimately, emails, telephone interviews and Zoom calls have saved this edition. But all would have been rendered useless without the help of cooperative, enthusiastic people.

The future of No. 10

The sudden advent of remote working hit both author and subject at roughly the same time, then. For both of them, it is (at the time of writing) too soon to say whether the temporary changes brought about by COVID-19 will lead to permanent ones. No. 10 Downing Street is in large part still essentially the same building it was when first constructed over 330 years ago. It has survived technological changes from the telephone to colour television, to the internet and WhatsApp. But this upheaval could well be different.

The building’s cramped rooms and tight corridors do not lend themselves easily to social distancing. In early August 2020, Gabrielle Louise Bertin, formerly David Cameron’s Director of External Relations, told the Times Red Box podcast, ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that the reason why coronavirus spread to so many important people in government is because you cannot socially distance in No. 10. It’s just too close an environment.’⁴ As senior figures within the building fell ill one by one, No. 10 was reportedly nicknamed ‘the Plague Pit’.⁵ No. 10’s internal layout could not be further from the trend in modern office design – as seen not only in the private sector but also in several government departments. Nowhere in Downing Street is there much natural light, nor is there space for flexible, open-plan workspaces. The houses at Downing Street were constructed less than twenty years after the Great Plague had torn through London and killed up to a quarter of the city’s population. Had we really learned nothing since then?

The future of London itself is also currently in doubt. Aspects of city living previously seen as beneficial and desirable – high-density housing, for example, or the ‘agglomeration’ benefits derived from clusters of similar businesses being located in close physical proximity to one another – are now being questioned. This is particularly true of central London, which has recovered from lockdown at a much slower rate than most of the capital. Nearly two months after pubs and restaurants were allowed to reopen, much of Downing Street’s home borough, the City of Westminster, remained a ghost town.

Many businesses – and even government departments – will have been surprised by how easily and successfully they have adapted to home working. However, it is far too early to say whether productivity, creativity and mental health will suffer. As I write, the Financial Times has cited a ‘government insider’ as claiming that home working on the part of officials has played some part in the ‘sharpness that has been lost’ within Whitehall.⁶ From the City of London coffee houses of the late seventeenth century to the cluster of tech start-ups that emerged around Old Street and Shoreditch in the twenty-first, proximity to others has been crucial in London’s story to date. Informal face-to-face interactions, gossip and rumour have played an important role in how business gets done in the capital. This has been no less true of working life within No. 10 Downing Street. Human beings will continue to want to be close to one another.

And yet, it is clear that the change in practice brought about by the pandemic has offered an opportunity to think again about previously accepted norms. No. 10 Downing Street exists on precedent. It was not designed for purpose. Just as people up and down the country have suddenly realised that they can just about manage to work from home, some within Downing Street are beginning to realise that the building might not be a very good place from which to run a modern government.

Some had come to this conclusion long before the pandemic. In January 2020, Dominic Cummings, Chief Adviser to the Prime Minister, advised Boris Johnson that he should move his office from a small room in No. 10 to a ‘Nasastyle mission control’ in the Chief Whip’s Office in No. 12 Downing Street. The move, which would have recreated the setup of Gordon Brown’s premiership, was ultimately rejected by the Prime Minister.⁷

But Cummings persisted. On 23 July 2020, the adviser was spotted wandering the halls of 70 Whitehall wielding a floorplan.⁸ The building, home to part of the Cabinet Office, is connected to No. 10 via an internal door. By mid-August, it had been announced that around twenty officials, including senior figures such as Cummings himself and Head of the No. 10 Policy Unit Munira Mirza, would be moved from within No. 10 to offices at 70 Whitehall.⁹

The offices, previously home to the Cabinet Office’s Economic and Domestic Affairs secretariat, are to be set up in what has been described as a ‘collaboration hub’, with co-working desks surrounded by screens displaying ‘real-time performance data’.¹⁰ The Prime Minister is expected to stay within No. 10, but the internal door between the two buildings – previously a significant symbolic dividing line between the Prime Minister’s personal office and the Cabinet Office, which serves the Cabinet as a collective body – is reportedly to be removed.¹¹

At the time of writing in late summer 2020, this move is yet to be completed. But it would represent a major change in the geography of power at Downing Street – not to mention a substantial expansion of the Prime Minister’s Office.

On top of this, as part of its ‘levelling up’ agenda, the Johnson government has pledged to accelerate the moving of civil service jobs out of London. There have also been repeated rumours that the House of Lords – or even the Commons – could be moved to York or elsewhere. The breaking up of Whitehall’s government cluster would also be significant for the geography of power between government departments and senior Cabinet Ministers. If this were to change, it would have significant ramifications for how government works in the UK.

All of this certainly makes it an interesting time to be publishing this paperback edition of No. 10. It also makes it very possible that this book will seem hopelessly out of date very quickly. From remote working to deliberate relocation, only time will tell if the changes being discussed at present will be short-term fixes, long-term alterations or entirely abandoned experiments. Precedent has dominated life at No. 10 Downing Street for hundreds of years, but its occupants have also reserved the right to make sudden, dramatic changes that alter the existing order throughout. The swapping of the Nos. 10 and 11 flats between Prime Minister and Chancellor is a notable example from recent decades.

The thing that is truly remarkable about No. 10 Downing Street is that this building, designed to be an entirely ordinary home and built at no great expense, has proved so resilient and adaptable, despite its obvious flaws and given the importance of its modern purpose. It was built lightly and has repeatedly been close to physical collapse throughout its long history, requiring so many partial renovations, adaptations, temporary fixes and replacement parts that it can be compared to Trigger’s trusty broom from the sitcom Only Fools and Horses, which had allegedly survived for twenty years, albeit with seventeen new heads and fourteen new handles. Yet despite all this, No. 10’s historical ‘stickiness’ has been incredible. It would be a great surprise if it were to cease to play an important role at the heart of government for years to come. But the four years since the publication of the first edition of this book have seen near-constant shocks and surprises. Given the way 2020 has progressed so far, perhaps it would be more surprising if things stayed the same.

Jack Brown

Walthamstow, London

August 2020

Introduction

You shouldn’t underestimate the influence of geography. The fact that these ancient houses are used for the head of government reflects in many ways how the government runs.¹

– Andrew Turnbull

Proximity is power.²

– Robert Armstrong

Speaking in 1943 on the rebuilding of the Houses of Parliament, Winston Churchill observed that ‘We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us.’³ The Prime Minister was reflecting on how the small, oblong layout of the Commons, whilst proving very cramped if all Members were in attendance, kept the style of speaking conversational and the party system adversarial. The gravity of deciding to ‘cross the floor’ to join another party (a decision that Churchill was highly unusual in having taken twice) was reinforced by the design of the building, which sat the government and the opposition on opposite sides of the room, facing one another, poised for battle, with the most senior figures on each side leading the charge from the front benches. This oppositional layout remains influential today. Members are permitted to address one another only from their seats, and are forbidden from speaking from the floor of the House, in the area between the two red lines said to have been drawn two sword-lengths apart.⁴

Churchill also noted that a small chamber meant that ‘quick, informal interruptions and interchanges’ were possible even when the chamber was half full, brought about by catching the eye of the Speaker of the House when rising or half-rising to speak. In addition, on significant occasions, the cramped nature of the small chamber brought about ‘a sense of crowd and urgency’, giving ‘a sense that great matters are being decided, there and then, by the House’.⁵

The chamber in the House of Commons is deliberately oppositional in its architecture, and its size and layout directly affect how business is conducted. Similarly, the size and layout of No. 10 directly limits the small number of staff that work in the Prime Minister’s Office. Its confines dictate which few advisers have easy, direct and frequent access to the Prime Minister, and therefore who has influence over him or her. It provides the curious blend of the formal and informal, of work and leisure (as both home and office), that is central to being Prime Minister. Its relatively humble stature sends a message to the nation that the Prime Minister is neither regal nor presidential, but merely primus inter pares (first among equals) in the British system. Successive Prime Ministers have altered it, but it has also altered them.

This book

This book is not just the history of a building. It tells the story of how No. 10 and its occupants interacted in the postwar years, during the premierships of twelve different Prime Ministers from 1945 to 2010 (formerly ten, from 1945 to 1997, in the previous edition). It centres on the reconstruction of No. 10 between 1960 and 1963, led by the architect Raymond Erith and taking place during Harold Macmillan’s premiership. The study of this process reveals a great deal about the building and the job it houses. It reflects the fusion of informality, adaptability and strict small-‘c’ conservatism at the heart of Britain’s unwritten constitution. It tells us a great deal about how we as a nation have shaped the office of Prime Minister, and how No. 10 itself has influenced the evolution of the role.

The phrase ‘geography of power’ is used to describe how the buildings that house the most powerful jobs in the country shape the conduct of these roles, and how their occupants in turn shape them. The phrase itself was borrowed from Peter Hennessy’s The Prime Minister, where it was used to refer to George Downing, the eponymous builder of the street that would go on to become one of the most famous in the world. The phrase may well have been used elsewhere, but that is where it was drawn from in this case. It speaks to the role that physical places play in constraining or allowing the exercise of influence and access. It has also been suggested that the ‘architecture of power’ may have been more appropriate, and this could have been an equally valid title.⁶ However, this is primarily a work of contemporary history, focusing on No. 10 during the premierships of ten postwar Prime Ministers, from Clement Attlee to John Major. To borrow a phrase from an influential contemporary historian for its title seems appropriate.

The book begins with a history of the building itself. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the functions that it has housed in the period 1945–97. Chapter 3 then looks at the layout of key rooms in No. 10, and their relation to the internal geography of power. Chapter 4 explores the geography of power outside the building, as well as considering some of the ways in which geography can be and has been subverted at No. 10. Chapter 5 tells the story of the reconstruction of the Downing Street houses and the adjoining Old Treasury from 1960–3, and explores its influence on No. 10’s development. Chapter 6 investigates the building’s role as a home, and Chapter 7 its role as a place for hosting visitors and projecting power. Chapter 8 provides a history of No. 10 under attack, demonstrating the building’s resilience and adaptability throughout its long history, and Chapter 9 details the adjustments and conflicts of the Blair and Brown years, before some concluding thoughts.

The extent to which buildings shape the actions of individual political actors does of course have limits. Observing the manner in which journalists have covered the deteriorating physical state of the Palace of Westminster in recent years, the comedian David Mitchell noted the ‘tedious satisfaction’ that many commentators appeared to derive from overusing the ‘leaden analogy’ of the crumbling, outdated building for the functions (and the politicians) that it houses.⁷ Studying the influence of No. 10 on successive Prime Ministers has involved a careful tightrope walk between providing real human insight into the conduct of arguably the most powerful job in the country, and tedious, overreaching metaphors and conclusions.

I hope that this book does not too often lose its balance. It is intended to blend some degree of insight into the inner workings of No. 10 with a wider interest in one of the most famous and influential buildings in British history. It is the result of a year and a half as the Researcher in Residence at No. 10, a role designed with the intention of making No. 10’s history more widely accessible. I sincerely hope that it will not be the last such book produced by a Researcher in Residence.

A note on sources

This book makes extensive use of Prime Ministerial and other political memoirs, as well as the few excellent works that have studied No. 10 as a home and office to date, particularly those by Anthony Seldon, R. J. Minney and Christopher Jones. It also draws on archival material, primarily from the National Archives and Erith’s personal archives, held by RIBA. Original interviews with some key figures are drawn upon, alongside previous interview material gathered by the Mile End Group at Queen Mary University of London and the Strand Group at King’s College London.

However, writing the history of No. 10 itself is not without its challenges. The history of the building is intertwined with the role that it quickly went on to occupy, and the magnitude of this role often means that memoirs and biographies of those who have lived there often quite rightly focus on events and characters rather than place. Details as simple as which room a Prime Minister preferred to work from are recorded only occasionally. Much of No. 10’s history has therefore been passed down by word of mouth, and is inherently fallible. One particular anecdote, from the former Cabinet Secretary and Principal Private Secretary at No. 10 Robert Armstrong (Lord Armstrong of Ilminster), illustrates this point particularly well:

While I was Private Secretary, Mr. Heath had a dinner party for Sir Alec Douglas-Home on his seventieth birthday in 1973 and Mr. Macmillan was invited. He came to the party. When the party was over, he asked if he could see the Cabinet Room. I took him in. There was a dim light, but it was not brightly lit. But it was all there: the table and the chairs, the Prime Minister’s telephone by it. Mr. Macmillan – aged about eighty by now – stood at the door and looked around the room, hand on his cane, and after a long pause: To think, that was the chair on which I was sitting, the telephone I was using, when I talked to Jack Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis. I didn’t have the heart to say, Actually, Mr. Macmillan, you were in Admiralty House!⁸

If even those who occupied the house are prone to historical confusion, then it is fair to assume that the historian may occasionally struggle too.

This does not make the work impossible, only challenging. Some governments, particularly those of Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher, featured multiple influential figures who, upon their departure from office, went on to eagerly produce reams of insightful studies on the machinery of No. 10 and the workings of the premiership. Others have produced much less. Internal documents from the Ministry of Works that detail the building’s history do exist, and can be useful, but the source of key facts is often unclear, and the degree of historical rigour involved in putting them together is also questionable.

One final point needs to be made. Due to Downing Street’s constant evolution and adaptation, the precise location of historic rooms may have altered slightly over time. More significantly, present-day No. 10 is an amalgamation of three separate historic buildings, the main two of which were joined together in 1735. The historic ‘house at the back’ is therefore an entire floor lower than the terraced house on Downing Street. As a consequence, the ground floor on the Downing Street side, when one enters the famous front door, is the first floor by the time one reaches the back of the house. This can make it difficult to locate a room by referring to floor numbers, as the ground floor at the back of the house, which opens onto the garden, is the basement when viewed from Downing Street. There are also several half-floors, where historic adaptations have led to short flights of stairs or raised ceilings that further confuse matters. For consistency, this book takes the ‘ground floor’ to be the floor on which one enters from the front door on the Downing Street side. The first floor is immediately above, and the basement immediately below, regardless of whether the rooms referred to are at the front or the back of the house.

1

The Building

It is the smallest, yet the greatest street in the world, because it lies at the hub of the gigantic wheel which encircles the globe under the name of the British Empire.

– Joseph Hodges Choate¹

On first inspection, No. 10 Downing Street appears an unassuming home for the British Prime Minister. Yet despite its outward appearance, this modest terraced property located just off Whitehall in London’s SW1 postcode is a house like no other. Behind one of the world’s most iconic front doors lies a sprawling, labyrinthine building with an incredible history. No. 10 has been the property of the First Lord of the Treasury, a role that in modern times has become synonymous with that of Prime Minister, for nearly 300 years.

Constructed in the 1680s, this historic building has remained a constant at the heart of British governance ever since. At the time of John Major’s departure from No. 10 in 1997, it had seen fifty different Prime Ministers come and go. Since Arthur Balfour established the precedent at the turn of the twentieth century, every subsequent Prime Minister has at some point made Downing