No. 10 Is Falling Down

The cost of repair was to run to at least -L-11,000--and that, as every sensible Londoner knew, would be only the beginning. "So much," fumed the Morning Herald on June 21, 1783, "has this extraordinary edifice cost the country--for one moiety of which sum, a much better dwelling might have been purchased." But in spite of all the fuss, the British went through with the "great repair," just as they had done before and were to do time and time again. For more than 200 years the house, now known as No. 10 Downing Street, has been one of the most unsuitable and yet tenacious of all government buildings. It is a house with only a front door, and Commonwealth ministers sometimes arrive as tradesmen leave.

From the very moment that Sir Robert Walpole, George II's First Lord of the Treasury, moved into it in 1735, it began to be the center of British power. Queen Caroline would breakfast there, and then return to the palace to persuade her weaker husband to do just what the gallant Walpole suggested. But in its varied career as the home of the Pitts, the Disraelis, the Gladstones, the Churchills and lesser men who have guided the history of Britain, one thing about the narrow, unassuming house has remained constant. Jerry-built as a real estate speculation by Harvard-educated Sir George Downing, who managed the neat trick of flourishing under both Oliver Cromwell and Charles II, it has been in almost constant danger of falling down.

In 1766 inspectors found it "much decayed, the Floors & Chimneys much sunk." In 1781 the Board of Works bluntly called it "dangerous." In 1832, the year of the great Reform Bill, Earl Grey had to move out of it because it had become uninhabitable, and even Winston Churchill, no man to take a British institution lightly, found it "shaky." Last week, in a special White Paper, Her Majesty's government announced that No. 10 is in worse shape than ever.

Its main walls, it seems, rest not on solid foundations, but on shifting dirt. Its timbers are rotting, the Cabinet room is hazardous, some floors are so weak that the number of guests invited to receptions have had to be cut. What No. 10 needs, said the White Paper, is nothing less than a complete "structural overhaul" at a cost of at least -L-400,000 ($1,120,000). Once again sensible men could say that the most economical course would be to tear the whole place down. But as usual, even sensible men will agree in the end that London would not really be London without the original, precarious and thoroughly beloved No. 10.

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