Closed During Renovation

Prime Minister Harold Macmillan moved out of No. 10 Downing Street and will not be back for two or three years. After more than two centuries, the narrow, four-story house in which 43 British Prime Ministers have lived or worked is crumbling and in urgent need of rebuilding. Like No. 11, the residence of Chancellors of the Exchequer, and No. 12, the office of the majority party whip, the house was built about 1682 as a real estate speculation by a Harvard man named Sir George Downing; despite repeated patching and propping, its floors and walls have tilted and sagged. Sir Winston Churchill, who has tried both No. 10 and No. 11, long ago called down a plague on both houses as "shaky and lightly built by the profiteering contractor whose name they bear."

For comfort and convenience, the British government would do much better to tear down No. 10 entirely and build something new. No. 10 is far too small for the offices and consultation rooms the modern Prime Minister requires; it has only one accessible door (the back door leads to the garden), and statesmen often have to brush by the butcher's boy delivering the day's meat. But, being British, no one considered it; No. 10 will be rebuilt as it was.

While workmen carry out their $1,400,000 repair job, Macmillan will have to find other quarters. He expects to live and work at Admiralty House in Whitehall, where a special Cabinet room has been readied.

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