KNOCK, KNOCK, WHO’S THERE?
This year marks 300 years since the post of Prime Minister was established, but what of Downing Street and that black door? Eleanor Doughty delves into the history of No 10 and takes a look at other iconic London entrance ways
IN 1999, Christie’s sold a blue front door for £5,750. The same blue door that Richard Curtis cast as the front door of travel-bookshop owner William Thacker in the film Notting Hill. According to Amelia Walker, head of private and iconic collections at the London auction house, a door is ‘an unusual thing to sell. Normally, you only remove a door when you’re doing a complete refurbishment or if you have a very good reason’.
Once you start looking for notable front doors, you’ll find them everywhere: at 221b, Baker Street, NW1, home of Sherlock Holmes (www.sherlock-holmes.co.uk), or 18, Folgate Street, E1, where, behind the imposing black door and black brick surround, is concealed a museum dedicated to the family of French Huguenot silk weavers who once lived there (www.dennissevershouse.co.uk).
At Selfridges, on Oxford Street, W1, one of the doors is watched over by Gilbert Bayes’s Queen of Time clock and, in the 1920s, when the old Sir John Soane Bank of England building was demolished, architect Herbert Baker made sure its 10-storey replacement came complete with an appropriately grand, bronze entrance. Designed by Sir Charles Wheeler, the doors are adorned with symbols: lions for strength; the constellations of Ursa Major and the Southern Cross to represent the Bank’s global operations; the hand of Zeus grasping at lightning to symbolise the electrical force behind modern banking. The Bank’s front door is very special, says Lord King of Lothbury, governor from 2003 to 2013: ‘Unlike most, it doesn’t have a key. When we were planning for potential terrorist threats and having to evacuate the building, one of the issues that came up was how would we get back in again? The answer, I think, was using ladders and breaking in through a window.’
Of course, the point of a front door is security and, for the Bank of England, this aspect of the front door is paramount. As well as keeping the building safe, says Lord King, the Bank’s front doors ‘demonstrate to people that, when they come in, they’re entering a special place’. His mission as governor ‘was to increase the transparency of the Bank to the outside world, so the doors were not only a barrier to the outside world from the Bank, but an opening to the Bank from the outside world’.
The city’s most famous door is surely the one to 10, Downing Street. In 1735, the building was presented to Sir Robert Walpole, First Lord of the Treasury and de facto first Prime Minister, by George II. Walpole refused the gesture and, instead, asked the King if he could make it available to him and all future First Lords as an official residence.
It wasn’t until restoration work began in August 1766 that No 10 acquired its iconic oak door, its number painted in white with the zero at a 37˚ anticlockwise angle. A lion’s-head knocker and brass letterbox, inscribed ‘First Lord of the Treasury’ were also added. After a mortar attack by the IRA in 1991, the oak door was replaced with a steel one and there are now two on rotation, regularly swapped out for refurbishment. Interestingly, neither door can be opened from the outside.
Prime Ministers, explains Christopher Jones in his book No 10 Downing Street: the
‘Unlike most other examples, the front door to the Bank of England doesn’t have a key’
Story of a House, are not given keys to the front door because ‘policemen and doorkeepers are on duty all day every day… no Prime Minister has ever had the indignity of fumbling for the keys before a crowd of interested onlookers.’ Not that No 10 hasn’t ever been visited by those short of keys. One evening in the 1920s, Ladies Mary and Sibell Lygon, daughters of the 7th Earl Beauchamp, went home (or tried to) to Halkin House in nearby Belgravia. Realising the footman had fallen asleep, they walked to the home of family friend and then Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Thankfully, the big black door swung open for them.
In fact, it has swung open for a lot of people. Mr Jones mentions one day during Harold Wilson’s tenure when ‘the doorkeeper kept a check on the comings and goings… and found that between 6am and 11pm the front door of No 10 was opened 945 times’.
Some doors represent even older traditions. At the Tower of London, at 9.53pm every night, the Chief Yeoman Warder marches with a military escort to lock the outer gate. This, the Ceremony of the Keys, is as spinetingling as it sounds, says Tracy Borman, joint chief curator at Historic Royal Palaces. ‘We don’t need the ceremony in the same way anymore, but it symbolises 500 years of tradition—it’s such a survivor.’ The gate itself, the front door to the Tower of London, is even older—about 700 years old, says Dr Borman. ‘It’s satisfyingly heavy and the keys are huge. It’s picture-book historical stuff—it’s why people come to the tower.’
‘He found that between 6am and 11pm the front door of No 10 was opened 945 times’