Qualla: 11 Downing Street

11 Downing Street: Introduction

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RachelH_, CC BY 2.0. Tony Blair walked through the front door of Number 10 in 1997 and turned left. He had three young children. His family needed a larger flat than the cramped apartment above Number 10 could provide. So Blair did something unprecedented: he moved the prime minister into the residence above 11 Downing Street, traditionally the home of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Gordon Brown, the new Chancellor and at the time a bachelor, swapped with him and took the smaller flat above Number 10. The arrangement worked. It was supposed to be temporary. Instead it lasted twenty-five years. Brown himself, then Cameron, May, and Johnson all kept the same swap. Only Rishi Sunak in 2022, with younger children but a different sense of decorum, moved back into the smaller Number 10 flat - and Keir Starmer, taking office in 2024, swapped right back to Number 11. The Chancellor's house, technically, has not housed the Chancellor in nearly three decades.

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Image: RachelH_ | CC BY 2.0

11 Downing Street: A Terrace, Internally One House

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Symonds, CC BY 3.0. Numbers 10, 11, and 12 Downing Street look like three separate Georgian terraced houses. They are not. The interiors have been linked over centuries by doorways, corridors, and shared stairwells, so that one can walk from Number 11 to Number 10 without ever using the street doors...

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Image: Richard Symonds | CC BY 3.0

11 Downing Street: Wren, Couse, and Soane

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit [2], CC BY 2.0. Sir George Downing built Number 11 in the 1680s as part of his cul-de-sac of terraced houses, to designs by Christopher Wren - though, as with all the Downing houses, the construction was cheap and the foundations shallow. The house was altered between 1723 and 1735, then refaced...

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Image: [2] | CC BY 2.0

11 Downing Street: The First Chancellor in Residence

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Foreign and Commonwealth Office, CC BY 2.0. Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, the future 3rd Marquess of Lansdowne, was the first Chancellor of the Exchequer to live at Number 11 - in 1806. The official designation as the Chancellor's residence didn't come until 1828. For most of the nineteenth century, the use of the house was inf...

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Image: Foreign and Commonwealth Office | CC BY 2.0

11 Downing Street: Cash for Curtains

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit U.S. Department of State from United States, Public domain. In March 2020, just as Britain entered its first COVID-19 lockdown, Boris Johnson commissioned an expensive refurbishment of the residential flat above Number 11. The work included gold wallpaper, hand-painted murals, and reportedly expensive furnishings supplied by the designer ...

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Image: U.S. Department of State from United States | Public domain

11 Downing Street: From the Air

Tue, 19 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tristan Surtel, CC BY-SA 4.0. Number 11 sits on the left side of the Number 10 terrace as you face the building from Downing Street, so from above it occupies the centre of the three connected houses. The complex is invisible from any normal airspace - central London is permanently restricted at low altitude....

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Image: Tristan Surtel | CC BY-SA 4.0