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The building is technically the official residence of the First Lord of the Treasury, and is so labelled on the front door. This office is now inextricably linked with that of the Prime Minister, hence it is known as the official residence of the Prime Minister. The last Prime Minister not to be the First Lord of the Treasury was Lord Salisbury, prime minister at the very beginning of the twentieth century (as a result he did not live at Number 10).
Although the official residence, many Prime Ministers chose not to actually live at Number 10. Some 19th and 20th century prime ministers owned larger and more impressive townhouses with servants and in reality lived in them. Some prime ministers, notably in the 1950s and again in the 1990s lived in Admiralty House (London) while Number 10 was undergoing rebuilding work or in the 1990s, following an IRA mortar attack. James Callaghan (1976-79) lived in his own private home, but maintained the pretence of living at Number 10 for security and privacy reasons, while secretly exiting by a side door to return to his 'private' home. Tony Blair lives in the Chancellor of the Exchequer's apartment in Number 11, because the apartment there is larger and so more suitable for his family. (Chancellor Gordon Brown lives in the Prime Minister's apartment in Number 10.)
George II of Great Britain presented 10 Downing Street to Sir Robert WalpoleRobert Walpole, 1st Earl of Orford ( 26 August 1676 18 March 1745), normally known as Sir Robert Walpole is generally regarded as the first Prime Minister of Great Britain. The position of Prime Minister was only a de facto one, having no official recogni as an official residence
Numbers 10 and 11 were originally townhouses in which government ministers lived, with servants, but they ceased to be used as such in the 1940sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1890s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s Years: 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 Events and trends Technology First nuclear bomb First cruise missile, the. Instead they evolved into offices, with the Prime Minister and Chancellor of the Exchequer living in small apartments at the top of the building created from rooms that had once been used by servants. Additionally, the walls between the houses on Downing Street and the corresponding houses behind them on Horseguards Parade were knocked through and the buildings integerated.
With the use of photography from the mid nineteenth century, pictures began to appear of 10 Downing St. They all showed a rather dark, dank street lined by black buildings. In the 1950s, it became clear that No. 10 was in such a poor state of repair that it was in immediate danger of collapse. (The pillars in the cabinet room that held the upper stories in place were themselves found to be held together by little more than two hundred years of layers of overpainting and varnish, with the internal original wood having rotted away almost to dust!) After considering demolishing the entire street, it was decided that, as occurred in the White House in the 1940s, the facade would be preserved while the interior would be gutted down to the foundations, and a 'copy' of the original building erected using modern steel and concrete, over which furnishings of the original interior could be grafted. When they examined the exterior facade, they discovered that it was not black at all; it actually was yellow, the black look a product of two centuries of severe pollution. After considering restoring the exterior to its original eighteenth century yellow look, it was decided instead to preserve its 'traditional' look of more recent times, so the newly cleaned yellow bricks were painted black to resemble their previous polluted colour.