The Impact of World War II on Soane’s interiors at 10 & 11 Downing Street

Above: The State Dining Room at No.10 Downing Street.

Soane aficionados will recognise the Soanean detailing on the oak panelling with deeply undercut quirked bead mouldings as well as the highly enriched star vault ceiling. The eagle-eyed will also occasionally spot the adjacent Breakfast Room (now known as The Small Dining Room) through the central double doors, which is of a much more intimate scale but similarly panelled in oak. Here Soane plays that architect’s trick of placing the fireplace under a window, which is therefore flued in a contorted and less than optimal way.

Above: Soane Office, variant designs for the ceiling of State Dining Room, No.10 Downing Street, July 1825

Soane created these two rooms in 1825-6 above the vaulted kitchen added by Sir Robert Taylor in the 1780s. In typical Soane fashion major structural works were required to shoe-horn the double-height dining room into the existing building - in what was previously bedroom accommodation - punching up into the roof-space which had to be rebuilt. Furthermore, the kitchen flues, which ran right through the middle of the space Soane wanted to carve out for his grand room, had to be rerouted. 

These two fine Soane interiors have remained largely untouched over their 200-year life. The reported ‘magenta and green’ colour scheme of the star vault had long since been whitewashed, and in the 1930s the Breakfast Room’s by then unfashionable dark oak panelling was painted white. Soane’s other significant interior alterations at 11 Downing Street have fared less well, facing eradication or major alteration. Here, Soane created a much smaller dining room (now also called a State Dining Room) with a highly sophisticated pendentive domed ceiling - a model of which can still be seen in ‘The Colonnade’ at the Soane Museum.

Above: Photograph of the state dining room of Number 11 Downing Street, London; residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Credit HM Treasury.

This shallow domed ceiling is detached from the side walls with long thin lanterns providing top lighting and is clearly related to his own breakfast room at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields. This room was open on one side to a similarly sized ante-room, and beyond this was a tight staircase which wound its way up through the building. This work was carried out contemporaneously with the interiors at Number 10, as Soane was engaged in amalgamating what were, up until the early 19th century, still town houses under separate ownership. Number 11, as we now know it, had been acquired some years earlier, and now needed to be properly joined to form the beginnings of what would become one interconnected block for the Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer and ultimately Home Secretary as adjacent houses were successively acquired for the purpose. 

Soane cleverly squeezed his new top-lit ground floor room into a gap between the terraced houses fronting the street, and Sir William Kent’s grand building facing Horse Guards Parade which Walpole had built to accommodate the principal state reception rooms and Cabinet Room we know today. Soane’s oak panelled Small Dining Room and ante-room survived untouched for 20 years, after which it was decided to join the multiple houses in a more meaningful way. This led to Soane’s staircase being replaced by a more generous one taking up half of the ante-room. The original panelling was adapted, significantly compromising the purity and symmetry of Soane’s original design. At this time a flamboyant Victorian fireplace replaced Soane’s typically restrained Regency chimneypiece. To add insult to injury, the remaining sliver of ante-room was subdivided again in the 1930s to accommodate a trolley lift and servery to make for more efficient delivery of warm food from the distant kitchens.

Above: Model for the domical ceiling to the Eating Room, No.11 Downing Street, 1825

War damage to the Downing Street buildings was quite impactful despite there being no direct hits by German bombs. Many fell close by, and photographs from the time show many of the state rooms covered with shattered window glass, and chunks of plaster from fallen ceilings. The Historic England Archive in Swindon is now home to countless detailed and fascinating Ministry of Works (MOW) photographs. These detail wartime damage and the progress of the extensive and thoughtful restoration of the whole 10-12 Downing Street complex by the eminent architect of the time Raymond Erith in the early 1960s. 

World War II had taken its toll on what were already a rather ramshackle agglomeration of poorly constructed houses, much added to and altered in piecemeal fashion. Following adjacent bombing, the 18th-century refacing of the street façade was coming away from the building and leaning out at the top. Plans for a new lift were abandoned as the core of the building was too wonky and unstable, and the seasonal shift of the shallow footings on boggy ground meant a carpenter was employed almost full time to ease sagging doors and windows. Clearly a major reconstruction was required. 

During the Prime Ministership of Sir Anthony Eden, the MOW Historic Buildings Department proposed a number of radical schemes to rebuild, including one completely eradicating the Downing Street buildings including all of Kent’s and Soane’s work. However, following the Suez crisis, Eden resigned, and Harold Macmillan took up the reins to instigate the reconstruction. Sir Albert Richardson had been in the running to get the job as all agreed that the in-house team at the MOW were not up to it. However, Eden himself suggested Raymond Erith who was significantly younger than Richardson, practically an octogenarian.

Erith was perhaps one of our greatest mid-twentieth century classical architects, and highly influenced by Soane in much of his work, and so today, there is even more Soanean detailing throughout 10,11 and the newly rebuilt 12 than there ever was in Soane’s day. The whole of the interior of the knocked together 1680s terraced houses that front Downing Street were stripped to a bare shell with new concrete floors inserted and significant underpinning carried out to ensure long term stability. Soane’s work at Number 10 was in a later and better built section, so remained largely intact. 

The Number 11 Small Dining Room and adjacent ante-room however saw the most significant changes to Soane’s interiors. In quite a radical move, the entirety of Soane’s work in this area was removed: the plaster vault was cut into pieces and taken down along with the panelling and large arched headed window. These were stored off site whilst Erith constructed a whole new timber roof structure which he extended to create a new ante-room where none had been before. Soane’s original panelling was refitted and reconfigured to infill the original opening to the now eradicated ante-room, and then faithfully copied in the new ante space Erith created by pushing Soane’s window further out into the garden area. The plaster vault was tied back up to the new roof structure and joints seamlessly filled, so that today, none of this radical surgery is evident. In fact, so authentically detailed is Erith’s work, that eminent historians have been fooled by his modifications. 

The removal of all traces of Soane’s ante-room allowed Erith to design a generous new staircase in Number 11 where the more modest original by Soane and its larger Victorian replacement once were. Erith copied the new staircase from one of Soane’s at Aynhoe Park. Furthermore, where Erith extended the dining room outward, creating a new space below, he purloined two cast-iron columns from Soane’s adjacent Treasury building (already much altered by Sir Charles Barry). There the MOW was responsible for a façade retention scheme running alongside the works at Downing Street, and therefore there was some architectural salvage to be had. In a final reference to Soane, Erith designed a new chimneypiece for the Small Dining Room based on one in Lincoln’s Inn Fields to replace the later Victorian one. 

And so it is today that what most think of as a beautiful surviving gem of a Soane interior owes much to Erith and his sensitive but radical and historically confusing adaptation. He did however seek the approval of the then Curator of Sir John Soane’s Museum, Sir John Summerson. who wrote to Erith saying that the proposed extension ‘would be a great improvement’. 

In Number 10, post-war restoration was much less invasive: the panelling of the Breakfast Room was removed, stripped of its white paint and then refitted with the oak repolished, but to a lighter shade than originally. The cornice here is in a Soanean style but designed by Erith. Chimneypieces throughout were removed for protection during the works, then restored and replaced. Unfortunately, the Soane original from the State Dining Room was broken during removal, and Erith drew up the design of its replacement to match the original as closely as possible.

It is testament to the importance of Soane’s work that it survived a period in our history when less significance was placed upon our historic fabric generally, and where wartime damage was often used as an excuse to ‘throw the baby out with the bathwater’. Luckily the foresight of those in power at the time, and an architect particularly sympathetic to the work of Soane, has ensured the preservation of his key interiors at Downing Street, adapted where necessary to continue to serve us some two centuries later. 

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Written by Simon Hurst