Mansion House is the official residence of the Lord Mayor of the City of London in London. Mansion House is a great central meeting point to arrange that special entertaining evening with one of Diamond Escorts
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Mansion House is used for several of the City of London's official functions, including the annual dinner, hosted by the Lord Mayor, providing a platform for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to deliver there customarily speech, now referred to as the Mansion House Speech. The speech is delivered to the business community and discusses the state of the British economy. The Guildhall is another venue used for important City functions.
Mansion House was originally built between in the mid 18th century, in the then fashionable Palladian style by the City of London surveyor and architect George Dance the Elder. The original site had formerly been occupied by St Mary Woolchurch Haw, which was destroyed during the Great Fire of London. The construction was incited by a wish to erode the inconvenient practice of lodging the Lord Mayor in one of the City Halls. George Dance won a design competition over solicited designs from James Gibbs and Giacomo Leoni, and uninvited submissions by Batty Langley and Isaac Ware. At the time this bestowed accolade became the making of George Dance as a renowned architect within London Society.
Mansion House was designed as a three storey structure perched over a rusticated basement. The entrance facade features a portico with six Corinthian columns. The original building had two prominent and very unusual attic structures; between the periods of 1794 and 1843 these additions were removed. The building is situated on a confined site, and in the opinion of Sir John Summerson Mansion House gives an impression of uneasily constricted bulk. On the whole, the building is a striking reminder that good taste was not a universal attribute in the eighteenth century. The main reception room consisted of a columned hall called the Egyptian Hall, named due to the arrangement of the columns selected by Dance which were deemed to be Egyptian styled by Palladio, rather than it employed Egyptian motifs as an addition. British architecture's docile flirtation with Egyptian motifs lay several decades in the future.
The residence is unique due to having its own court of law, since the Lord Mayor is the chief magistrate of the City while in office. There are eleven holding cells situated on the site, ten for male occupancy and one which carries the nicknamed, the birdcage, for female occupants. A famous prisoner here was the early 20th century suffragette women's rights campaigner Emmeline Pankhurst.
Mansion House plays host to The Harold Samuel Collection of Dutch and Flemish Seventeenth Century Paintings. It consists of 84 works of art and includes some outstanding works by artists such as Hendrick Avercamp, Gerard Ter Borch, Pieter Claesz, Aelbert Cuyp, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan Steen, David Teniers the Younger and Willem van de Velde, but to mention a few.
