10 Downing Street – The makeshift mansion

Origin Story

Podmasters

Society & Culture, News, News Commentary, History

4.8 • 655 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2024

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We’ve covered ideas, phrases, people and historical events. Now Origin Story profiles its first building: Number 10 Downing Street. Following Dorian’s bonus episode about the birth of end of the world fiction, based on his new book Everything Must Go, Ian goes deep on a topic from his bestselling book How Westminster Works and Why It Doesn’t. He explains how a house built on marshland by a 17th century scoundrel gradually became the prime minister’s official residence, and how its cramped, chaotic floorplan still influences how vital decisions are made. Why does tradition trump efficient governance? How do wily advisers exploit the layout to increase their influence over the PM? Is the door more important than the rest of the house put together? And is it finally time to say goodbye to Number 10? Support Origin Story on Patreon for exclusive benefits www.Patreon.com/originstorypod Written and presented by Dorian Lynskey and Ian Dunt. Music by Jade Bailey. Logo art by Mischa Welsh. Audio production by Simon Williams. Group Editor: Andrew Harrison. Origin Story is a Podmasters production Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:45.0	Hello, welcome to another between season mini episode of Origin Story, this one going out to all our listeners. There are also exclusive ones for Patreon only in the weeks in between.
0:51.0	I'm Doreenzylinski and I am Ian Dundt.
0:53.4	This time it's another bit of shameless self-promotion.
0:58.1	I promoted my new book. And Ian's book is Sunday Times bestseller, How Westminster Works and Why It
1:07.2	Doesn't, is out now in paperback and there's origin story material in there.
1:12.7	Ian, what are you going to be storying the origin of? Yeah, it's tenuous, but doable,
1:18.7	editorially. And that's all that I've required it to be for this purpose. And it is the,
1:24.7	it's the origin of Downing Street. I feel, you know, in the last, your bit of a book promotion, you sort of took us really from sort of the dawn of the biblical age of disaster straight through to the start of the age of the secular apocalypse.
1:38.3	And on that basis, I feel slightly, you know, intellectually emasculated, really, by producing a town.
1:45.0	I'm going to talk about a house in London, a townhouse in London.
1:47.8	Listen, man, if that's what it takes going to Sunday Times v. Seller, I'm all for it.
1:53.6	Right. So it's like the house itself.
1:56.5	The house itself. And really, how the house is fucking us.
2:00.8	Because that use of that house
2:02.8	has just been a complete disaster for so long in how we organise things in this country.
2:09.0	And yet because we are this country and because we operate according to an almost pathological
2:13.0	sense of sentimentality, we're unable to think, well, I don't know, maybe we shouldn't put
	...

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