Horse Guards Parade, London 2014
© Leslie Hossack
On the November 7th 1924, Winston Churchill was appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative government of Stanley Baldwin. In January 1925, his family moved into the official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer located at 11 Downing Street. This was the second time in his career that Winston had held a cabinet post with an official residence backing onto Horse Guards Parade. The first time was in 1911 when he was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty. He and his family had lived in Admiralty House from 1913 to 1915, and he later described those years as “the happiest of my life.”
While serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1925 to 1929, Churchill delivered five budget speeches. In addition, in 1927 he found time to visit Mussolini in Rome; to publish The World Crisis, Volume III, 1916-1918; and to take up bricklaying at Chartwell. By the beginning of 1929, Winston’s career appeared to be at its zenith, and in March he published Volume IV of The World Crisis, The Aftermath. However, in May 1929, Mr. Baldwin’s government was defeated and Churchill resigned as Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was time to leave the official residence at 11 Downing Street.
In the photograph above, the back garden walls of No. 10 and No. 11 Downing Street are directly behind the viewer. The red building seen across the parade square is the Old Admiralty Building. Although Churchill was about to enter his “Wilderness Years” at the end of 1929, he would return to both The Admiralty and to Downing Street many years later.
The image featured above is part of the limited edition collector’s portfolio created by Leslie Hossack to mark the 50th anniversary of the death of Sir Winston Churchill. She presents locations that chart Churchill’s personal and political life, from his birth at Blenheim Palace in 1874 until his death in London in 1965. THE CHURCHILL PHOTOGRAPHS are part of Hossack’s larger body of work that explores Nazi architecture in Berlin, Stalinist structures in Moscow, contested sites in Jerusalem, a Cold War bunker in Ottawa, NATO’s Headquarter Camp in Kosovo, and buildings linked to the Japanese Canadian internment during World War II.
To view more photographs, please visit Leslie’s website. lesliehossack.com