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| • | Mansion House is the official residence of the Lord Mayor of the City of London. It is used for some of the City of London's official functions, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer makes an annual "Mansion House Speech" about the state of the British economy. The Guildhall is another venue used for important City functions.
The Mansion House was built between 1739 and 1752, in the then fashionable Palladian style by the City of London surveyor and architect George Dance the Elder. The construction was promtped by a wish to put an end to the inconvenient practice of lodging the Lord Mayor in one of the City Halls. Dance won a design competition over solicited designs from James Gibbs and Giacomo Leoni, and uninvited submissions by Batty Langley and Isaac Ware.
The Mansion House has three main stories over a rusticated basement. The entrance facade features a six column portico. The building originally had two prominent and unusual attic structures, but these were removed in 1794 and 1843. The building is on a confined site, and in the opinion of Sir John Summerson it 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 was a colummned hall called the "Egyptian Hall", which was so named because the arrangement of the columns chosen by Dance was deemed to be "Egyptian" by Palladio, rather than because it employed Egptian motifs. British architecture's mild flirtation with Egyptian motifs lay several decades in the future.
In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Mark Twain made up a story about the erection of the building.
Source: [wikipedia: mansion house, london]
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