Mansion House is a private residence with a courtroom in it, a Egyptian Hall, and a Lord Mayor who is not the Mayor of London
Thai Square at Mansion House holds a 4.3 from six hundred and ninety-five people, and it sits opposite the official residence of the Lord Mayor of London.
Who is not the Mayor of London, and this confuses everybody, permanently, and it is worth ten seconds.
Two mayors
The Mayor of London runs Greater London. Transport, policing, planning, the whole thing. Nine million people. Elected by everybody.
The Lord Mayor of the City of London runs the Square Mile – a district with a resident population of a few thousand – and is elected by the livery companies and the City’s own electorate, which includes businesses.
The office is nearly a thousand years old. Whittington held it four times, and we wrote about him at the Saint and again at the Mercer Roof Terrace.
And the modern role is, in large part, ambassadorial: the Lord Mayor spends a very substantial proportion of the year abroad, promoting British financial services, which is a job that exists and which somebody has to do.
What is inside Mansion House
A courtroom.
Genuinely. The Lord Mayor is a magistrate, and Mansion House contains a justice room – and it had, until relatively recently, holding cells in the basement.
Eleven of them for men. One for women, which was known as the Birdcage, and in which Emmeline Pankhurst was held.
The Lord Mayor’s official residence had a cell in it, and a suffragette was locked in it.
The Egyptian Hall
Which is the great room, and which is not Egyptian.
It is called that because it follows a form described by Vitruvius as an Egyptian hall – a Roman architectural type, with a colonnade and a clerestory – and it has nothing to do with Egypt at all.
The Prat’s architectural desk regards this as entirely in keeping with everything else in five hundred and thirteen articles: the name is wrong, it has been wrong for two hundred and seventy years, and nobody has ever corrected it because nobody has ever asked.
Before Mansion House
The Lord Mayor had no official residence, and used his own house or a livery hall.
Which is why Williamson’s Tavern, which we wrote about in the first City batch, claims to have been the Mayor’s residence – and the claim is plausible, and the pub is best known instead for a stone in the fireplace that marks the centre of the City and almost certainly marks nothing.
The true claim is dull. The false one is photographed.
Verdict
Good Thai food, honest rating.
Go, eat, and look across the road at a private house with a courtroom in it.
The Show
The Lord Mayor’s Show is the oldest civic procession in the world that is still running – and it has been going, in some form, since the thirteenth century.
Its purpose was originally practical and slightly grudging: the new Lord Mayor had to travel to Westminster to swear loyalty to the Crown, and the City turned the journey into a spectacle in order to make a point about who it was that was doing the travelling.
It is a parade about jurisdiction. The City is showing the Crown its wealth on the way to bowing to it.
It has been cancelled for war and for plague, and it has come back every time.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
British people would rather laugh at our misery than fix it. This is that.
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