Garden of 10 and 11 Downing Street

The terrace and garden have provided a casual setting for many gatherings of First Lords with foreign dignitaries, Cabinet ministers, guests, and staff. In September 1941, Winston Churchill and his wife, Clementine, drank champagne in the garden with five "young Frenchmen" who had escaped from France in a canoe before arriving in Eastbourne after having spent 30 hours in the English Channel. Churchill called his secretaries the "garden girls" because their offices overlooked the garden. , in the garden]] In October 1929 The Times reported on the retirement after 40 years of Downing Street's head gardener, Harry Simpson. Having originally started as a gardener in nearby St James's Park, he…

Roy Strong described the garden as "one of London's hidden gems". Victoria Summerley, writing in Great Gardens of London, felt that the garden "would not win any medals for garden design" and that the design of the garden was "not an exercise in metropolitan chic or horticultural bling" but instead reflected the features of an "archetypal British back garden" including roses, a shaded area, a large lawn and raised vegetable beds. Lambert's painting depicts rectilinear borders and a "formal grass parterre with small, box-edged beds filled with topiary, flowering plants and dwarf fruit trees". In 1736, in the first reference to the garden, it was written that "a piece of garden ground...hath…