The Merry Lute player, painted between 1624-8 by Frans Hals in oil on panel. Mansion House.
Mansion House. A Georgian town palace, over 250 years old.
Lord Mayors Coach, which is housed in the Museum of London. The Lord Mayors show dates back to 1535.
The Rt Hon the Lord Mayor of the City of London, John Stuttard (2006/7) Annie (loving the facial expression darlin') Bill Beaver, the LM's speech writer and yes that is me, looking like a right muppet. Pancake day, obviously.Mansion House is probably better known for some of the City of London’s official functions, especially when the Chancellor of the Exchequer gives a speech, the “Mansion House Speech”. I worked here with the lovely Principle Diary Assistant, Miss Annie Gale M.B.E. (If your are reading this Annie, I know that you will be meticulously looking for typing errors xx) I worked with her on the Lord Mayors Diary.
However, it was here I managed to turn into a tour guide, occasionally I would give talks/tours to groups of 25-40 people at a time. Mansion House is also home to The Harold Samuel Collection of Dutch and Flemish Seventeenth Century Paintings. A very impressive collection indeed, it includes The Merry Lute player, which was the first painting to be bought at a New York auction in 1963, via telephone from London. It is valued at…. a rude amount of millions.
P.S) there are eleven holding cells in Mansion House, as it has its own court of law. It has ten cells which were used for men and just one cell for women, named the "the birdcage" Emmeline Pankhurst, the famous 20th Century suffragette women’s right’s campaigner, was once imprisoned here. The court is no longer in use, I have been into the cells, and I can tell you they are small. I liked to go down there and scare myself sometimes, it's just rows of tunnels that you can't stand fully upright in!
