The most famous was the Mansion House Speech of 1911 by David Lloyd George, which warned the German Empire against opposing British influence during the period leading up to the First World War.

[2] The site, at the east end of Poultry, London, had previously been occupied by the Stocks Market,[3] which by the time of its closure was mostly used for the sale of herbs.

Dance won a competition over designs solicited from James Gibbs and Giacomo Leoni, and uninvited submissions by Batty Langley and Isaac Ware.

[7][8] The Mansion House was paid for in an unusual way: the City authorities, all Church of England men, found a way to tax those of other Christian denominations, particularly the Rational Dissenters.

A Unitarian named Samuel Sharpe, banker by day and amateur Egyptologist by night, wrote about it in the 1830s, striking a blow against the Test and Corporate Acts.

[9] William Edward Hartpole Lecky in his History of England during the Eighteenth Century (1878) describes the funding of the construction of the Mansion House as "a very scandalous form of persecution".

[14] The American author Mark Twain recounts the story in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889): It reminded me of something I had read in my youth about the ingenious way in which the aldermen of London raised the money that built the Mansion House.

Then they went to work and elected a lot of Dissenters, one after another, and kept it up until they had collected £15,000 in fines; and there stands the stately Mansion House to this day, to keep the blushing citizen in mind of a long past and lamented day when a band of Yankees slipped into London and played games of the sort that has given their race a unique and shady reputation among all truly good and holy peoples that be in the earth.

The entrance facade has a portico with six Corinthian columns, supporting a pediment with a tympanum sculpture by Sir Robert Taylor, in the centre of which is a symbolic figure of the City of London trampling on her enemies.

Sir John Summerson wrote that "it leaves an impression of uneasily constricted bulk", adding that "on the whole, the building is a striking reminder that good taste was not a universal attribute in the eighteenth century".

[18] It consists of 84 paintings and includes some outstanding works by artists including Hendrick Avercamp, Gerard Ter Borch, Pieter Claesz, Aelbert Cuyp, Frans Hals, Pieter de Hooch, Jacob van Ruisdael, Jan Steen, David Teniers the Younger and Willem van de Velde.