The Mansion House

This guide to the Mansion House in Dublin opens at a grand 1821 banquet for King George the Fourth, when the staff ran short-handed and the Lord Mayor himself picked up a soup tureen to serve the king, who then stood up and, breaking every rule of protocol, served soup right back. It traces the round room where that happened, rushed up in weeks by the architect John Semple for the royal visit, and the older house built in 1710 by developer Joshua Dawson that still surrounds it. A century later, that same room hosted a very different gathering.