The Ground Floor
There are four rooms on the ground floor, as the floor plan in Paine's Plans shows. Beyond them are the kitchens and domestic offices, originally joined to the main building by a colonnade.
Paine's published plans give no indication of the use of these rooms on the ground floor. However, in Doncaster Archives there are volumes of Mansion House inventories dating from 1756 to 1908. These allow us to discover the use to which the rooms were put and how they were furnished. They show that the Mansion House, besides being a place for civic entertainment, was used for local government purposes from the beginning.
In the mid-eighteenth century, the ground floor housed the grandly-titled 'court of judicature' (where the mayor and his three fellow alderman-magistrates held a magistrates court every Monday morning), a councillors' room, an aldermen's room and a gentlemen's dining room.
To the right of the main staircase is another, slighter, staircase. This is the backstairs, the separate staircase by which the servants moved form floor to floor. These were probably removed in 1806, when the new dining room was built and the backstairs were relocated to the rear of the dining room.
