It is perhaps the most nondescript entrance to any tourist site in London. Located on Horseguards Drive in Whitehall, about a block from the Westminster Underground stop, the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms are tucked next to a wall by the Clive Steps.
Life in The Blitz
Through two glass doors and down a curved flight of concrete steps is a museum filled with darkened rooms and claustrophobic hallways – once the center of the British war effort against Axis powers from 1939 to 1945 and now a museum dedicated to the guiding force of that effort.
From a meeting room where visitors can listen to the quarrels Churchill and his military staff often had to cramped rooms where desks and cots are crammed together, the war rooms provided protection for military leaders and civilian employees during air raids. Few details are spared, from the chemical toilets used to lamps used to boost the vitamin D levels for staffers suffering from light deprivation.
Displays at the museum explain Prime Minister Winston Churchill rarely slept in the shelter, created under the Office of the Works in Whitehall, and preferred to be a visual presence as Londoners enduring near-daily bombing raids from September 1940 through May 1941.
In one stretch, the city was raided for 57 consecutive days, while inside the war rooms, staffers recalled they could hear very little if any of what was going on outside. Portions of the war rooms were reinforced with additional steel and concrete, while officials knew a direct hit above them meant nothing could save them.
The war room story is enriched by recorded recollections from those who worked and lived there, the vast maps detailing how far flung World War II was, and the German air raids could be so devastating without breaking the will of the people.
Winston Churchill Museum
From early May 1940 until the summer of 1945, Prime Minister Winston Churchill led England and Great Britain. From the bleakest days of the war until the defeat of Germany, he was witty, resilient and prickly - qualities the museum makes evident in his life on the whole.
Born in 1874, a Boer War hero at 26, an skilled painter and voluminous writer, Churchill was a revered national hero when he died in 1965. In a room adjacent to the Cabinet War Rooms, the arc of his life is played out from the collections of toy soldiers he treasured as a boy to the film of his funeral services from St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Museum exhibits can be unsparing regarding Churchill’s flaws and contradictions. His opposition to granting autonomous powers to India in the 1920s because of race, his defense of King Edward VIII when the king wished to marry Wallis Warfield Simpson are given equal due in contrast to his prescient warnings about the rise of Adolf Hitler and his efforts for political and social reform in the early 1900s.
Open daily from 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. excepting Dec. 24, 25 and 26, the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms provide vibrant history lessons and the measure of a man of enormously conflicting qualities. Expect to take at least 90 minutes for a full visit and be assured it is a worthwhile stop when visiting London.
David Harry - Along with contributing articles to Suite 101, I am a reporter for a newspaper in Scarborough, Maine. I have been a freelance writer for ...
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