Churchill Museum & Cabinet War Rooms

Lonely Planet review

Down in the bunker where Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his cabinet and generals met during WWII, around £6 million has been spent on a huge exhibition devoted to 'the greatest Briton'. This whizz-bang, multimedia Churchill Museum joins the highly evocative Cabinet War Rooms, where chiefs of staff slept, ate and plotted Hitler's downfall.

Chiefs of staff blissfully believed they were protected from Luftwaffe bombs by the 3m slab of concrete overhead. (Turns out it would have crumpled like paper had the area taken a hit.) Together, these two sections make you forget the Churchill who was a maverick and lousy peacetime politician, and drive home how much the cigar-chewing, wartime PM was a case of right man, right time.

In the Chief of Staff's Conference Room, the walls are covered with huge, original maps that were only discovered in 2002. If you squint two-thirds of the way down the right wall, somebody (Churchill himself?) drew a little doodle depicting a cross-eyed and bandy-legged Hitler knocked on his arse.

The free audioguide is very informative and entertaining and features plenty of anecdotes, including some from people who worked here in the nerve centre of Britain's war effort - and weren't even allowed by their irritable boss to relieve the tension by whistling.