Churchill Museum & Cabinet War Rooms

Down in the bunker where Prime Minister Winston Churchill, his cabinet and generals met during WWII, £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, blissfully believing 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. The Churchill Museum contains all sorts of posters, trivia and personal effects, from the man’s cigars to a ‘British bulldog’ vase in his image, and from his formal Privy Council uniform to his shockingly tasteless red velvet ‘romper’ outfit. Even though the museum doesn’t shy away from its hero’s fallibilities, it does begin with his strongest suit – his stirring speeches, replayed for each goosebumped visitor who steps in front of the screen. ‘I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’, ‘We will fight them on the beaches’, ‘Never in the course of human history has so much been owed by so many to so few’. Elsewhere, silver-tongued Winnie even gets credit for inspiring Orson Welles’ famous rant about Switzerland and cuckoo clocks, with a speech he made to Parliament several years before The Third Man was filmed. There’s fantastically edited footage of Churchill’s 1965 state funeral, making the April 2005 burial of Pope John Paul II look like a low-key family affair, and you can check on what the PM was doing nearly every day beforehand via the huge tabletop interactive lifeline. Touch on a particular year on the screen and it will open up into months and days for you to choose. In stark contrast, the old Cabinet War Rooms have been left much as they were when the lights were turned off on VJ Day in August 1945 and everyone headed off for a well-earned drink. The room where the Cabinet held more than 100 meetings, the Telegraph Room with a hotline to Roosevelt, the cramped typing pool, the converted broom cupboard that was Churchill’s office and scores of bedrooms have all been preserved. You will pass the broadcast niche where Churchill made four of his rousing speeches to the nation, including one about Germany fuelling ‘a fire in British hearts’ by launching the London Blitz. 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.