The Churchill War Rooms has a lot to recommend it. There is no blood, guts or shocking sights for the squeamish. The Churchill War Rooms were created after, Winston Churchill, our most esteemed second world war prime minister, had a close brush with death when the rear of Downing Street was bombed in an air raid. This rendered his kitchen to rubble and nearly killed his cook who a few minutes earlier was lovingly tending to a pudding.
Feelers were put out for a suitable bomb proof location for the cabinet to plan the war effort and the chosen bunker was the basement of the nearby Treasury Building. Following VE Day Victory in Europe Day on 8 May , the lights of the Churchill War Rooms were turned out and everything in this secret underground headquarters was left in situ; picked in aspic as it were:. With its narrow corridors and low lighting you think that this is going to be an expensive, murky, boring, damp squib of a place.
Then step by step you become thrilled by the immensity of it. Inside this warren of narrow passages and rooms lies a whole underground community of what would have been people who all needed to work, eat, sleep, pee and plot the war. I saw no bathrooms and as many of them smoked and at least one smoked a cigar you can only imagine how fetid and obnoxious the air would have been in this windowless space.
The cabinet meeting rooms, the map room and the radio telephony rooms will thrill war buffs especially when we contrast it to the sophisticated technology that is at play today in the Russian Ukrainian conflict. The success of the second world war was dependent on low tech, crackly radio systems, coded messages and a paper map room with pins denoting enemy positions.
We see a man with a high degree of confidence in his importance and abilities. These were the days of war time rationing which spared no one from the lowliest, hungry and ragged urban dweller to the monarch and the prime minister. Churchill ensured he was spared the worst privations by obtaining dairy produce, vegetables and meat from his country estates. This allowed him to not only maintain his portly physique but to entertain lavishly. The private kitchen in the Churchill War Rooms is nothing more than a bleak cupboard.
