Not long before the beginning of the Second World War, Winston Churchill and others decided to transform the basement beneath a civil service building adjacent to Parliament Square to provide emergency Cabinet Offices in the event of war. The space was duly converted and reinforced and became the Cabinet War Rooms for the duration of the war after 1940. Deep underground, beneath a 60 foot slab of concrete, the War Cabinet would meet in the sound proofed “Cabinet Room” and plan Britain’s war strategies. Winston Churchill would sit in a large wooden seat and chair the Cabinet meetings that were made up of coalition ministers from all parties. These meetings would often take place whilst noisy air-raids were bombing London up on street level.

By the end of the war in 1945, the rooms had expanded and covered more than three acres. There was a mini-hospital, a canteen, dormitories, even a shooting range! It was like a little village deep in the bowels of the earth.

The Map Room was one of the most important in the subterranean warren beneath London. It was here that Chiefs of Staff and Cabinet Ministers would pore over information received from the different war fronts. Maps still hang on the walls showing theatres of war from the Far East to the Mediterranean to the Atlantic Ocean. And you can still see the long table containing the old fashioned Bakelite telephones in red, black, green and white. The Map Room remained the hub of activity right up until V.J. day in 1945

Churchill’s personal bedroom is still there as is the “Trans-Atlantic Telephone Room” where Churchill had a direct “hotline” phone link to the U.S. President in Washington. “X-Ray” was the codename for this state-of-the-art telephone scrambler that was so large that it had to be housed in a store-room at Selfridges department store in Oxford Street.

The Churchill Museum tells the life story of Britain’s Prime Minister during the Second World War and again in the 1950s. You can learn about his childhood, his days as a journalist in South Africa, his first rise to political power, the “wilderness years” that followed, and then the period leading up to the Second World War known as the “Gathering Storm” years.

There is also a long interactive table called “Lifeline”. It is a computerised “filing cabinet” covering the years, months, weeks and days of Winston Churchill’s extraordinary life. It uses cutting edge technology and vividly brings to life the history of a man who in 2002 was voted “The Greatest Briton” ever in a BBC national public vote.