Churchill War Rooms United Kingdom

Legendary

The British government's underground command center during WWII.

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When workers unlocked these rooms decades after the war, they found three sugar cubes hidden in a desk drawer. Sugar was rationed during the war, so somebody had been saving them, then left in such a hurry they never came back.

The rooms sit underground in central London, beneath the Treasury building on Whitehall. The British government picked the spot in 1938, and building work started that same year.

Nobody built the rooms from scratch. Workers took an ordinary basement and turned it into a secret headquarters in just a few months.

They put sandbags in the alcoves and swapped glass doors for heavy wooden ones. They added steel doors, air locks, and telephone lines running to the rest of the country.

The rooms opened on 27 August 1939. One week later, Britain declared war on Germany.

Winston Churchill became prime minister in 1940. When he first walked into the main meeting room, he said this was the room from which he would direct the war.

He meant it. His War Cabinet met down here 115 times, usually when German bombs were falling hardest on London above them.

Around 500 people worked in the rooms, and many slept there too. The Map Room stayed staffed 24 hours a day for six straight years, tracking ships, troops, and planes across the world.

A thick slab of concrete sat above them, in places up to five feet deep. It was meant to protect everyone below from the bombing.

Japan surrendered in August 1945, and the war ended. On 16 August, staff switched off the lights in the Map Room for the first time in six years, locked the doors, and walked away.

The rooms sat untouched for decades. The Imperial War Museum reopened them to the public in 1984, with pins still stuck in the maps and papers still on the desks.

See Churchill's bedroom and the Map Room, left exactly as staff abandoned them. Look for the transatlantic phone room, disguised as a toilet so nobody would guess what was inside. Visit the Churchill Museum next door to see his hats, cigars, and even his childhood letters.