Churchill War Rooms

The Churchill War Rooms lie beneath the government buildings of Whitehall, a warren of low, reinforced basements where Winston Churchill and his war cabinet directed Britain's Second World War. Opened as an emergency headquarters days before war broke out in 1939, the complex stayed in constant use until the lights were switched off in 1945, and much of it survives exactly as it was left.

The preserved rooms are the draw. Visitors file past the Map Room, its walls still stuck with pins and coloured thread tracking convoys and front lines, the Cabinet Room where ministers met under a concrete slab, and Churchill's own bedroom and the transatlantic telephone room disguised as a private lavatory. The sense of a moment frozen in time, cigarette tins and sugar cubes included, is the site's particular power.

Alongside the bunker sits the Churchill Museum, opened in 2005, a biographical gallery tracing the prime minister's long and contradictory career from soldier and journalist to wartime leader and postwar statesman. Interactive displays and personal artefacts, including his famous siren suits, flesh out the man behind the speeches.

For visitors the War Rooms form one branch of the Imperial War Museums and are among the busiest historic sites in London, so timed tickets reserved ahead are advisable. The entrance is on Horse Guards Road beside St James's Park, within easy reach of Westminster. An audio guide is included, and most people spend around two hours underground before emerging back into the daylight of the park. The cramped, dimly lit corridors leave a strong impression of the strain under which decisions were taken, and the café and shop at the exit provide a gentle return to the present day.