Tickets for the Churchill War Rooms in London cost £33, but you might get more out of booking a more expansive Churchill and World War II walking tour.
What are the Churchill War Rooms?
The Churchill War Rooms in London is an underground museum that includes the United Kingdom Government’s base of operations during World War II. The subterranean complex was built under the offices of Whitehall to offer relative safety.
Churchill War Rooms ticket prices and availability
At the time of writing, tickets for the Churchill War Rooms cost £33. They are timed tickets, so you have to pick a particular time to show up. Booking online in advance is highly advisable, as availability for many time slots can be low.
Tours of the Churchill War Rooms
If tickets for the Churchill War Rooms have sold out, another option is to book onto a tour that includes the Churchill War Rooms.
There are several such tours available, and there’s an argument for them being a better investment than just buying an entrance ticket.
The tours also look at other sites related to Churchill and World War II in London, giving a more rounded picture.
Inside the Churchill War Rooms
The Cabinet War Rooms have been opened to the public in a bid to shed a bit of light on what life was like for those in charge of the war, and it’s nowhere near the opulence you’d suspect. The complex is a gloomy one, the maze of corridors having the vibe of a deserted school, shut down for summer.
Things don’t get much more grandiose when you get to the private quarters. Each of the VIPs has a grotty little room, with an austere single bed and a desk. They’d sometimes be down here for weeks, beavering away without the faintest hope of getting some fresh air or daylight.
The central map room must have been chaos. Composite maps cover the walls, peppered with pinholes that trace the routes of ships and planes. Phones lie all over the place, and would have been ringing on an almost constant basis. A more stressful workplace is difficult to imagine, and it comes as no surprise to hear that the day the war ended, everyone simply walked out, leaving things as they were. They’re still in the same state today.
The Churchill Museum in London
The Churchill War Rooms also contains the Churchill Museum. It’s an impressive exploration of the man often regarded as the greatest ever Briton. In creating it there must have been the temptation to make it into a shrine, as monuments to war heroes often are. Any museum in France that has a section of Charles De Gaulle, for example, would have you believe that he won the war single-handedly and did a lot of good work for charity.
But Winston Churchill is painted warts and all. He was a near slave-driver who expected people to put in the same ridiculous hours that he did, yet still commanded respect; he had some very old-fashioned – some would say racist – beliefs about the Empire; he had overseen high profile military failures before the Second World War. A lot of this is not exactly flattering.
His eccentricities are also explored, and there are plenty of them to go round. He’s pictured in his ridiculous oversized romper suits that he wore for ease of getting them on. Elsewhere, you hear about how he worked in bed, dictating notes whilst dressed as a Mandarin, and learn that he used cuddly toys to separate books on his shelves.
Winston Churchill’s toilet
If there’s one part of the Churchill War Rooms that sums up the differences between today’s stringent security and the past’s almost wilful neglect of it, though, it’s an old broom cupboard. This is where Churchill had his super-secret direct line to the American President. The first ever hotline, conversations were protected by extraordinary levels of scrambling technology, but the room itself had barely anything to guard it. Instead of soldiers being posted outside and huge locking mechanisms being used, the entrance was simply disguised as Churchill’s own private toilet. No-one ever even thought to check whether it really was.
More London ideas
Other London articles on Planet Whitley include:
- The cheeky way to get cheaper London Eye tickets.
- How to get free entry to St Paul’s Cathedral.
- The part of the Tower of London you should visit first.
For a wide range of London tour and experience ideas, have a look over here.
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