The heart of the British war effort

“THIS IS the room from which I will direct the war,” declared Winston Churchill shortly after becoming prime minister in 1940, as he toured the warren of underground rooms built to endure the German air raids on London.

Here, amidst vermin, the constant hum of a frequently malfunctioning air supply system and the stench from the lack of proper toilet facilities, he presided over 115 meetings of the war cabinet and many more of the defence committee.

Built in 1938 as a temporary refuge in case of air raid attacks, the bunker became a second home to dozens of civil servants, military personnel, and Churchill himself between 1940 and 1946, and was the backdrop for many of the key decisions that decided the outcome of the war. Built beneath the Treasury, a short walk from Downing Street, the rooms were 10 feet underground and constructed of reinforced concrete with steel roofs, but would not have survived a direct hit from the Luftwaffe. Given the short flying distance to continental Europe, Germany’s conquest of Belgium and France in 1940 made air attacks on London a certainty – the first time such a grim reality was faced by a government. Churchill and his cabinet assumed the bombing would inflict 200,000 casualties a week, whereas the total wartime deaths from air raids amounted to 147,000, of which 80,000 were in London.