We returned to London a little bit sleepy from our overnight train ride from Edinburgh but were able to drop our luggage off at our hotel and headed off to see the “Churchill War Rooms”. We walked from our hotel past the Church of England Headquarters, Westminster Abbey, the Methodist Church of England, Whitehall buildings and the Parade grounds. The Cabinet War Rooms provided the secret underground headquarters for the core of the British government throughout the Second World War.

The fear that London would be the target of aerial bombardment had troubled the government since the First World War, and in 1938, the basement of a Whitehall building was chosen as the site for the Cabinet War Rooms. From 1940 to 1945, hundreds of men and women would spend thousands of vital hours here, and it soon became the inner sanctum of the British government. Following the surrender of the Japanese Forces, the doors to the Cabinet War Rooms were locked on 16 August 1945, and the complex was left undisturbed until Parliament ensured its preservation as a historic site in 1948. Knowledge of the site and access to it remained highly restricted until the late 1970s when the Imperial War Museum began the task of preserving the site and its contents, making them accessible to as wide an audience as possible. In 1984, the main war rooms opened to the public. In 2003, further restoration work opened the ‘Courtyard Rooms,’ the rooms where staff would eat, sleep, and work in safety.

In 2005 they added the only major museum in the world dedicated to Sir Winston Churchill. Its multimedia and uniquely engaging approach provide visitors with a comprehensive overview of Churchill’s life.

Photography was permitted but I refrained and concentrated on the venue and the Churchill Museum. You can get a feel of the faciity by viewing: https://www.iwm.org.uk/visits/churchill-war-rooms/about

In the afternoon, we headed over to the British Museum, which we missed on our planned first day as our original flight was cancelled. Not having the time we wanted, we just viewed the museum’s highlights.

The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art, and culture. Its permanent collection of eight million works is the largest in the world. It documents the story of human culture from its beginnings to the present. The British Museum was the first public national museum to cover all fields of knowledge. The museum was established in 1753, largely based on the collections of the Anglo-Irish physician and scientist Sir Hans Sloane. It first opened to the public in 1759, in Montagu House, on the site of the current building. The museum’s expansion over the following 250 years was largely a result of British colonization and resulted in the creation of several branch institutions, or independent spin-offs, the first being the Natural History Museum in 1881. The right to ownership of some of its most well-known acquisitions, notably the Greek Elgin Marbles and the Egyptian Rosetta Stone, is subject to long-term disputes and repatriation claims. Some of the displayed objects we were able to see included: Tang dynasty figures, the Rosetta Stone, and the Hoa Hakananai’a – A colossal ancestor figure from Rapa Nui/Easter Island.

To the Churchilll War Rooms

British Museum