One of London’s most fascinating museums is the secret command center used by Winston Churchill and his staff during the most harrowing moments of World War II, when it looked like England might become German. We regard the period with nostalgia, but a staggering 30,000 civilians were killed by some 18,000 tons of bombs in London alone and more than 65,000 innocent people were killed in Britain as a whole. Here, in the cellar of the Treasury building, practically next door to 10 Downing St., the core of the British government hunkered down where one errant bomb could have incinerated the lot of them.
When the war ended, the bunker was abandoned, but everything was left just as it was in August 1945. When it came time to make it a museum, everything was intact—from pushpins tracing convoy movements on yellowed world maps to rationed sugar cubes hidden in the back of a clerk’s desk drawer. Although the hideout functioned like a small town for 526 people, with sleeping quarters, kitchens, radio rooms, and other facilities that would enable leaders to live undetected for months on end, it feels a lot more like your old elementary school, with its painted brick, linoleum walls, and round clocks.
Midway through, you disappear into the Churchill Museum, surely the most cutting-edge biographical museum open at this moment. Exhaustively displaying every conceivable facet of his life (his bowtie, his bowler hat, and even the original front door to 10 Downing St.), it covers the exalted statesman’s life from entitled birth through his antics as a journalist in South Africa (where he escaped a kidnapping and became a national hero) to his stints as prime minister. You even learn his favorite cigar (Romeo y Julieta) and brandy (Hine). The entire museum is atwitter with multimedia displays, movies, and archival sounds, but the centerpiece will blow you away: a 15m-long (50-ft.) Lifeline Interactive table, like a long file cabinet illuminated by projections, that covers every month of Churchill’s life. Touch a date, and the file “opens” with 4,600 pages of rare documents, photos, or, for critical dates in history, animated Easter eggs that temporarily consume the entire table (select the original Armistice Day or the Titanic sinking to see what I mean). You could play for hours, dipping into his life day by day.