Churchill War Rooms

You're at the foot of Clive Steps, below a vast government building. Underneath it, in the basement, are the Churchill War Rooms, the bunker from which Britain was run through the Second World War. The rooms were ready on the twenty-seventh of August 1939, a week before Britain declared war. Churchill's War Cabinet met down here more than a hundred times. A concrete slab up to three metres thick was later added overhead, but a big enough bomb could still have broken through. The heart of the bunker was the Map Room. Pins on the charts showed where every ship and convoy was, and when a ship was sunk, its pin came out. One map is pocked with hundreds of thousands of tiny holes. On D-Day, Churchill spent the whole day watching it, because the King had stopped him from going to sea to see the landings himself. The day after Japan surrendered in August 1945, the Map Room lights were switched off for the first time in six years. The door was shut and everything left as it was. One officer had even left his sugar ration in a desk drawer. It was found decades later. Next stop: Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, about 500 metres or 6 minutes along Horse Guards Road, then left on Great George Street to Parliament Square.