Churchill War Rooms — The Underground Nerve Centre

Located in Westminster, London, the Churchill War Rooms served as a secret underground command centre where Winston Churchill's War Cabinet met 115 times during World War II. Operational from 27 August 1939, the complex featured a 24-hour Map Room and a top-secret transatlantic phone line disguised as a toilet for encrypted calls with President Roosevelt.

London · from the walk “Secrets of Westminster & MI6” · audio ~4 min · Generated

Churchill War Rooms, Clive Steps, King Charles Street, London SW1A 2AQ

Where was the secret transatlantic phone line hidden inside the Churchill War Rooms in London?

Right beneath your feet... buried under the streets of Westminster... lies one of the most extraordinary secrets of the Second World War. The Church-ill War Rooms.......... In nineteen thirty-six, the Air Ministry believed that enemy bombing could cause up to two hundred thousand casualties per Week. The government panicked. Plans were drawn up to evacuate the Prime Minister from London entirely... but there was a problem. If Londoners learned their leader had fled to safety... morale would collapse.......... So instead, in June nineteen thirty-eight, Sir Hastings Ismay ordered a survey of Whitehall to find a suitable underground shelter. They chose the basement of the New Public Offices building, near Parliament, with its strong steel frame. The rooms became fully operational on the twenty-seventh of August, nineteen thirty-nine... just One week before Britain declared war on Germany.......... Down here, Church-ill's War Cabinet met one hundred and fifteen times. The Map Room never slept... staffed around the clock by officers of the Royal Navy, Army, and Royal Air Force. The phones on the central desk were called the "beauty chorus" because they would light up and flash when ringing. They made NO sound. Church-ill despised excess noise... so even the typewriters were special noiseless Remington models.......... Now here is a detail most people walk right past. There was a tiny cupboard that everyone assumed was Church-ill's private toilet. But it was no toilet at all. It housed a top-secret transatlantic telephone line, using cutting-edge encryption technology called Sig-saly. The actual scrambling equipment was so enormous it had to be hidden in the basement of Selfridges department store on Oxford Street! The first secure call between Church-ill and President Roosevelt took place on the fifteenth of July, nineteen forty-three.......... And one last extraordinary detail. When the Imperial War Museum took over in the early nineteen eighties... they found three sugar cubes tucked in an envelope at the back of a desk drawer in the Map Room. They belonged to Wing Commander John Heagerty. Sugar was rationed during the war, and you can Still see where he carefully shaved tiny bits off one cube... presumably for his cup of tea. For forty years, those little cubes sat there in the dark... a perfectly preserved reminder that this place was not just a command centre. It was a world of real people, working through the longest nights of the twentieth century.

Unlocked for everyone by someone who walked here

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