June 1, 2015

Finest Hour 108, Autumn 2000

Page 36

By PHIL REED


For the past few years I have been in severe danger of sounding like a squeaking door, the proverbial broken record and a clamorous news vendor combined. I cannot count the number of occasions on which I have said, in one form or another, “Watch This Space,” as I promise news of plans to extend the Cabinet War Rooms. Now, like Churchill in his Mansion House speech after victory at El Alamein (something I hear repeated on the CWR sound system several times each day—forgive me if I sink into his rhetoric), I can announce: “We have a victory!”

After six years of negotiations with the Treasury and its private sector partners, after the collapse of one PFI* scheme and its transformation into another, after a period which has seen a change of Director-Generals, the realisation of the American Air Museum and the Holocaust exhibition and the rise of the Imperial War Museum-North, the CWR has finally set its foot firmly on the path of its own expansion.

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As is the way with such long campaigns, the issue was resolved in a very short space of time, as all parties suddenly and very rudely found themselves up against immutable tight deadlines. After years of occasional meetings, drawn out correspondence and discussions over drinks at Departmental parties, in a matter of weeks a triangle of law firms, a bevy of consultants and a charm of government officials generated a pile of faxes, e-mails and notes of telephone conversations that now fill half a filing cabinet.

The saga began in 1994 with the first announcement of a PFI scheme to develop the building under which we dwell, known by its rather biblical sounding sobriquet of GOGGS, or, more prosaically, Government Offices Great George Street. This seemed to me to offer the last chance for the CWR to “reclaim” the territory that it once owned, but which had been cruelly annexed since the war by the Ministry of Defence Photography Unit and HM Treasury’s archive. Few people were even aware that what one sees today in the CWR is what it comprised in 1940; that by early 1941 it had grown by 200% to accommodate a dining and kitchen facility for Winston and Clementine Churchill, a bedroom for her and rooms for detectives, servants and select ministers; and that by 1943 it housed major elements of military intelligence, planning and deception.

The plan is to restore and open to die public the “Churchill suite” and ancillary rooms, to create an improved education and public information facility, to make a second shop to meet the growing demand, alongside a conference facility with all modern appurtenances, to make more entrances and exits (to accommodate anticipated greater numbers)—and! last but far from least—to establish, as an intrinsic part of the CWR, a museum covering the whole of Sir Winston Churchill’s life, career and achievements.

We now have firm legal agreements which will allow us to occupy these historic spaces in two phases by August 2002. The commercial developer of the GOGGS building, Stanhope pic, and its construction partner Bovis Lend Lease, have generously offered nearly half a million pounds worth of fee work, equipment and actual works to speed the project along and our consultants are beavering away to produce a full business plan, feasibility study and project presentation. And feelers are already out to find the funds necessary to realise the scheme which are currently loosely estimated at around eight million pounds.

Any mention I make of the scheme to interested parties is consistently greeted with huge enthusiasm and an assertion of its worthwhile nature and inevitable success. I tend to feel the same, but, professionally I cannot let myself think that realisation of the project—and particularly the fund raising—will be quite as straightforward as many people would have me believe. As I look at the prospects for the next few years, die words of Churchill’s 1942 Mansion House speech again ring in the background: “This is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is perhaps the end of the beginning.” Watch This Space!

Ironically, as I sign up for more of it, space is the one tiling I am currently running out of. I have spent the last ten Saturdays in the company of our equally keen (for keen read mad) architectural consultant, crawling hundreds of yards on our bellies under the shallow steel girders of the slab (where we were rewarded with a stillcoiled-up hundred-yard length of barbed wire [What, no Nazi spies caught in it, Phil? -Ed.] and a number of Second World War cigarette packets), wading through fetid water in the sub-basement (to find two pristine period pumps—and a lot of less-than-pristine detritus), and generally pillaging the Treasury for architectural reclamation: a rather elevated term to cover our snatching period furniture, light shades, spades, switches and signs. My office resembles that of the “Steptoes.” The Treasury’s corridors around here are tliose of a repossessor’s yard.

These exertions have combined with the efforts of those Friends who have kindly contributed small, but vital bits of office paraphernalia, to enable us to furnish several period rooms in our expansion. The solid support of the Treasury and the generosity of Stanhope and Bovis have set us well on our way to guaranteeing diat the first part of the expansion will be open within a matter of two to three years. I am confident that die small matter of several millions of pounds will be found and the whole “Churchill Project” completed within a matter of five to six years. As I always say: Watch This Space.


Mr. Reed ([email protected]) is curator of London’s Cabinet War Rooms. His article is reprinted by permission from the Imperial War Room Despatches, August 2000.

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