Visit Churchill War Rooms

Churchill War Rooms, part of Imperial War Museums (IWM), includes the original Cabinet War Rooms, the wartime bunker which sheltered Churchill and his staff during the Blitz.

These historic rooms once buzzed with planning and plotting, strategies and secrets. Today visitors can explore the underground headquarters for themselves, see where Churchill and his War Cabinet met, sometimes late into the night, and look through the lens of history into the Map Room, where the books and charts have remained exactly where they were left on the day the lights were switched off in 1945.

The Churchill Museum, also part of Churchill War Rooms, has a vast collection of objects, which together explore the stories of Churchill’s life and legacy. Highlights from the current display include a rattle used by Churchill as a baby, a drawing by Graham Sutherland commemorating Churchill’s 80th birthday and the flag used to drape Churchill’s coffin at his State funeral.

UK schools, further education colleges and youth groups can learn about leadership and decision-making and how lives in Britain were affected by the Second World War by booking a self-guided site visit or a site visit with a Learning Session. Learning Sessions use original artefacts, documents, photographs, posters and film from our collections. IWM also undertakes and supports academic research, and our collections are open to the public.

Churchill War Rooms are open daily except for the Christmas holiday and many of our collection items are available for non-commercial usage at the IWM website.

IWM, including Churchill War Rooms, tells the story of people who have lived, fought and died in conflicts involving Britain and the Commonwealth since the First World War. Our unique Collections, made up of the every day and the exceptional, reveal stories of people, places ideas and events. Using these, we tell vivid personal stories and create powerful physical experiences across our five museums that reflect the realities of war as both a destructive and creative force. We challenge people to look at conflict from different perspectives, enriching their understanding of the causes, course and consequences of war and its impact on people’s lives.