Biography | Winston Churchill — He Took the War Cabinet Underground at These Clive Steps

People treat Churchill's war as a story told from Downing Street balconies.

The working rooms that mattered after May 1940 sat under the Treasury, reached from Clive Steps on King Charles Street.

The Cabinet War Rooms had been fitted in the basement of the New Public Offices from 1938 and were declared operational on 27 August 1939, days before Britain declared war.

Neville Chamberlain's war cabinet used the suite only once, in October 1939.

Churchill became prime minister on 10 May 1940, the day Germany opened the western offensive.

He inspected the Cabinet Room that month and made it the place from which the war cabinet would meet when London was under threat.

The Map Room ran around the clock. Officers of the three services kept the charts current and sent daily summaries to the King, the prime minister, and the Chiefs of Staff.

A slab of concrete a metre and a half thick was added from late 1940 as the Blitz made the street above a target.

Churchill disliked sleeping underground and used the bedroom only for occasional rest.

The rooms stayed in use until August 1945, after Japan surrendered, then were left as they stood.

Imperial War Museums opened them to the public in 1984. The Cabinet Room and the Map Room still hold the tables, maps, and ashtrays of the war years.

Stand at Clive Steps and the point is not drama. It is how close the war government sat to Whitehall, and how little of that work ever needed a window.

Photo: Churchill War Rooms, Clive Steps, Wikimedia Commons