During the Second World War, Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his cabinet went underground to continue meeting and planning the war effort. A maze of tiny bunker rooms still sit beneath what is now the Treasury building. The Cabinet War Rooms became fully operational on 27 August 1939, a week before Britain declared war on Germany, but Churchill wasn’t interested in going underground until Germany’s Blitz bombing offensive began in September 1940.
Once 10 Downing Street was bombed he convinced even his cook (whose kitchen was hit) to go below ground. “Churchill’s War Cabinet met here 115 times, most often during the Blitz and the later German V-weapon offensive,” explains the explains the Imperial War Rooms website. “The Cabinet War Rooms were in use 24 hours a day until 16 August 1945, when the lights were turned off in the Map Room for the first time in six years.”
