Today I went to the Churchill War Rooms, in Whitehall, which is a part of the Imperial War Museum. The War Rooms are rooms in an underground bunker that hosted Winston Churchill and his government in a (somewhat) bomb-proof area during the Second World War. They were used for information gathering, meetings, and also living quarters.

Historically, they are very interesting. You feel as if you’ve stepped back into a frozen piece of time, and seeing the resources available and the challenges faced by some of the bravest people in the nation is incredibly patriotic. The rooms are filled with artifacts, furniture, maps, and look exactly as they would have done in 1945- in fact one of the rooms had the lights turned out and the doors closed the day World War II ended, and was not opened again until the 70s. There’s also a very unbiased Churchill museum, and you can hear recordings of his speeches, including the very moving “never was so much owed by so many to so few” speech.

The bit I loved the most? The type face, fonts, and hand painted and hand drawn fonts everywhere. Here’s a selection of my favourites.

You can find out more about the War Rooms here. It’s pricy, and was FULL of tourists and school kids on a Sunday afternoon, so it may be worth calling in advance to find out when their least busy time is. Lots of the corridors are quite narrow and it can be quite overwhelming with hundreds of people shuffling through!