journal of the churchill center and societies - Winston Churchill

War Rooms...
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.
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. $
*PFI = Private Finance Initiative, a scheme whereby the
private sector pay for a building construction which is
then rented back to the government for a few decades, before
ownership reverts to the government.
FINEST HOUR IOS / 37