Secret areas of Winston Churchill's underground bunker, the nerve center for British military planning and intelligence in World War II, are to be opened to the public for the first time.
Access will be allowed to Churchill's private quarters, showing a personal side of the wartime prime minister, director of London's Cabinet War Rooms museum Phil Reed said.
Churchill, who died at the age of 90 in 1965, led Britain between 1940 and 1945 and again from 1951 to 1955.
The rooms, hidden for 60 years, are to be renovated in a $17 million project and will open in 2003, joining parts of the labyrinthine Cabinet War Rooms, which have been open since 1984.
It was in these dank and airless rooms, not far from his official residence in Downing Street, central London, where Churchill had coded telephone conversations with President Franklin D. Roosevelt, plotted campaigns with generals and slept during the heaviest nights of bombing.
The newly revealed rooms will include the family dining room and the kitchen where Churchill's cook, undeterred by food rationing, worked to sate the leader's famous appetite.
"These inauspicious yet historically important rooms have been hidden from the public for too long. This is where the country's leading figures ate, slept, sought refuge from the wartime bombs and made momentous decisions," Reed told reporters.
Reed also plans to open a Churchill museum in 2005, the 60th anniversary year of the end of the war, housing paintings, papers and school reports of Churchill.
Churchill's grandson, also called Winston Churchill, told reporters he remembered playing toy trains with his grandfather in the underground bunker. He said his grandfather would have approved of a project that taught people about the past.
"It is only by knowing where you're coming from that you can have any hope of knowing where you're going," Churchill quoted his grandfather as having said.