The closest the War Rooms came to being directly hit was in September 1940, when a bomb fell on Clive Steps, leaving a small crater near what is now the visitor entrance to the site.ĭarkest Hour's Map Room and "beauty chorus." / Sarah Greenwood You can see its kind of lack of bombproof-ness everywhere you go, especially when you look up into the ceiling and you can see the gigantic layer of concrete that they had to add to the ceiling in order to try to improve the protection.” "The war is not necessarily a surprise, but the War Rooms are not a lavishly purpose-built facility. “One of the most important things to understand about the Cabinet War Rooms is they’re an extremely improvised space," Ian Kikuchi, senior curator, Second World War at Imperial War Museums, tells Mental Floss. Greenwood noted the War Rooms’ contrast to the Nazi sites for World War II operations depicted in the 2008 film Valkyrie: “It’s very sharp and organized and clear and cold colors,” she says. The recreated typists' bay, on the set of Darkest Hour at Ealing Studios. There’s this forest of beams from when they brought in a Naval architect to shore the whole thing up when they realized that it was not bombproof.” She remembers being most struck by how apparent it was that this all-important nerve center of war operations was “cobbled together at the 11th hour, furniture brought in from home. Greenwood, along with other members of the art department, visited the Churchill War Rooms about half a dozen times. Because we’d been to the real War Rooms, we knew what we were trying to capture.” “And I think that came from knowing what it was going to be like. “I designed, drew up the rough plans and everything over a weekend, and when I showed it to Joe, he was just like-and this is very rare-he was like, ‘Yep, that’s great.’ There were very few changes that we made to that,” Greenwood says. Wright has spoken about how Greenwood often helpfully challenges his choices, but her plans for the War Rooms were an unusual instance of immediate agreement between the two filmmakers. Gary Oldman and Lily James as Elizabeth Layton, Churchill's secretary, in the recreated Map Room in Darkest Hour (2017). “We argue a lot," Greenwood tells Mental Floss, laughing, of their longtime collaboration. With the exception of 2015’s Pan, she has worked on every feature that Wright’s directed, plus two of his miniseries. Greenwood came to Darkest Hour as a longtime collaborator of director Joe Wright ( Atonement, Pride & Prejudice). The Darkest Hour crew spent three and a half weeks filming scenes that take place in the War Rooms, recreated by production designer Sarah Greenwood and her team at West London’s Ealing Studios. Located underneath the Treasury building in Westminster, it covered about 3 acres and accommodated up to 528 Cabinet and supporting staff members. © IWMĪs war dawned and Churchill took the reins after the period of appeasement led by his predecessor Neville Chamberlain, the humble underground government storage space was hurriedly converted into a military information hub. The Cabinet War Room as it’s seen today within Churchill War Rooms.
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