February - The Churchill War Rooms

It's February! And so far so good on the "One-Blog-a-Month" Resolution.

I have just finished reading Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life, a considerable portion of which takes place in London during the Blitz. It just so happens that this month’s venue of choice was the Churchill War Rooms, and it must be said that each experience heightened the other considerably.

The British attitude of a “stiff upper lip” was never so tested as it was during the Blitz, and the courageously “Keep Calm and Carry On” response of Brits in the 1940s is deeply ingrained in our image of ourselves as a nation. Both in Atkinson’s novel, and in many works from the time – such as Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love - one important theme is the idea that getting oneself to safety by leaving the UK during the war was tantamount to betraying the nation.

And the Cabinet War Rooms were built with that in mind. No British Prime Minister would flee to the countryside while bombs were falling on London. They would remain in the thick of it, in a bunker built to keep those in charge of the country alive while they got on with fighting the second terrible war of the century.

In 1936, the Air Ministry posited that, should war break out and the enemy embark on an aerial bombing of London, it could result in up to 200,000 casualties a week. Under these circumstances, it was thought that key government offices would be better scattered away from the centre of the city though – as someone quite rightly pointed out – it might not be great for morale if the PM was seen scurrying out of London as soon as war was declared. Instead they decided to take proceedings underground, beginning work on a temporary emergency government centre in the basement of the New Public Offices building in 1938.

This work involved soundproofing, adding ventilation, installing communications, and reinforcing the basement, which included adding a 5-feet-thick layer of concrete known as “the Slab”. The War Rooms became fully operational in August 1939, a week before Britain declared war on Germany, but are most associated with Churchill, who didn’t arrive until May 1940. The Cabinet room he described as “the room from which I will direct the war”, and this he certainly did, holding 115 Cabinet meetings there until the German V-weapon bombing campaign came to an end in 1945.

Who knew Andrew Lloyd Webber worked at the Churchill War Rooms?

Along with the Cabinet Room, the Map Room was the most important room in the facility, constantly in use and manned 24-hours a day by naval, army, and air force officers. There were rooms for typists and switchboard operators, and the Transatlantic Telephone Room where Churchill could talk to President Roosevelt over a secure line, through the SIGSALY code-scrambling encrypted telephone installed in the basement of Selfridges. There were also kitchens, Churchill’s private dining room, dormitories for staff, and private bedrooms for officers and ministers.

But many of the men and women who worked at the War Rooms every day did not sleep there, instead making their way home at the end of the day and back in again every morning, like a regular 9-5 job. The droves of these day-to-day typists and switchboard operators were the inspiration behind this week’s outfit. The women who would spend evenings huddled in basements and on Tube platforms while their homes were blown to bits, and then would get up the next day and head in to work as usual.

My interpretation of their daily uniform is – of course – a fairly loose one. Not sure these silver shoes would have stood up well to the rubble-laden London streets, but nothing says 1940s like a good old tea dress. The beret felt suitably wartime – though I imagine red might have been considered a bit flashy. Still, walking down along past the Treasury building in my tea dress and my lace up shoes, it wasn’t difficult to imagine myself another typist heading underground for wartime work.

Walking through the War Rooms’ small corridors, you cannot avoid imagining what it must have been like to have spent day after day, evening after evening, trapped underground in hot, smelly, cramped conditions. The “underground nucleus of Britain’s war effort” was not built to be pleasant – Churchill almost always opted to sleep above ground at number 10, deciding to face bombs rather than spend the night safe in his airless, windowless chamber. But the museum, which has been part of the Imperial War Museum since 1984, has also skilfully captured the positive aspects of the War Rooms – the camaraderie, the feeling of security, and that tenacious Blitz-time spirit of the Brits who worked there.

The Churchill War Rooms details

Opening times = Every Day, 9:30am-6pm

Admission = £19 for Adults, £9.50 for children

Closest Tube station = Westminster

Coat - M&S
Dress - Lindy Bop "Amelia" dress
Shoes - ASOS
Beret - M&S

January - The Wallace Collection

New Year’s Resolution 2017: Get back into blogging. 

In my current job, I do a lot of blogging –somewhere in the region of 3000-7500 words a week…on top of everything else. So I have made the decision to have another crack at dressing up in London… with the slightly more realistic goal of writing one blog a month. Fingers crossed. To begin, I managed (finally) to visit a London landmark which has been on my list since I was at university, and I can’t believe I left it so long. The Wallace Collection in Manchester Square is an utter gem, and the more I explore it, the more I like it.

Originally, this discreet, underrated attraction was on my list when I was writing my third-year dissertation on Fashion and the French Revolution because the it houses one of the finest 18^th-century French painting collections in the world - including works which once belonged to Marie-Antoinette (meh) and Madame de Pompadour (quelle babe). But, my goodness, it does not stop there. This is the collection that keeps on giving – there is a fabulous range of 17^th-century Dutch and Flemish painting, one of the best collections of French furniture outside the Louvre, a whole room of gorgeous Canalettos, hung on pale Grand-canal-blue silk wallpaper, a vast array of arms and armour, and one of the world’s leading collections of Sèvres porcelain. And those are just the bits I paid attention to! This is the sort of place you want to keep coming back to, with more to discover and delight in every time.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  

Hertford House (where the Wallace Collection lives) was the London townhouse of the Seymour family – the Marquesses of Hertford. And a more confusingly-twisted family you’d be hard-pressed to find. I suppose such is the nature of old-timey aristocracy, but every time I tried to research a particular family member, I ended up getting hopelessly tangled in a web of people who all seemed to share permutations of the same name. Rather than bother trying to sort the Seymours from the Seymour-Conways and the Ingram-Seymour-Conways, or the Barons Beauchamp from the Dukes of Somerset from the Earls of Yarmouth (all of whom, by the way, seemed to be called Francis) I decided to pay attention to the only one who mattered – illegitimate son of the 4^th Marquess: Richard Wallace.

Behold Sir Richard Wallace - Modestly tucked away over a door-frame!

Despite having a skint nobleman (who refused to acknowledge him, but still made him work as his assistant) for a father, Sir Richard Wallace turned out to be quite a rich – and quite a lovely – man. Raised in Paris by his grandmother, the French capital became his spiritual home, providing him with a wife, a house, the perfect hunting ground for great art, innumerable opportunities to be charitable, and his final resting place. During the violence of the Siege of Paris and the Paris Commune in 1871, Wallace chose to stay in the city, rather than run off home to Britain or back to his nice, safe estate, and won the love and esteem of the Parisian people for setting up a hospital and ambulance system for the needy and the wounded. It is estimated that, by the end of the siege, he had personally contributed the equivalent of $6.5m by modern standards to helping those who needed helping. As thanks, he had a balloon and a boulevard named after him, as well as being awarded the Legion d’Honneur and becoming a Baron. He moved back to London in 1872, and spent the next 15 years doing up Hertford House and creating a suitable home for his magnificent art collection.

And what a job he did. Entering the house, on a grey January Saturday, you are immediately struck by the warmth and beauty of the place. I couldn’t believe it wasn’t packed – get on it people, you’re missing out! Each room is hung with beautiful, silk wallpaper and a recent rehang two years ago has seen the collection organised by nationality. The result is a seamless, flowing experience, with every room feeling like a beautiful capsule of the best of its time. My favourite rooms were the pastel-coloured chambers dedicated to Rococo Watteaus and frilly Fragonards (including one picture which Frozen fans might recognise…) as well as the ones with walls covered with daft De Greuze paintings of sad children holding animals. But the newly-refurbished Great Gallery is a joy as well. Flooded with natural light, the new ceiling has been returned to how it was during Wallace’s time in the 1870s, and does true justice to the Collection’s most famous pieces – such as Frans Hals’s famous Laughing Cavalier.

Anyway – enough about the art, more about the clothes! Well, a 50s-style swing dress may not be era-appropriate, but sure did match nicely with the wallpaper. And the pink velvet shoes went perfectly with the Wes Anderson-esque restaurant, originally named the Café Bagatelle after Wallace’s final home in Paris and where we enjoyed a superior lunch post-wander.

Apologies for the length of post, I really could ramble for hours about this lovely place – and therein lies its charm. The building itself is as lovely as the art displayed within it, it’s right in the centre of London and – most excitingly of all – it is absolutely FREE! Take a detour next time you’re on Oxford Street and experience an hour or two of true beauty.

Dress - The "Myrtle" dress, Lindy Bop
Shoes - ASOS
Necklace - EcclecticEccentricity

The Wallace Collection details

Opening times = Monday-Sunday, 10am-5pm

Admission = Totally free!

Closest Tube station = Bond Street