Museums

Battle of Britain Bunker

The underground operations room from which 11 Group fought the Battle of Britain, with the plotting table set to 15 September 1940.

Also in Secrets & Espionage.

Sixty feet under the grass at RAF Uxbridge is the operations room of No. 11 Group, the fighter group that covered London and the south-east, and it was from here, not from Dowding's headquarters at Bentley Priory, that the squadrons were actually scrambled. The room was part of the first integrated air defence system in the world: radar and Observer Corps reports came in, women of the WAAF pushed blocks across the map table with rakes, and the controller on the balcony above chose which squadrons to send, their states shown on the board of lights on the wall. Churchill watched from that balcony on 16 August 1940 and said in the car afterwards the words about so much owed by so many. The table is set as it was on 15 September, the day the Luftwaffe threw everything at London and lost. The same room controlled the air cover for D-Day. The bunker opened as a museum in 1985 and Hillingdon Council built a visitor centre over it in 2018, with the descent into the room itself by timed tour.

Where

Wren Avenue, UB10 0GG

Nearest station

Uxbridge · 14 min walk

Hours

NearbyMuseums

• Heath Robinson Museum1 hr 39 min walk
• Old Speech Room Gallery and Museum, Harrow School2 hr 1 min walk
• Osterley Park and House2 hr 1 min walk

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