Revealed: Churchill's spartan Second World War quarters gets overhaul

The only luxuries in the room are a porcelain jug emblazoned with a royal crest and a fan mounted on the drab beige wall. A painted door sign is the sole clue to its significance – it reads: "Mrs Churchill."

This spartan space, buried deep beneath Whitehall, is the wartime bedroom of the wife of Winston Churchill, and next month it will be opened to the public for the first time.

The chamber, four metres square, is one of nine rooms, including the Churchills' private dining suite and kitchen, that have benefited from a £7m renovation of the British Government's Second World War bunker. The overhaul of the Cabinet War Rooms, underneath the Treasury building, will double the area of the complex accessible to visitors when it opens on 8 April.

Managers of the museum are hoping to benefit from a recent revival of interest in all things Churchillian.

Britain's wartime leader was the runaway winner of the BBC's Great Britons survey last year and the subject of an award-winning television film starring Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave that won high praise on both sides of the Atlantic. A biography by the late Roy Jenkins is also in the best-sellers' list.

Despite suffering a downturn of 40,000 visitors a year in the aftermath of 11 September, the War Rooms have fared better than many London attractions. Last year they were visited by 290,000 people.

Peter Reed, the museum's director, said: "I think the turn of the millennium inspired a reflective attitude and although the British are loath to put people on pedestals, it seems Churchill is the exception."

A preview of the new rooms yesterday revealed that, unlike the air-conditioned and computerised bunkers of their modern successors, Churchill and his wife Clementine, as well as dozens of generals and senior civil servants in the complex, enjoyed few creature comforts. But the couple's private area did contain a walnut table and a sideboard identical to one currently in use in Downing Street, and the area was carpeted, a privilege not granted to lower ranks in the bunker.

Churchill hated being underground so much that he only used the dining room three times, preferring instead to take his meals and daily bottle of champagne in his quarters at 10 Downing Street. But he did begrudgingly agree to sleep in in the bunker from where he worked regularly until 3am.

The complex, which opened in 1941, offers a snapshot of life at the nerve centre of the British war effort, right down to specially silenced typewriters ordered by the notoriously tetchy prime minister because he could not stand noise.

The renovation is the first stage of a project to create a £6m Churchill museum from what used to be the Treasury archives. The museum, which still needs to raise £3m from public and private donors, will open in 2005 to coincide with the 60th anniversary of the end of the Second World War and 40 years since Churchill's death.