“The Cabinet War Rooms, especially the bedrooms, evoke a period of deprivation and duty.” That’s what Lonely Planet says about one of London’s top tourist attractions.

I want to emphasize the word “evoke”.

Whenever you’re creating a tourist attraction, the key word, it seems to me, is evoke. You want to be evoking. A lot. The more evoking the better. Can you evoke too much, can you go overboard with a surfeit of evocativeness? I frankly doubt it, but let me know if you disagree, or if you can think of an example of a place that’s too evocative for its own good.

It’s easier to evoke if you’ve got ‘the place where it actually happened’. I wrote about this, in the case of Memphis and the Lorraine Motel where Martin Luther King was murdered, in an earlier post. And I wrote about the Cabinet War Rooms in London for The Wall Street Journal back a few years ago when they opened up the new, adjacent Churchill Museum:

On display here are numerous bits of classic Churchilliana: among them, the well-chomped, half-consumed cigars (the image-conscious Churchill, understand, would never smoke a stogie to an unflattering nub) and the polka-dot bowtie famous from the 1941 portrait by photographer Yosuf Karsh (which, somehow disappointingly, turns out to have been a clip-on).

The full article continues here.