The modest aim of the museum’s backers was to create “the benchmark for personality museums in the 21st century” and I’d say they’ve pulled it off.

There are screens to touch, evolving maps to study, and even an electronic pond (a la the one at the Churchill’s family estate, Chartwell) that you can fish in. Paradoxically, the effect of all this cutting edge gimcrackery—and this is intentional—is a visitor experience that is “tactile and pre-digital” to use the words of graphic designer Nick Bell, whose team collobrated on the project. “We tried to reflect a mid-century, analog, paper-driven world using [current] technology,” Mr Bell says, and to “retain [for people] a sense of opening dusty files in an archive.”

The “dusty files” refer particularly to the Lifeline, a 3-foot-wide, 40-foot-long digital display table that cost more than half a million dollars and has to be seen to be believed.