Bletchley Park is the site of the World War II forerunner of GCHQ (where spies listen in to radio and other messages). At the heart of the operation was the British need to crack the codes of the German armed forces. The Germans used a device nick-named an enigma machine which had been available on the open market a few years before war broke out. With ground-breaking computing hardware and a team of mathematicians and others, the codes could be cracked – and had to be cracked again and again because the machine could be reset with a new complex code every day.

The most famous wartime resident was probably Alan Turing and there is a special statue of him in the museum. It is worth noting as well that the hall of fame in Bletchley House has at least two dozen other men and women in it. We also discovered that the House and Park had their own history before and since the war and we were also given a glimpse of a another world from decades and centuries past.

If you want to find out more I suggest you try their website:  http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/.

encoding machine

A replica of the “bombe” used in decoding

Colossus rebuild project

Hut 1

Alan Turing statue

Bletchley House

Aerial view in Bletchley Park