Yesterday we visited Bletchley park in Buckinghamshire. From 1938 onwards Bletchley Park was the headquarters of British secret service code-breaking teams, working to read the secret codes of the enemy forces during WWII. The most famous of these stories was that of the enigma codes which they broke early in the war. However clever use of the information gained meant that the German armed forces continued to us these codes until the end of the war.
Despite 10000 people working on site over three 8 hour shifts it appears the Germans had no idea that anything important was happening on the site, and the only enemy action seen by Bletchley Park was caused by a couple of bombs being dumped randomly by a bomber returning home from the raid on Coventry. It is estimated that the work of Bletchley Park shortened the war by 2-4 years. The people working at Bletchley were not officially acknowledged until 2009 when the government announced that each would receive a commemorative badge for their service.
At the end of the war the site continued to be used by government departments including the post office as a training centre. By 1991 the government had no further use for the site and was planning to sell it off for housing development. In order to advert this Milton Keynes local council declared the site a conservation area and the site was transferred to a charitable trust to develop as a museum. It opened in 1993 and is still expanding as buildings on the site are refurbished and brought back into use. In addition to the code-breakers story there is now a museum of computing (The earliest computers were built at Bletchley as part of the code-breaking efforts and many of the mathematicians who worked there went onto be the fore-fathers of the computer age). There are also a number of other exhibits relating to espionage during WWII and life during that period.
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