Save Bletchley Park

GOOD NEWS

While more money is always required, the site is currently applying for a Heritage Lottery Funding bid for a £4.1 million award, which would enable Bletchley Park to be preserved while improving its layout and accessibility.

We can all help the Trust until this award has been granted. The top ways are:

Visit the park
It’s brilliant to see and you’ll get first-hand information about the war effort from the friendliest museum staff you could ever hope to meet. Then there are the special events throughout the year, including the Battle of Britain flyby. You can view the upcoming calendar of events online at www.bletchleypark.org.uk. Tickets cost £10 for adults (£8 for concessions), £6 for children (under 12s are free), and a family ticket is just £22.50. Tickets are valid for 12 months, so they’re great value.

Donate money
If you can’t make a visit, why not donate some money instead? Visit the website and choose to leave a donation and your help will see that future generations can visit the park and see how important it is.

Write to your MP
Write to your MP and demand that the government provides financial support to Bletchley Park in order to ensure its long term future. You can find out who your MP is by going to www.theyworkforyou.com/mp/

Get your friends involved
No matter which route you take, get your friends to do the same thing. With these simple steps, Bletchley Park can get the money and recognition it deserves.

VIST THE SITE!

A visit is one of the most rewarding things that you can do. You can see original Enigma machines to get an idea of what the Germans used to encode their messages. Then there’s the completed building work of Alan Turing’s Hut 8, where you can see the great man’s office as it was when he left. This is complete down to the tea mug he chained to his radiator to stop people stealing it; he later lost the key, but continued to drink from it anyway. Inside the hut, you can see the communications room and see how people would have worked during the war.

Moving on to H-block, you enter the National Museum of Computing. Here you can see the love that volunteers have put into the site with a working replica of the Bombe, decrypting actual Enigma messages. There you can speak to a real Wren about her experiences working during wartime – first-hand information that you simply cannot get anywhere else.

There’s also the Colossus rebuild project, undertaken by Tony Sale. Incredibly, he managed to assemble parts from the age (BT was handily decommissioning some of its exchanges that used the exact parts Tommy Flowers used in the original Colossus), while working from eight wartime pictures of the machine, plus some fragments of circuit diagrams that engineers sneakily held on to. Importantly, he had help from Arnold Lunch who designed the reader system in 1942. It’s incredible to see in operation and you can still find Sale onsite and happy to talk people through the workings of the machine.

It’s these interactions and incredible sights that mean that Bletchely Park isn’t just one of the most important places in history, it’s also one of the most interesting to visit. With more visitors and more money, Bletchley Park can only get better and better, and more people will recognise the amazing work that was done here. With your help you can repay Bletchley Park for the work it did in saving us, and save it.

FURTHER READING
Tony Sale’s guide to cryptography
http://www.codesandciphers.org.uk/

Description of Colossus
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~eroberts/courses/soco/projects/2008-09/colossus/index.html

The history from the trust
http://www.bletchleypark.org.uk/