Walking from Bletchley station along the busy road to the heavy metal gates of Bletchley Park, you will see a dilapidated old concrete hut on your right. The windows are boarded up and plants grow out of the guttering, but this is the building that was known as Block C during the war, when this otherwise unassuming country house was the most important base for British intelligence – the codebreaking centre and site of the invention of the electronic computer.
When restoration is complete, Block C will be a visitors’ centre. Work on the site will, in part, be paid for by a £4.6 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund; £2.4 million in matched funding was required to release the cash, a goal that was reached with the donation of £480,000 by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in October.
Beyond the block, the path sweeps on past the pond towards the house itself. A collection of long, squat brick and wooden structures lies to the right, brimming with history but inaccessible and in disrepair. The unromantically named huts one, three and six will be restored along with Block C, providing a better idea of what life was like for the mathematicians, linguists, cryptographers, pioneering computer engineers and support staff who lived and worked on this site. Fundraising is about to begin to restore hut 11a, built to house Alan Turing’s Bombe machines.
“People tell me to stop saying we should save Bletchley Park now, it’s saved,” says Dr Sue Black, senior research associate in computer science at University College London and one of Bletchley’s most vocal evangelists. “The house itself, anyway. But there’s a lot of work to be done telling the story of what was done here.”
This place, unknown for decades, has now been celebrated in films and television documentaries. Celebrity enthusiasts, notably Stephen Fry, have spoken in favour of preserving it as valuable proof that our modern computerised world came into being in Buckinghamshire.
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