Day 203 - July 22nd

Today we visited Bletchley Park. Once the top-secret home of the World War Two Codebreakers, the country house and estate in Bletchley became the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. During World War II, the estate housed the Government Code and Cypher School, which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers.

Following a recommended route, we headed first to the mansion house.

We were delayed a little going inside the house because an episode of 'The Repair Shop' was being filmed. We watched as a man was filmed (several times) carrying a box into the house, which we were told was 'for the reveal'. Once the perfect shots had been captured, we were allowed inside.

In the house some of the rooms had been recreated to look how they had looked during the war.

We then moved onto the garages and stableyard where war time vehicles were stored.

We then explored the various huts and other buildings on the site. Many of the huts were dressed to resemble how they had looked during World War II, particularly those that were used for codebreaking. This includes Hut 8, which housed Alan Turing's office, and other huts that were used for decrypting messages. 

Many code breaking machines wre on display as well as the Turing-Welchman Bombe machines.

We really enjoyed our visit to Bletchley Park .... and we can recommend the cakes in the Hut 4 Cafe! 😁

Just a short walk from Bletchley Park, we decided to extend our visit and explore The National Museum of Computing as well. The Museum is home to the world's largest collection of working historic computers and follows the development of computing from the 1940s to the 1980s and beyond.

This Burroughs machine brought back memories of my early days working in the bank.

Ernie - the premium bond machine.