Turing’s monument

Today Bletchley Park is a thriving monument to Turing and his fellow codebreakers. This did not happen easily. After the Second World War, the Bletchley Park site went into gradual decline, with its many temporary wartime buildings left unmaintained. The intense secrecy still surrounding the codebreakers’ wartime work meant there was no public awareness of what they had achieved, nor even that they had existed. It was only when the information embargo finally began to lift, decades later, that Bletchley Park’s importance became more widely known—but by that time the site was in danger of being razed to the ground to make way for housing estates. This chapter tells how Bletchley Park was rescued from property developers and from financial failure to become a national monument. The true heroes of this story are too numerous to mention by name—the hundreds of committed hard-working people, many of them volunteers, whose collective efforts over time saved Bletchley Park. Bletchley Park, also known as Station X, is arguably the most important single site associated with the Second World War. One of the best kept of all wartime secrets, it was acquired by the Foreign Office not long before the start of the fighting and at that time comprised some 55 acres of land, together with a large and architecturally odd mansion (see Fig. 9.1) and various associated outbuildings of the type common in large estates of the period. The mansion was built in Victorian and Edwardian times and its grounds were laid out as formal gardens, with a lake and many specimen trees. Curiously, these trees subsequently played a role in saving the site. During the war there was an almost continuous programme of construction. Numerous typical Ministry-of-Defence-style brick buildings were erected, as well as an assortment of timber huts. The huts included Hut 8, where Turing worked on Naval Enigma (Fig. 19.1). His introduction of the bombe, in 1940, was the start of Bletchley Park’s conversion into a codebreaking factory (see Chapter 12) and by the end of the war there were more than seventy buildings on the site, including the original mansion and its outbuildings. These structures supplied the capacity to house more than 3000 people per shift, as well as the large quantities of machinery and other equipment involved in the codebreaking work.