Bletchley Park Walks

Bletchley Park Manor. Originally the home of the financier and Liberal MP, Sir Herbert Samuel Leon (1850-1926), the Bletchley Park Mansion evolved in line with its owner's eccentric tastes into a hotch-potch of Victorian Gothic, Tudor and Dutch Baroque architectural styles. Its interior contains some attractive Victorian stained glass, mahogany woodwork, pillars, and ornate ceiling plasterwork. The Estate, which was sold by the Leon family in 1937, was to become the centre of the UK's main decryption effort during WWII. and it was here that the codes and ciphers of several Axis countries were decrypted, among them the ciphers generated by the German Enigma and Lorenz machines.

Buildings at Bletchley Park. Some 9,000 people worked at Bletchley Park at the height of the codebreaking efforts, many of the teams being housed initially in temporary wooden huts before being moved into more permanent brick-built buildings shown here. After the war, the site belonged to several owners, but by 1991 it was nearly empty and at risk of redevelopment. In 1992 the Bletchley Park Trust was formed to maintain the site as a museum devoted to the codebreakers, but despite the buildings on the site being of significant historic importance they have suffered neglect through inadequate funding. 

 A Turing Bombe. The BOMBE was named after and inspired by a device that had been designed in 1938 by the cryptologist Marian Rejewski of the Polish Cipher Bureau, who revealed their deciphering technique to the British just prior to WWII. Unlike COLOSSUS, the bombe was not a programmable computer, but an electromechanical machine designed to assist British cryptologists to break into German Enigma-machine-enciphered wireless traffic. Designed by Alan Turing, with an important refinement suggested by Gordon Welchman, the bombe made its first appearance during 1940 and refinements followed, particularly in the later American version.

 Alan Turing Statue at Bletchley Park. The statue, commissioned from Stephen Kettle by the late Sidney E Frank, depicts Alan Turing seated in front of an ENIGMA ciphering machine. Turing was the inspirational mathematician at the heart of Bletchley Park's success in breaking into Enigma-enciphered wireless traffic during World War Two. The one and a half ton, life-size statue was created from approximately half a million individual pieces of Welsh slate.

Ornamental Lake and Fountain

 Colossus Computer. The Colossus machines were electronic computing devices used by British codebreakers to read encrypted German wireless messages during World War II. The original machine was designed during 1943-4 by a team led by Tommy Flowers at the Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill - the machine's Post Office roots are plainly evident in the Strowger-type relays, uniselectors and equipment racks that were then much in evidence in the UK's automatic telephone exchanges. Colossus machines (eventually there were ten in all) were the world's first programmable, digital, electronic, computing devices. They used thermionic valves (vacuum tubes), the fastest switching devices then available, to perform calculations aimed at deciphering German wireless traffic that was encrypted using the Lorenz SZ40/42 machine. In the absence of magnetic disc or semi-conductor technology, encrypted messages were read by Colossus at high speed using punched paper tape for storage and an optical reader. Following the end of WWII., most of the machines were taken apart and their components recycled, but two survived at GCHQ Cheltenham where they were used for various purposes until 1960.

Ivy Farm House Ivy Farm rose to (secret) fame in WW2, as being the Radio Intercept Station for non-Morse radio traffic, decoded by Bletchley Park. In the late 1940s, it was designated the Foreign Office Research and Development Establishment (FORDE).

Children's play area, Bletchley Park