Bletchley Park
More info
- Owner
- Government Code and Cypher School
- Released
- 1939–1946
- Type
- Codebreaking establishment
- Location
- Milton Keynes, England
- Website
- bletchleypark.org.uk
A Victorian country house in Buckinghamshire where close to ten thousand people secretly read German military traffic — and where the computer turned up as a by-product.
The Government Code and Cypher School moved in during August 1939, an hour from London and conveniently placed on the railway line between Oxford and Cambridge, which is where the mathematicians came from. Work was split across numbered huts: Hut 6 handled Army and Air Force Enigma, Hut 8 the naval variant under Alan Turing, Huts 3 and 4 translated and assessed whatever came out. The resulting intelligence was codenamed ULTRA and circulated under tighter restrictions than almost anything else in the war.
At its January 1945 peak roughly 9,000 people worked there, about three-quarters of them women — many from the naval auxiliary service, running the bombes shift after shift without ever being told what the output meant. Everyone had signed the Official Secrets Act, and most stayed silent for thirty years. The site came close to demolition in 1991 and was saved by a hastily formed trust; it is a museum today.