Bletchley Park museum
The mansion in 2017 | |
| Established | 1938 (as a code-breaking centre); 1993 (as a museum) |
|---|---|
| Location | Bletchley, Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England, United Kingdom |
| Coordinates | 51°59′53″N 0°44′28″W / 51.998°N 0.741°W |
| Director | Iain Standen |
| Public transit access | Bletchley railway station |
| Website | bletchleypark |
The Bletchley Park Museum occupies an English country house and estate in Bletchley, Milton Keynes (Buckinghamshire), and celebrates Bletchley Park the principal centre of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War.
Bletchley Park housed the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), which regularly penetrated the secret communications of the Axis Powers – most importantly the German Enigma Lorenz cipher. The team of codebreakers included the computer pioneer Alan Turing and the "Ultra" intelligence produced at Bletchley was believed to have shortened the war by two to four years. The team at Bletchley Park, which included a lot of women, developed Colossus, the world's first programmable digital electronic computer. Codebreaking operations at Bletchley Park came to an end in 1946 and all information about the wartime operations was classified until the mid-1970s.
More recently, Bletchley Park has been open to the public, featuring interpretive exhibits and huts that have been rebuilt to appear as they did during their wartime operations. It receives hundreds of thousands of visitors annually. The separate National Museum of Computing, which includes a working replica Bombe machine and a rebuilt Colossus computer, is housed in Block H on the site.