Bletchley Park

Saturday's trip to Milton Keynes included a visit to Bletchley Park, the famous home of the Codebreakers, and "spiritual home" to one of my neighbours who used to work in intelligence somewhere in a past life!!

It was busy - very busy.  We should probably have expected that on the first Bank Holiday weekend of the year, when everyone thought they would have a day out on the Saturday.  We snaffled one of the last dozen parking spaces before they started to turn cars away from the main gate.  But the weather wasn't that great and it was definitely chilly as we wandered around the site.

The highlight for the YFG was the special exhibition associated with the film about Alan Turing, The Imitation Game.  The bombe [the name for the machine] below is the one they used in the film.

There was far too much to look at than I could manage in one visit.  There are hours and hours worth of exhibits to look at, display boards to read and artefacts to wonder over.  It is all incredibly interesting.  Those people contributed so much to the war effort and yet so little was really known about them.  

We did get 20% off my ticket, and the £23 odd I paid for the YFG and I to go in actually bought season tickets so we can go back for free within a year as many times as we like.  That sort of arrangement I like!  I support national heritage as much as I can, and this is definitely a site where there is still more work to be done on preserving the buildings [some of the huts are derelict] and there are more opportunities to share the history - I would love to see a bit of a living history workshop going on there with people re-enacting the period for example.  

I am certainly hoping that we will make it back to have another look before the year is out.