News Releases

Floating floors, a living roof and a demolition robot – all in a day’s work in the restoration of Bletchley Park

Bletchley Park has been granted Visitor Attraction Quality Assurance Status by VisitEngland, the National tourist board. The Home of the Codebreakers has also been named in Visit England’s Top 101 Things to do before you go abroad.

Celebrating the whole decade at the Home of the Codebreakers - The Forties Family Festival takes over Bletchley Park on Saturday 25th and Sunday 26th May. Re-enactors will take us back to the 1940s with costumes, vehicles and other artefacts from the period.

New play tells untold stories of Bletchley Park - The untold story of Bletchley Park is the subject of a play which debuts at The Lowry in Manchester 2-4 May before embarking on a UK tour. Total Theatre Award nominated company Idle Motion takes the audience back to 1940s England, to the eccentric country house whose grounds, filled with chess champions, Oxbridge graduates and young debutantes, was the melting pot of Britain’s greatest minds.

Bremont Watch Company works with the Bletchley Park Trust to create the ‘Codebreaker’ a historically and mechanically important watch - Bremont Watch Company and the Bletchley Park Trust are pleased to announce that they will be working together on the release of the new Bremont limited edition watch that will incorporate historical artefacts from Bletchley Park. It will be called the ‘Codebreaker’. The watch is unlike any other watch ever created and in addition a percentage of the proceeds will be used towards the ongoing restoration of Bletchley Park.

Raising money for Bletchley Park and The National Museum of Computing - An album of authentic electronica created by software programmers is being released to raise money to fund parent-child maths workshops at the Home of the Codebreakers and to help start a programming club for young people at The National Museum of Computing.

Project Manager Stephen Prowse takes us inside the derelict buildings - The man tasked with managing the £7.4m, Heritage Lottery Funded project to restore some of Bletchley Park’s iconic but derelict codebreaking buildings says one of the biggest challenges is not making them look too new.

British users can can help to build, update, edit and contribute to Google Maps - Google today announced that anyone can help to provide detailed local information to Google Maps in the UK. Google Map Maker is an online tool that allows people to contribute and edit map data for certain regions from around the world. Users can locate, draw, label and provide attributes for local map features, in effect, becoming “citizen cartographers.”

Bletchley Park Veteran meets comedienne over a cuppa - Veteran Wren (Women’s Royal Naval Service) and Bombe Operator, Ruth Bourne, is featured in Victoria Wood’s Nice Cup of Tea on BBC1 this week.

Recreating Second World War Codebreaking - The third Enigma Challenge at Bletchley Park and The Big Bang Fair in London was the best yet, with the Bombe Team deducing the Enigma settings in one hour and twenty minutes. Throughout the four-day event they deciphered a total of around 240 messages sent via an Enigma machine by members of GCHQ’s Historical Section.