CHAPTER 19

Turing’s monument

simon greenish, jonathan bowen,

and jack copeland

T

oday Bletchley Park is a thriving monument to Turing and his fellow codebreakers.

This did not happen easily. After the Second World War, the Bletchley Park site went

into gradual decline, with its many temporary wartime buildings left unmaintained.

The intense secrecy still surrounding the codebreakers’ wartime work meant there was no

public awareness of what they had achieved, nor even that they had existed. It was only when

the information embargo finally began to lift, decades later, that Bletchley Park’s importance

became more widely known—but by that time the site was in danger of being razed to the

ground to make way for housing estates. This chapter tells how Bletchley Park was rescued

from property developers and from financial failure to become a national monument. The

true heroes of this story are too numerous to mention by name—the hundreds of commit-

ted hard-working people, many of them volunteers, whose collective efforts over time saved

Bletchley Park.

Background

Bletchley Park, also known as Station X, is arguably the most important single site associated

with the Second World War. One of the best kept of all wartime secrets, it was acquired by the

Foreign Office not long before the start of the fighting and at that time comprised some 55 acres

of land, together with a large and architecturally odd mansion (see Fig. 9.1) and various asso-

ciated outbuildings of the type common in large estates of the period. The mansion was built

in Victorian and Edwardian times and its grounds were laid out as formal gardens, with a lake

and many specimen trees. Curiously, these trees subsequently played a role in saving the site.

During the war there was an almost continuous programme of construction. Numerous

typical Ministry-of-Defence-style brick buildings were erected, as well as an assortment of

timber huts. The huts included Hut 8, where Turing worked on Naval Enigma (Fig. 19.1). His