Bletchley Park 'in serious disrepair'

Bletchley Park, which housed the wartime Colossus codebreaking computers, is in urgent need of expensive repairs, according to the trust that runs it.

Around £1m of work needs to be done on the roof of the Victorian mansion at the centre of the park, and many of the wartime huts where computing pioneer Alan Turing worked, are in serious disrepair.

Some of the huts now house the National Museum of Computing and its prize exhibit, a working reconstruction of Colossus. The museum, which opens formally later this year, is also trying to raise money to be self-supporting.

The Park gets some of its income from visitors, and numbers were up by 40 per cent last year. The trust also relies heavily on revenue from conferences, weddings and research work at its Science and Innovation Centre.

The director of the Bletchley Park Trust, Simon Greenish, said: “The site is unique and one of the most important remaining from World War Two."

If you missed our three-part series on early computing at Bletchley Park, you can read it here.