Bletchley Park

[nanila]

Last weekend, we stayed in a Landmark Trust property a mere half-hour journey to Bletchley Park. We were surprised by nice weather on the Saturday, so we made the trip. Below is an assortment of photos from the selection of buildings we managed to visit over the course of five hours. I don’t think we saw more than a third of it, so we’ll definitely take advantage of the year-long entry that the steep admission price gets you to see the rest.



The dingy basement has had a lick of paint and yet somehow doggedly retains its character.



Listening stations.



Keiki does some Morse code-breaking.



Humuhumu does some Enigma encoding.



A surprisingly dry and sunny day after all the rain we’ve been having.



Daffodils were not quite ready.



The Mansion seemed like it was a bit of all right.



Not so sure the Intelligence Factory needs this.





Humuhumu and I spent quite a while on this interactive exhibit, plotting the locations of various maritime assets and enemies.





Many of the personal testimonials in the exhibition mention how boring and repetitive some of the intelligence work was.



You can see why they resorted to putting frogs in the pneumatic tube system to liven up the day.

The Park is beautifully maintained and the interactive exhibits are well designed and engaging - I’d say from the age of about 10 on up - so well worth a visit. I restrained myself to one book in the gift shop (The Walls Have Ears by Helen Fry) but could easily have brought home a stack.

Comments

[thekumquat]

Can confirm. The Computer Museum next door is also worth a visit, so your kids can laugh at the primitive games you (I, at least) played at their age.

[hamsterwoman]

What a cool place and a cool visit! Very neat that one can have a go at Morse code and the Enigma machine and other hands on things!