If you're interested in historical buildings, go ahead, visit Bletchley Park. But expect most of the exhibits to be buildings, living quarters, offices etc. and mundane descriptions of day-to-day life there, not exhibits about the technical/cryptological aspects (although they do have some of those too).
If you're interested in computer history and Bombe/Colossus, visit the much lesser known National Museum of Computing at the same site. https://www.tnmoc.org/
I spent way too much time at the the boring parts of Bletchley Park and as a result didn't have enough time for the Museum of Computing.
I'd recommend starting at the Museum of Computing, then if you have time left, the 1-2 buildings inside the official Bletchley Park museum that have the crypto exhibits.
+1 this commenter. I just visited the UK for the first time at the beginning of this month and had a fantastic ~3 hours at Bletchley Park, but felt I had to cram TNMOC and the amazing Colossus live demonstration (where I asked a million questions) and everything else in the museum in the 90 minutes I was there. If I assume other HN readers are like me, I would dedicate at least 2.5-3 hours for TNMOC to actually get a chance to actually see and play around with their extensive collection of vintage machines.
The current re-arrangement, in which the Bombe is housed by TNMOC to me probably makes things murkier than would be desirable although I'm sure it helps TNMOC attract visitors because people do like a Bombe demo (the Bombe is a replica, the real Bombes were destroyed because they were secret).
The Bombe isn't a computer any more than a basic electric toaster is a computer, and Enigma is nothing like how you'd do encryption today. It's cool to look at, but IMO it doesn't belong in a Computing museum.
In contrast (and remember this is later in the same war) Colossus is a digital computer (albeit not a stored program digital computer) and it attacks Lorenz, which is a stream cipher (albeit 8-bit bytes haven't been invented back then). Of course Colossus doesn't look like anything much, it's a computer, most of the stuff that's happening is invisible, and you can't understand why it breaks Lorenz, the math is very difficult.
However Colossus and Lorenz, unlike the Bombe and Enigma, are clear ancestors of the technologies we rely on every day, Salsa20 is a popular modern stream cipher, you are undoubtedly reading this on a digital computer. They're as connected to us as the vast physical disks in another TNMOC room, or the BBC Microcomputer (British older people may remember these from school) or the exhibit about FIDO Bulletin Board Systems.
We spent a whole gray day at Bletchley and TNMOC and I appreciated the connection between Bletchley and TNMOC given the context of WWII. To me Bletchley is more about process, a metaphorical "Scrum room" of one of the most important math and science programs in history. And taken together, they encapsulate sort of a catalyzing moment that computing prehistory transitioned to computing history.
My history-teacher wife liked Bletchley a lot more than TNMOC, where I lingered too long, but I did like both. Even though the Bombe replica was down for repairs that day.
Definitely if your interest is World War II, or the Intelligence process, the human side, any of that - the Bletchley Park exhibits are key and TNMOC is at most a side visit, whereas if your interest is computing, TNMOC is key and there's no reason to do more than pencil in the rest of the Bletchley Park site as a possible extra.
I don't know about Science. There's a lot of math and logic puzzle solving at Bletchley, but the other crash projects of WWII have a lot more science, Los Alamos obviously, translating from "In principle nuclear fission is a more powerful bomb than anything previously made" to an actual weapon you can use to destroy a Japanese city. But also the invention of the Cavity Magnetron - a little box can make enough radio waves to make a radar for your night fighter so you can figure out where the enemy planes are relative to you - or it can use those waves to heat a delicious baked potato in a few minutes...
it does seem like working on the Bombe got Alan Turing really deep into thinking about hardware. he'd previously played around with building some logic circuits but seems like he didn't go deep into it before Bletchley, before that he was mostly a very pure mathematician.
Turing was interested in lots of things. As a coincidence one of the small jobs I did many years ago was to develop the Turing Archive's web site, which I'm glad to see has since been substantially renovated: https://turingarchive.kings.cam.ac.uk/ - For that work we had a lot of high resolution images of non-Computing stuff Turing cared about, including Morphogensis (basically, why things are the shapes they are, for example why is a rose petal shaped that way? Why stripes on giraffes but spots on dalmations?).
So mathematics yes, Turing was always interested in that, but always applicability was on Turing's mind. In the early twentieth century Turing's "machine" in a paper he wrote at Princeton (before the war) was just an idea, but er, obviously with the exception of the need for an "infinite" paper tape you can realise Turing's machine, it's a computer, familiar to everybody today.
Even after Bletchley Turing wasn't a Software Engineer. The meta-applicability isn't something which would occur to a mathematician. That took Grace Hopper. Grace understood that the problem her people were tasked with (mechanically convert instructions to the code for the actual machine) is exactly the same sort of task the machine is doing anyway, and she invents the Compiler.
I went a few months ago -- was amazing how much better the Museum of Computing was, given it obviously had a tiny budget compared to Bletchley. Bletchley was mostly a bunch of school groups being bored and filling the space, empty buildings, etc.
Museum of Computing was extra amazing because some of the volunteers had worked on the hardware on display (and I'd worked on stuff 20 years after that), so we were able to talk about the actual hardware/OSes.
I visited both, on a whim, while I was by accident in the area, prodded by a comment just like this. It was a fantastic experice! And I did enjoy the National Museum of Computing more! There was an excellent elderly guide there that seemed to have been in computing since forever and told us stories of when he worked on machines just like the ones in the exhibition. A small bunch of us nerdy guys hung around him and it was great interacting with them and the tour guide. It was really really an excelent experice!
If I'm ever in the area again, I would love to revisit and I would love to have my young son with me as well.
The Cambridge museum you mention was surprisingly good. They have all sorts of weird things (remember that time that Lyons Tea manufactured their own line of mainframe computers? - they have one!). Also an original wirewrapped Spectrum prototype.
Indeed. The two groups don't get along. The building restoration people get most of the money. The computing people are apparently a tenant.
I visited in 2002, before the building people were getting money from the National Trust. Way too much tour guide info about the architecture of the mansion, which is not of any real architectural significance. If you like English manor houses with the usual pond and swans, there are better ones to visit.
This caught me out when I was a teenager. Luckily, there was a chap in the Museum of Computing who was spending his Sunday working on the Colossus, and he was happy to let me in and show me around! I'll never forget that kindness, it was truly a fascinating trip.
I was there a few years ago and will echo the fact that the folks I interacted with at the museum of computing were truly world class fantastic. When someone loves what they do and where they are it really shows.
My boss at Experian took our team to Bletchley Park intending to go to the NMOC but not having checked that was actually open. Hilarious.
Fortunately the small Memorial to the Polish Cryptographers who are the reason this was worth attempting is outside so we could visit that, about a third of the team were Polish (we hired away some subcontractors from a Polish firm, and then we were in turn bought by Experian) so visiting this memorial was a key part of our intent.
Also IIRC at that time the Bombe was still not in TNMOC, and Colossus was in a separate building so you could see it, but the rest of TNMOC was closed.
I've also seen an even earlier incarnation of TNMOC when I was younger, just basically a room heaped with obsolete computer gear, with some nerds who know roughly what it is but aren't equipped to properly exhibit or explain it. I remember they'd set up some video game consoles, something like the original Sonic The Hedgehog maybe, because they wanted children to have some positive impression, obviously a kitchen appliance sized "disk drive" doesn't mean anything to a child, but it's obvious Sonic is a game even if you're used to much flashier graphics.
I found chatting to the people working on stuff was the best bit.
Almost the level of ignoring the exhibits and look at the bits of stuff being worked on around.
I walked from the train station to the Museum of Computing, which provided enough of a walk through the Bletchley facility (and noticing enough "Asbestos Warning" signs) to fill my need for that portion of the site.
If nothing else, being able to say "Milton Keynes is on my tourist bucket list" is an amusing thing to say to UK co-workers.
I think it's testing how fast you can go from ~25 (depends on how quickly you dare take a roundabout) to 70 in between each roundabout that is the best part of living next to MK.
I visited family in Swindon, so they decide "we must see their Nested Fractal Roundabout of Doom" because that's obviously their primary tourist attraction now.
I can second this. The Museum of Computing was much more interesting to me than Bletchley Park. The working replicas of electro-mechanical computers were terrific, and the guides/operators there had a wealth of interesting knowledge and anecdotes. I learned much more about the use of these machines for code breaking there than I did at Bletchley Park.
Wait, there was something other than Museum of Computing in Bletchley Park?! I honestly didn't noticed, I went straight to that museum and I don't think there were other notices that there is something else there.
Umm I've been to Bletchley and NMOC twice and although the latter does have the particularly interesting live demos of the restored/recreated Colossus etc, it's completely wrong to say the "main" museum complex doesn't have much about the technical/crypto aspects.
If anything I'd say it's the other way around - there are exhibits on the way of life etc but the majority of them are on the cryptology and the approach the people working there took etc. I'm wondering if you accidentally missed one or two of the buildings.
I'm strongly in agreement with you. I thought the main museum was fascinating. You could only find it "boring" if you have no curiosity about the history of world war two or you just don't care about the human impact of the war on the communities and the people it affected.
Ah that explains a lot. I was confused reading some of the comments here, because to my memory all the war computing/enigma & post-war work was in BP museum, and TNMOC had a brief mentioned to link but was mostly later personal computing / early displays for ATC, etc.
TNMOC wasn't better to me, because I was more interested in Turing et al. than 80s vintage computing. (And some people would be the opposite, I was just surprised to see so many comments saying it's almost objectively better for this crowd.) But if all the computing side is there now makes sense that people are saying that.
45 minutes by train from London Euston. About the same time as my commute and I live in Zone 3. Might not be geographically that near but it's very accessible.
I think the point (see GP's other comment 'Philadelphia was the highlight of my trip to Washington D.C.') is that it's not part of a trip to London, your trip is to the UK, or England, you stayed in London, and visited elsewhere too.
A lot of foreigners seem to conflate London with the entire country in a way that doesn't seem to happen for other countries (you don't 'go to Paris' and actually stay in Marseilles) and some people outside London especially understandably don't like it.
Not that it's an unreachable distance away for a trip based in London.
Sure, but if Versailles is 30-45 minutes outside of central Paris by train, and Bletchley Park is about an hour or so outside of London, I'd venture that the extra ~hour round trip of travel time isn't that meaningful to most tourists.
Bletchley Park is excellent - I went in the early 2000s when it was just some huts and a country house. I return in 2024 and they now have full exhibitions, including one that goes through the full history and workings of the Bombe. I thought I was a bit of an Enigma nerd but it turns out I hadn't heard of Lorenz/Tunny at all and so it really added another layer to my knowledge of the work at Bletchley.
Also visiting Bletchley and then watching the Imitation Game makes it seem like the rushed medical drama from Mitchell and Webb [0]
Turing's life and work was a big part of my research and I was involved with a number of academic Turing memorial events, I've had dinner with his closest living relative. I'm well aware of all the inaccuracies.
I was given 114 minutes I don't think I could have done a better job of giving a feel for the guy, his work, and the situation to an intelligent person who has a passing interest in tech (e.g. my wife) than they did in the film.
This may just say more about me as a story-teller than as a genuine appraisal of the film.
If you want detail, read Turing's biography by Andrew Wiles, such a great work and impressively comprehensive. If you just like code breaking and WWII history, read The Hut Six story by "Turing's boss" Gordon Welchman, the publication of which lost him his American and British security clearances.
>I was given 114 minutes I don't think I could have done a better job of giving a feel for the guy, his work, and the situation to an intelligent person who has a passing interest in tech (e.g. my wife) than they did in the film.
I feel like I'm fairly forgiving when it comes to glossing over some details in order to serve the greater narrative, but I feel all of the film's points of conflict were fabricated to the point of being misleading.
Turing was a genius, but he wasn't a sole genius loner - he was a much liked and integral member of the team. Much of the plot is about him supposedly single handedly and against the will of Bletchley working on the Bombe when the Polish Bombe was a tried and true solution to Enigma-sans-plugboard already. This image of him being some kind of rebel is absolutely not giving you a "feel" for his situation.
The idea that the machine wasn't working and they had no idea how it was going to work until they "suddenly had the idea of using a crib" is trying to add a peril and a Eureka moment that didn't exist. From a "let's not get waded down in the details" point of view, sure but again this really adds more of a sole genius factor on Turing specifically when he was but one genius in a factory of geniuses.
Things like having one bombe in the corner of a room quietly breaking all the Nazi's codes? Sure, why not. It's very silly and downplays the roles of hundreds of Wrens, but you can have that for the sake of storytelling.
We may have different things that we wanted from this film, but honestly rewatching it it just felt like it was muddying the waters of what I already knew rather than being a fun accessible glimpse into the life of one of History's greatest minds.
You can also visit The Enigma Cipher Centre in Poznan/Poland
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It is an exhibition about cracking Enigma by the polish mathematicians:
M. Rejewski, H. Zygalski and J. Różycki who then, at the begin of the Second World War, handed it over to the Allies.
The old town is charming, the food is great and lots green space to wander around. Citadel park is worth visiting and you’ll not regret it.
Wrocław is 2 hours away and it’s a wonderful city as well. Extra fun if you like treasure hunt as the city is full of tiny gnomes for that. Extra fun with kids.
And the tickets are valid for 12 months. So you can visit one day and if you run out of time or want to go back and dive into more detail on something you can use the same tickets to come back with in in a year and go round again.
Many of the people HN appeals to will find Bletchley Park fascinating, but I can report that my wife, who has no specific interest in any of the topics that makes the place historic, was also fascinated when we visited some time ago, and regularly recommends it as a place to visit.
I was there a few weeks ago! I had always wanted to visit, so it was a bucket list item for me and I absolutely loved it. The conditions in which people worked tirelessly while trying to eke out a bit of a normal life in between were so interesting.
I am kicking myself that I couldn't stop at the Museum of Computing, but the family was jetlagged and really tired. Regardless of that, I considered Bletchley Park time well spent and an awesome visit.
If anyone is looking for a great novel that partially takes place in Bletchley Park, I can highly recommend Cryptonomicon by Neil Stephenson (of Snow Crash fame).
Usual caveats about Neal Stephenson apply but I think Cryptonomicon presents a much more compelling portrait of Alan Turing than the film The Imitation game which incorrectly portrays him as a repressed nerd single handedly solving all the problems.
I don't know if this was what your parent meant, but
One of the fairly noticeable problems with Stephenson is that he uses the "rape as character development" trope a lot for female characters. So, that's not great. In general in fact female characters in his novels are not written as if they were - you know - people, and even when they're the protagonist we get some weird male gaze stuff going on.
It's not a deal breaker, Diamond Age is one of my favourite novels despite this. But certainly it feels at best lazy.
Other routine complaints are that Stephenson's novels are too long (fair) under edited (presumably with the same root cause, ie celebrity) and poorly paced (e.g. six chapters about the protagonist preparing and then eating cereals, two pages on the climactic bank heist they've spent the whole book planning)
Technically I think Stephenson suffers from having noticed that, unlike many contemporaries who wrote fiction set in the near future, he actually has some idea what he was writing about and not realising how limited that knowledge is. William Gibson knows he has no idea how a computer works, so in a Gibson novel he's not trying to convince you his protagonist knows which IPv6 routing protocol to use - William Gibson doesn't know what IPv6 is. But Neal might spend a paragraph about some nonsense that seems plausible if you know as much as he does... but then is laughable if you know more. That seems if anything worse than what Gibson chose.
I like hard SF, but hard SF is really difficult. One of my other favourite novels is Greg Egan's "Incandescence". Egan isn't great at writing women either, but in Incandescence he cuts himself a break, nobody involved is technically human anyway, but he did spend a lot of time figuring out all the tricky physics needed to make the novel's story work. Is there really a civilisation in the core of our galaxy? We'll probably never know, but Egan attempted to design a scenario that could, in principle, technically work.
Fantastic place, and your tickets will last for a year. There's also the computer museum close by (separate ticket). Really great place to walk around, and I think, historically important to all of us here. The original home of the hackers.
On a related note, if you’re around Washington, DC in the US, then the National Cryptologic Museum[1] is well worth a visit. They have a ton of equipment on exhibit, including a variety of mechanical encryption machines as well as early supercomputers.
It doesn’t get that many visitors, because it’s within Fort Meade (home of the NSA), and most people probably don’t even realize it’s open to the public.
I second this: don't go down the wrong entrance, but definitely do visit. It's a fun time with knowledgeable employees that will take you on a tour. You can also see some of the machinery used to crack Japanese codes and some historical attempts at codes and code-breaking. It's a fascinating place.
If you're interested in the history of how the Poles and then British not only cracked the German Enigma Cipher machine used in world war 2, but then operationalized the interception, decryption and dissemination process - this is the place. There's quite a bit written about how the Enigma cipher system worked, but it isn't until you get to Bletchley Park do you understand the size, scope and scale of how they turned decryption of intercepted messages into an industrial process that gave the Allies a strategic edge in WW2. A must visit next time you're in London (35 minute train from Euston station, 5 minute walk to the museum.)
Somewhat off-topic, but I find this webdesign hard to use, especially on Desktop. It looks like a good design for a print-out poster, but not so much for a digital site. Something is just... off. Perhaps the work of a designer who usually works for print media?
i went there while in a summer school in Reading. Loved it and highly recommended! One of the things I remember was an exibith on how pidgeons were used in WWII
If you're interested in computer history and Bombe/Colossus, visit the much lesser known National Museum of Computing at the same site. https://www.tnmoc.org/
I spent way too much time at the the boring parts of Bletchley Park and as a result didn't have enough time for the Museum of Computing.
I'd recommend starting at the Museum of Computing, then if you have time left, the 1-2 buildings inside the official Bletchley Park museum that have the crypto exhibits.