The Mansion, originally uploaded by adambowie.

It’s probably been ten years since I last visited Bletchley Park, so it was high time for another visit. They’ve done quite a lot to the site in the meantime. Last time I went, it was only open on alternate weekends over the summer. Now it’s open everyday except Christmas. Last time I visited the site also bore reminders of a more recent previous existance as a BT training area. Now it’s home to whole host of different societies and little museums, along with its main function as the home of the Enigma decryption exhibit and historical computers – the National Codes Centre.
As well as the fascinating collection of Enigma machines and replicas and rebuilds of the devices invented to solve them, there’s a host of other exhibits. For example, a Churchill collection, a film projection collection (I watched a couple of fascinating 1960s newsreels), a diplomatic wireless collection (where one of the other visitors recognised one of the machines from his time in Germany) and even a railway collection.
Outside a building where they’re painstakingly rebuilding Turing’s Colussus there sits, somewhat mournfully, a replica of the top of a German U-Boat which I belive was used in the film Enigma. It sits atop a lorry trailer, and was obviously used for closeups alongside minitures of CGI in the film.
Overall, a fascinating experience. And they provide those handsets which give you more information than you could possibly need as you wander around the exhibition.
See a Flickr slideshow of some of my photos here.