Wartime code site restoration gets grant

The Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) is providing the grant to help the Bletchley Park Trust restore some of the park’s most important buildings, including the wooden huts that were at the heart of code-breaking activity during the war.

Bletchley Park, a country estate before it was purchased by the British government in 1938, housed as many as 10,000 people at its wartime peak.

The success of the park’s code-breakers in breaking the German cypher systems Enigma and Lorenz are credited with shortening the war by two years.

The restoration project will also create a visitor centre, new exhibitions and interactive displays at the site, which fell into near-dereliction after the war but is now open to the public and visited by 130,000 people a year.

The funding is part of £6m confirmed for three projects, with efforts to conserve bumblebees and a scheme to restore Newcastle’s medieval Black Gate also receiving cash.

Actor and author Stephen Fry said the multimillion-pound grant to Bletchley Park would enable the trust to do justice to the site.

“Not only did these people change the very course of history by helping to secure the allied victory, thereby quietly and modestly providing us with the free world, they also gave birth to the information age which underpins the way we all live today.

The HLF also confirmed a grant of £340,000 for the Bumblebee Conservation Trust; a further £1.4m will go to help to restore Newcastle’s 13th century Black Gate.