Bletchley Park gets £7.4m to tart up WWII code-breaking huts
Donations + lotto cash will also help build exhibition centre
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Bletchley Park has successfully raised the £2.4m it needed to start restoration on code-breaking huts at the World War II site and build a new visitor centre.
The park's Trust had to raise the cash to unlock a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £5m, giving it £7.4m in funding to restore the derelict huts 3 and 6, where code-breaking took place during the war, and develop its exhibition centre in Block C.
"Raising these funds has not only been a race against time to save the Huts from dereliction, but also has been imperative in order to create essential capacity and an improved experience for our ever-rising numbers of visitors," Iain Standen, CEO of the Bletchley Park Trust, said in a canned statement.
"We are enormously grateful for the generosity of the Heritage Lottery Fund and other donors for enabling us to start making this vision a reality."
This is just the start of the Trust's master plan to restore and transform the entire Park into a heritage and education centre. The next phase will be a fundraising campaign for a further £15m, which will go on while work starts on the project this autumn.
Bletchley Park, the site where Alan Turing and other code breakers changed the course of the war by breaking Germany's wartime Enigma and Lorenz ciphers, has been fundraising for a few years now to try to bring it into a state to reflect its former glory as well as preserving and exhibiting World War II and computer memorabilia.
Private donations, charitable funds and money from the likes of Google have helped to save much of the Park, as well as helping the Trust to get its hands on a collection of Turing's work to display at the site. ®
