Bletchley Park
The secret house where the war was quietly won, and the birthplace of the computer. An hour from the cottage, and worth every mile.
The secret house where the war was quietly won, and the birthplace of the computer. An hour from the cottage, and worth every mile.
We will be straight with you: Bletchley Park is not on the doorstep. It sits over towards Milton Keynes, about an hour's drive from the cottage, so this is a proper day out rather than a morning's wander. But it is one of the most extraordinary places in the country, and if there is any interest in the war, in science, or simply in a cracking human story, it more than repays the journey. Behind the gates of an unremarkable Victorian mansion, a mix of Gothic, Tudor and Dutch Baroque with a green copper dome, some nine thousand people worked in total secrecy to read the enemy's most private thoughts.
This was the home of the Government Code and Cypher School, known to those who worked here only as “Station X”. Their task was to break the German ciphers, above all the Enigma machine and the even more fiendish Lorenz used by the high command. To do it they built extraordinary machines: Alan Turing and Gordon Welchman's Bombe, which chased down the daily Enigma settings, and then Colossus, designed by Tommy Flowers to attack Lorenz, which turned out to be the world's first programmable electronic computer. Around three-quarters of the staff were women, many of them Wrens operating the machines around the clock, and everyone had signed the Official Secrets Act. The intelligence they produced, codenamed Ultra, is widely credited with shortening the war by around two years and saving countless lives, and yet most of them told no one what they had done for decades afterwards.
The site opened as a museum in 1993 and was beautifully restored in 2014, so it is a polished, well-told day out rather than a dusty relic. You can walk through the mansion's panelled rooms, step inside the original wooden huts where Hut 6 and Hut 8 did their work, and see the codebreaking story laid out with real objects, recreated offices and plenty for children to turn, press and puzzle over. A working rebuild of the Bombe clatters away in Hut 11, and on the same site The National Museum of Computing, ticketed separately, holds a rebuilt Colossus and traces the whole story from those first machines to the present day. Between them, the two make a full and genuinely absorbing day.
Bletchley Park is open most of the year, and a standard ticket lasts a full twelve months, so you can come back if you do not see it all. Allow a whole day: there is a lot of ground to cover, a café for lunch and regular guided tours and talks that are well worth catching. The drive is a straightforward hour or so, mostly dual carriageway towards Milton Keynes, and there is plenty of parking on site. It is largely accessible and very family-friendly, though older children tend to get the most from the story. Check current opening times, ticket prices and what is on before you set off on the Bletchley Park website.
Because Bletchley is a day in its own right, we would not try to bolt much else on. But it does round off a wartime-Britain theme rather nicely if you have a few days here: Ditchley Park, just up our own lanes, is where Churchill spent his moonlit weekends, and his grave at Bladon lies in the churchyard below Blenheim, where he was born. See all three across a stay and the story joins up beautifully. For everything closer to home, our guide to things to do in the area runs from grand houses to ancient stones and quiet gardens.
“It is a fair drive, so we send guests off early and tell them to make a day of it. You come away moved, honestly, by what all those young people did and never spoke about. The kids love the machines; the grown-ups love the story.”
A wartime day out one way, and your own thatched cottage to come home to. Sleeps seven, less than a mile from Soho Farmhouse.