Milton Keynes; Sunday, 18 June, 2023

Another late breakfast and after checking out of the hotel I headed over to the bus stop to catch the bus down to the southern suburb of Milton Keynes – Bletchley.

Whilst today it’s been subsumed into the City, for a long time Bletchley was it’s own quiet little town which is why it was chosen as the ideal location to move the government cypher school and code breakers out to at the start of the Second World War into the recently acquired Bletchley Park country house. From the house initially and then from a growing assortment of wooden huts and concrete blocks the men and women of Bletchley Park set about decrypting Nazi communications.

The most famous of the code breakers is Alan Turing, widely seen as the father of modern computing and much of the foundation of modern computers was laid down here, but there are countless other brilliant minds who helped dramatically shorten the war.

The museum that’s now on the site tells the story of those who worked here and how over time the operation grew so good that the Allies were able to read Nazi communications pretty much in real time, whilst the Nazi’s still believed that their cyphers and encryption was unbreakable.

Along with the house and two of the main blocks the museum also covers several of the wooden huts which have been preserved and restored, including hut 8 where Turing worked and his office has been recreated.

I spent much of the day wandering round the different exhibits at the park before leaving and heading to another, linked, but much smaller museum just outside of the parks grounds – the National Museum of Computing.

The museum effectively picks up the history of computing from the end of World War II with recreations of both the Turing designed Bombe machine as well as Colossus, the first electronic computer, and takes the story forward from there, through the big industrial computers of the 50s and 60s to the growth of the desktop PC, games systems, mobile devices and beyond.

After looking round the museum I headed back to the bus station in Bletchley, caught the bus back into Milton Keynes, had a very late lunch and then headed back to the hotel to pick up my luggage to start the journey home, only as I checked just before I got to the hotel I discovered that the train I was booked on had been cancelled, so rather than spending over half an hour waiting on Milton Keynes Central station I had a drink in the hotel bar

Shortly before my train was due to arrive I headed down to the station to pick up what turned out to be one of the most unpleasant train journeys I’ve ever taken on a train that was packed beyond capacity with barely operating air conditioning on a really muggy afternoon in a carriage where the smell from the toilet was all consuming. I was really quite glad it was only 40 minutes back into London, I don’t know how the people who had boarded 90 minutes earlier in Manchester were coping.