Daytrips - Miss Alice

Question of the week: Is there a day-trip destination outside London that you'd like to recommend?

"I wrote up a few day trips a couple of summer's back, so I'll link you to them - York, Brighton, and my home town of St Albans - and then pick something different again: Bletchley Park.

Now, you won't find a lot of tourist guides recommending Milton Keynes, and for good reason, but Bletchley Park, on the outskirts of the new city, is a must for anyone interested in second world war history, cryptography, or the history of computing.

Bletchley Park was once the quiet Victorian country home of a City of London banker, but during the second world war became Station X, a secret base for the Government Code and Cypher School - the cryptographers who broke the Enigma code, amongst others, providing critical information which saved countless lives and shortened the war by at least two years.

Brilliant mathematician, Alan Turing worked here, developing the Bombe - a giant electro-mechanical machine which helped break the pass codes, which influenced his later work on general computing. (see PM Gordon's Brown official apology for the British government's later treatment of this war hero)

The Bletchley Park Trust arrange a program of special events throughout the year, emphasising different aspects or periods of history, and if you can time your visit to coincide, it's well worth taking the guided tours and so on, to get the most out of your trip. The next event is on Feb 28th, celebrating the work of Alan Turing at Bletchley Park for LGBT History month.

The Turing Bombe and other early computers such as the Colossus were key to these successes, and because of these links, the site is also home the National Museum of Computing. In contrast to the slick, big-budget Silicon Valley Computer History Museum, this is a volunteer-funded, volunteer-run collection, who have brought together a real richness of hands-on vintage tech, as well as rebuilding one of the original Colossus computers, which is now working in all it's noisy, physical, magnificence.

Tickets for Bletchley Park, including the National Museum of Computing, cost £8 for students, but the price drops to just £7 if you order it in advance.

There are regular trains from Euston to Bletchley Railway Station, which is on the same road as the entrance to Bletchley Park. "
- Miss Alice

* Photo by zoonabar, used under Creative Commons, with thanks.