U4 Trip to Bletchley Park

The U4s Maths Trip to Bletchley Park

"Bletchley Park was once the country home of the wealthy Sir Herbert Leon and his family, who added to it over the years in a mix of architectural styles. By 1938 the mansion was for sale, and the Government Code and Cypher School needed a safer home. Fifty miles from London, Bletchley was close to roads and railroads. It was refitted as a center to decode messages produced by the infamous Enigma machine, a devilishly complicated German encoding device that resembled a large, overgrown typewriter." - British Heritage, 2022

Syra, Qadirah and Isobel (U4) share their account of the trip:

We really enjoyed our trip to Bletchley park. We had learnt about it before in a history lesson and we found it really helpful watching the imitation game before hand, however nothing could have really prepared us for what we saw when we arrived! When we got there, we began some code breaking lessons to experience what it was really like to have to decode several messages and it showed us how difficult it was and how skilled you had to be to do this. It really helped us imagine what it would have been like for the young girls living there, some of which would have been our age! The highlight of the trip was definitely being able to see Alan Turing’s office. We loved how realistic the volunteers at Bletchley park had made it. There was even a note from him on his type writer! Later on we had a really interesting talk from one of the volunteers. The tour was definitely another highlight of the trip and it was an amazing experience and we were so lucky to have the opportunity to have our own talk from a volunteer at the park. I After lunch we went to see where all the code breaking actually happened. It was so fun to see this with our friends and to have a look at the type writers used for the code breaking. It was so cool to see history and maths combined in one place which has still been preserved so well. Overall we had a great trip to Bletchley park and would definitely go again!

Thank you to Mr Bottomley for organising a great trip.