Bletchley Park codebreaking huts set for historic restoration

The curators of Bletchley Park have announced plans to begin restoring the facility's historic codebreaking huts as well as the buildings which housed the Bombe codebreaking machine.

Under the plan, Codebreaking Huts 3 and 6, which housed the decryption and translation of signals intercepted from German Enigma machines, will be restored to their World War II condition and will allow visitors to see the conditions under which scientists and mathematicians worked to crack the legendary cipher.

Additionally, the park plans to restore Huts 11 and 11a, which housed the Bomb computational system. Considered one of the forerunners to modern computers, Bombe was able to simulate the activity of multiple Enigma machines to help crack a complex cipher which contained millions of millions of configurations and combinations.

The foundation said that it hopes to have restoration of the huts completed by mid-2014.

The renovations are the latest in an effort to establish Bletchley Park as both a historic location and an educational centre teaching of the role technology and computation played in helping the Allies win the war. Curators hope that by 2020 all restoration work on the facility will be finished and open to the general public.

Lead by Alan Turing, the Bletchley Park group helped to crack an Enigma code which at the time had proven unbreakable. Through a combination of mathematical analysis and engineering skill, the group developed a system for reliably intercepting and decoding German signals and orders. The intelligence coup proved vital in the European theatre.

Post-war, however, the facility and its staff faced a series of tragedies. After being tried on charges of homosexuality, Turing died in 1954 after ingesting cyanide. Though the government apologised for it's prosecution of Turing in 2009, he was never formally pardoned.

Bletchley Park also fell on hard times after the war, falling into a state of neglect for decades, only to be rediscovered and championed by the scientific community as a historical site and a rallying point for math and science education campaigns.