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Bletchley, Buckinghamshire, England

Town of Bletchley, Buckinghamshire

Bletchley and Fenny Stratford is located on the southern tip of Milton Keynes. With Junction 14 of the M1 motorway to the North East and Junction 13 to the East, as well as a main line station on the West Coast Main line, access to the town is excellent. Many residents commute the 50 miles to London daily.

Bletchley is an historical town, with beautiful Nature Reserves within its borders, making a visit well worth while. Milton Keynes, a modern, vibrant and expanding shopping centre is a short 10 minutes drive away.

Official Bletchley, Buckinghamshire website: www.bfstc.co.uk

Bletchley Park

In the summer of 1939, a small team of codebreakers arrived at the Government Code and Cipher School's new home at Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire. Their mission was to crack the backbone of German military and intelligence communications, the Enigma cipher.

The Germans thought Enigma was unbreakable. The combination of rotating wheels, electrical contacts and wires meant that the odds against anyone who did not know the machine's settings being able to break Enigma were 150 million million million to one!

But Bletchley Park achieved a breakthrough when the Poles passed on their knowledge of how the machine worked. This helped the codebreakers exploit a design weakness in Enigma; that no letter could ever be encrypted as itself.

It is estimated that over 10,000 people worked at Bletchley Park at the height of its wartime activity. Their work affected the fate of nations and helped shorten the war by at least two years. But by March 1946, the people were gone and every scrap of evidence of their codebreaking exploits had been removed from Bletchley Park.

Bletchley Park website: www.bletchleypark.org.uk