This is a special place for many people. For all of us who want to discover the roots of computing that pervade our modern life experience; for those who wish to know how the Allies really won the war; and for those who want to see how a museum should present itself to the public without reducing the message.
Bletchley Park is an impeccable experience, and far removed from the perception of museums as being places in which to see things. This is place where you engage at many levels and in which you are placed into the WWII together with the thousands who worked here breaking the codes of the German, Japanese and other war machines.
There was a risk that this entire site would be converted into low-cost housing by one previous government, but fortunately this same government discovered that they did not own this site and the family that did own it donated it for posterity for future generations. And with funds made available from Lotto and other sources the site has been turned into an dynamic museum of the highest professional order for the public.
There are critiques that modern museums are pandering to the public and watering down the message to push through as many people as possible, but in this case, and as a computer scientist and mathematician myself, I found the experience accentuating my knowledge and being truly informative and a worthwhile trip. I will be back again and hopefully many times.
Among the highlights are (1) the Volunteers who were all impeccably dressed and highly informative on the minutiae of the history of the code breaking activities in WWII. They were all happy to be there and none are paid for their services.The park keeps a very small group of permanent staff with volunteers making up the bulk of the support personnel. (2) The park ground, in immaculate condition, as they welcome the visitors on the walk up to the house. (3) The restored huts, with the audio and video support to reconstruct the conditions of the flow of the information as it became useful for the military strategists. (4) The audio/video units, which are modern and appear to be iPods in a casing with a simple and effective interface to enable anyone, with no training, to use these and to obtain short (2-3 min) videos covering the different sections and tours. (5) The entrance and reception area, completely understated from the outside, which opens up to a perfect introduction to the site prior to the start of the tours in the park. (6) Desks with embedded interactive screens which are used to show the processes and equipment in details through touch based navigation. The equipment is placed into old-style desks which largely hides the technology and emphasises the message.
My one critique is that there is perhaps too much information available and that this creates a kind of "noise" which needs to be decrypted during a talk. We have the audio/video guides, the tour guides, and the audio and video within many of the rooms. But perhaps that is part of the experience, that we ourselves need to discover the information we need from the variety of sources available.
My lasting memory is that of standing in the office of my hero, Alan Turing, to whom we owe so much, not only for the war effort, but for the insights and the application of these insights, on both sides of the Atlantic, which led to what we know today as computers, computer programming, and artificial intelligence.