Bletchley Park, Buckinghamshire: the architecture of the Government Code and Cypher School

Abstract

During World War II, Bletchley Park, a former country house in Buckinghamshire, was the home of the British Government's Code and Cypher School. The small organization that arrived in August 1939 grew into a staff of more than 10,000 by 1945. The need for progressively larger and more complex accommodation necessitated a near-continuous building programme. Despite some demolitions and post-war alterations, many of the site's wartime buildings still stand.A recent programme of architectural study, landscape survey and archival research by English Heritage has provided for the first time a comprehensive overview of Bletchley's development. The sequence and functions of the standing buildings have been established, and ways in which their evolution related to the earlier (largely Victorian) landscaped park have been explored. Bletchley represents in its architecture the evolution of a cryptographic research centre from modest beginnings into a global signals intelligence centre.