Bletchley Park receives funding boost (From Bucks Free Press)

Bletchley Park receives funding boost

9:52am Wednesday 10th September 2008

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Read last month's article about the plight of Bletchley Park here

TWO leading technology firms have stepped in to help save crumbling Bletchley Park, home to code-breaking efforts during World War Two, from further disrepair with a donation of $100,000 (£57,000).

The funding boost from IBM and PGP will now be put towards restoring and curating collections at the National Museum of Computing, which has been established on the historic estate in Milton Keynes. Among the notable exhibits at the museum are a working model of Colossus, the world’s first computer, which operated on the site from 1943.

As reported in Freetime last month, Bletchley Park currently receives no public funding and many of the historic huts, where much of the important codebreaking work was undertaken during the war years, are now rapidly crumbling away. To date, the Bletchley Park Trust has raised more than £5 million to restore the buildings, but far more is still needed.

An online petition on the Downing Street website in support of measures to protect Bletchley Park has so far gathered more than 14,000 signatures and in July, nearly 100 academics wrote a letter of protest arguing that "the future of the site, buildings, resources and equipment at Bletchley Park must be preserved for future generations."

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