ENIGMA : BLETCHLEY PARK
HISTORY ⦾ PHOTOGRAPHY ⦾ URBAN EXPLORATION
A photographic urban exploration series captured at Bletchley Park, Milton Keynes, England.
Bletchley Park is an English estate in Milton Keynes that became the principal centre
of Allied code-breaking during the Second World War. Alan Turing is one of the most
well-known codebreakers to have worked at Bletchley Park.
Shattered windows, peeling walls and rusted hinges... this place exudes history.
The site was divided into multiple huts and spurs as Bletchley Park gradually grew in size and scope.
Work was highly compartmentalised, with different huts performing different functions.
Here, agents of the Ultra intelligence project decoded the enemy’s secret messages,
most notably those that had been encrypted with the German Enigma and Tunny Cipher Machines.
At the start of the war in 1939, the station had only 200 workers,
but by late 1944 it had a staff of nearly 9,000, working in three shifts around the clock.
Experts at crossword-puzzle solving and chess were among those who were hired.
Working conditions in the huts were drab and primitive, even by 1940s standards.
The huts were cold and draughty with unreliable, smoky, stoves. In fact, Bletchley’s
facilities as a whole were inadequate at first, and the food, whilst making allowances
for the privations of wartime, was poor.
Much of what was done at Bletchley Park during World War Two remained secret
for several decades after the war ended and it was only in 1974 that the public
was given greater access to what was done and achieved at this nondescript
mansion house in Buckingham, fifty miles to the north of London.
When the war in Europe ended in May 1945, the work at Bletchley Park
was redirected towards the Soviet Union and used during the Cold War.
As well as producing the intelligence that saved thousands of allied lives,
Bletchley Park saw the birth of modern computing.
Many of the abandoned huts have been crammed full of vintage technology and electronics.
Some of Bletchley Park has now been restored to its former glory through restoration and conversion into a museum, however, other huts lie derelict and are being reclaimed by the elements.
Suffice to say that to visit Bletchley Park is to take a tentative step into the shadows.
We are venturing into a clandestine world, where a secret war was continuously
and relentlessly waged, even when the guns were silent.
THE END
thank you for going on this photographic journey with me...
