Bletchley Park is a stately home in Buckinghamshire in England, about 50 miles north of London.

During World War II, Bletchley Park was the site of the United Kingdom's efforts to break Axis ciphers, particularly the Enigma and Lorenz cyphers used by Nazi Germany.

Travelling under the guise of 'Captain Ridley's Shooting Party', a small team of scholars-turned-codebreakers arrived at Bletchley Park in the summer of 1939.  Their mission: to crack the Nazi Enigma cypher. The odds against them were a staggering 150,000,000,000,000,000,000 to 1. Their success in breaking this seemingly 'unbreakable' code was one of the And in Colossus, they gave us the world's first computer, built to crack the Lorenz cypher used by Hitler and his generals.

The work of Bletchley Park's pioneers secretly affected the fate of nations during the course of the war and helped shorten it by at least two years. Since then, millions of people have been influenced by what happened on and beyond this site.  It is estimated that over 10,000 people worked here at the height of the Park's wartime activity. Working conditions were cramped and spartan, and the work itself often arduous. But for many recruits, it was the time of their lives.

By March 1946 they were all gone, removing every scrap of evidence of their codebreaking exploits as they left. Their efforts in breaking those 'unbreakable' codes in the utmost secrecy caused Winston Churchill to coin the phrase "the geese that laid the golden eggs and never cackled". It would be decades before Bletchley Park would start to reveal its secrets.

By 1991, the Park was deserted, its buildings facing demolition. The Bletchley Park Trust was formed with the aim of preserving the site for posterity. So began a long and arduous campaign.The Trust fought off hostile bids from property speculators and waded through a mountain of Government red tape to clinch a deal that saved Bletchley Park for the nation.