Google donates £550,000 to Bletchley Park restoration

Bletchley Park's continuing battle to restore the condition of its historical buildings has received a welcome boost this week, thanks to Google.

It would be wonderful if other donors follow Google's example to help preserve our computing heritage. We could then proceed as soon as possible with restoration of the profoundly historically significant code breaking huts.

The tech giant has donated 550,000 to help the former site of WWII code breaking restore the huts where such great work took place. This donation builds on the 4.6 million in Heritage Lottery Fund monies awarded to Bletchley Park in October. The lottery funding was awarded on condition the park matched the figure.

With the money, in addition to restoring the state of the buildings, Bletchley Park is hoping to transform itself into a heritage and education centre, that will both encourage future generations as well as serving as a reminder of what previous generations achieved during wartime code-breaking efforts.

"We are tremendously grateful to Google for bringing us considerably closer to achieving our development aims. We have received other generous contributions towards the project but this is the largest single element of the partnership funding and absolutely vital in potentially getting the project underway much sooner than might otherwise have been the case," said Simon Greenish, CEO of the Bletchley Park Trust.

"It would be wonderful if other donors follow Google's example to help preserve our computing heritage. We could then proceed as soon as possible with restoration of the profoundly historically significant code breaking huts."

This is not the first time Google has shown its support for Bletchley Park. Earlier this year, the tech giant tried to raise awareness of the need for funding to restore the park's buildings to their former glory.

"The Bletchley Park Trust has been doing great work to honour Alan Turing and the code breakers who helped shorten the second world war and to educate the next generation about the history of modern computing," said Peter Barron, Google's director of external relations. "We are delighted to make this charitable donation to help support the next phase of this important project"