Some very good news from the UK Telegraph:
Grant to save wartime code-breaking centre Bletchley Park from ruinThe outcome of World War Two could have been horribly different had this work not been done. Nice to see that people are finally stepping up to the plate and preserving this important bit of history for future generations.
The country house whose secret code-breaking centre helped Britain win the Second World War is to receive a "substantial" government grant to save it from dereliction.
Bletchley Park, which has fallen into disrepair despite the achievements of its spies in intercepting private messages between Hitler and his generals, is to be given money from the historic monuments commission.
The plight of the Buckinghamshire site, where information encrypted by Germany's Enigma machines was deciphered, was highlighted earlier this year when leading computer scientists demanded that the government step in to rescue the building from its "terrible" state.
The complex, home to a museum, is run by a charitable trust that receives no money directly from the government.
English Heritage is to announce a grant worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to prevent the main building from ruin.
"Bletchley Park is renowned globally for the achievements of its code-breakers in the Second World War and workers here made an enormous contribution in a whole range of spheres from mathematics to computing," said Andrew Brown of English Heritage. "It is our job to make sure this site is properly protected and interpreted for future generations."
However, the future of the wooden huts where the Engima codes were cracked is still in doubt.
Bletchley's codebreakers, led by Alan Turing, managed to crack the complex Engima codes, which the Germans thought were unbreakable. The intelligence that this generated saved countless Allied lives and may have shortened the war significantly.
As the German ciphers became more elaborate, the codebreakers fought back, and their efforts culminated in the Colossus, one of the world's first programmable electronic computers. It was an advance that kick-started modern British computing.
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