In 2003, singer Andre 3000 and OutKast asked the question, “What’s cooler than being cool?” And today I’m asking you “What’s more secret than ‘Most Secret’?”

No, it’s not Top Secret, it’s actually Ultra Secret. A phrase commissioned during the Second World War for a facility that’s activities were so secret, so important to global wartime intelligence, that even married couples didn’t find out for decades that they’d both worked in the same facility… true story. It wasn’t until the mid 1970’s that the work of the men and women of Bletchley Park was finally publicly revealed.

Bletchley Park sits just outside Bletchley train station, on the edge of a housing estate. However, during wartime and for a good few years after, unless you worked there or were in the highest echelons of the military or government, you wouldn’t have known about it. Even if you’d somehow strayed off the beaten path and passed it’s entrance gates, you’d certainly not know what was going on behind the various layers of security. To the casual observer, Bletchley Park was a private manor house and grounds…

Today, Bletchley Park is a museum, dedicated to educating visitors about its most clandestine wartime role of enemy code breaking. Sure, if you’ve watched films such as Enigma and The Imitation Game, you’ll have some understanding of what went on there, but as with most Hollywood productions, artistic license has been liberally applied, sometimes with a very broad brush.

Bletchley is one of those museums that is continuously improving and updating its facilities to greater enhance the visitor experience. Just over the last couple of years, new, permanent exhibition buildings have been opened and more work is continuing. This is a fantastic prospect for a visitor, because when you pay for your initial visit, your ticket is valid for 12 months, meaning you don’t have to worry about missing something really interesting, because you can go back again and again without having to pay further entrance fees.

With the majority of the original huts and buildings still standing, Bletchley Park have managed to creative an immersive experience that allows visitors to gain an insight of not only ‘what’ went on there, but also ‘who’ were the people that worked there. Huts and buildings have been faithfully recreated, furnished and accessorised as they would have been from 1939 - 1946. And it’s not all roped off and behind bullet proof glass. You actually walk through and around the offices as they were. Piped audio and projected images add to the experience and draw you in to a time gone by. It’s both beautiful and haunting at the same time, especially if you manage to visit on a quiet day. You find yourself standing among the offices of the original code breaking huts, listening to the stories and daily musings of real people, the vast majority of whom are no longer around.

Although a lot of these people are no longer with us, many of their stories are available within books, some of which are available in the excellent gift store. Bringing their stories bang up to date though, is the incredibly interesting Bletchley Park Podcasts (produced by a good friend of mine, Mr Mark Cotton), where interviews have been carried out with many wartime Bletchley Park workers and experts in the field.

Facilities for visitors are excellent and special attention has been made to make the site as accessible for disabled visitors as possible. Audio guides can be picked up from the visitors entrance and in person guided tours are offered throughout the day. There’s are plenty of places to grab refreshments and take a rest, you can even sit and picnic on the very lawns the codebreakers would have enjoyed a rare and welcome break, enjoying the sights and sounds of the lake and it’s bird life inhabitants. Stepping up a notch and partaking of a truly English tradition, why not book in for afternoon tea within the mansion house?

Of course, the objects that Bletchley Park and its activities are famous for, are the Enigma machine and the Bombe and Colossus decrypting computers. Bletchley Park has a couple of Enigma machines on site for visitors to see, but if you want to see a working Bombe and Colossus computer in action, then you’ll need to take a short stroll to the top of the Bletchley site to block H, and the National Museum of Computing. This is a separate museum and trust, and the entrance fee is NOT included with admission to Bletchley Park. It’s a shame in my opinion, because the two museums are so intricately linked. However, depending who talks to you about them being separate entities, there was obviously some politics at play somewhere down the line, meaning (at this moment in time), never the twain shall meet…

Opening times and pre booking of tickets for the museums are on the websites:

Bletchley Park Museum - https://bletchleypark.org.uk/

National Museum of Computing - https://www.tnmoc.org/

The Bletchley Park Podcast is available on your usual podcast providers.

* Oh, and it’s ‘Ice Cold’ by the way… ‘What’s cooler than being cool?”. Listen to the song, you’ll understand.