Photos: Codebreaking Bletchley Park gets £4.6m lottery grant

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Bletchley Park

A walk through life inside Britain's WWII codebreaking hub...

Seventy years ago inside drab huts in the heart of Buckinghamshire, British codebreakers unpicked the secret communications of the Nazi war machine.

The work of the World War II codebreakers based at Bletchley Park allowed the Allies to stay one step ahead of the German military.

Today it was confirmed that the Bletchley Park Trust will receive £4.6m from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) to create a new visitors' centre on the site - seen here during the Second World War - and renovate the huts where the codebreaking took place.

CEO of the Bletchley Park Trust Simon Greenish said the award recognised the site's role in history.

"Bletchley is getting a lot of recognition and quite rightly so because this is arguably one of the most important sites in 20th-century Britain," he said.

silicon.com spoke to Greenish about why the work that took place at Bletchley was so important, what life was like for the codebreakers and the site's role in developing one of the world's first electronic computers.

Photo: Crown Copyright, used with kind permission Director GCHQ