Google Street View trike hits historic Bletchley Park

Home of World War II codebreakers to be featured in Google's Special Collect gallery...

Bletchley Park has been captured for Google Street View with the help of trikes equipped with 360-degree cameras, like the one abovePhoto: Google

Google has added images of the historic computing site Bletchley Park to its Street View mapping service.

Bletchley Park was used during World War II as a codebreaking centre, housing the men, women and machines who worked on cracking Nazi codes.

A Google trike equipped with a 360-degree camera made its way around the site yesterday to capture images of Bletchley House and the many huts that once housed the codebreakers. A trike was used in order to access some of the places a car wouldn't be able to go on the site.

The images taken will eventually appear in the Google Street View Special Collect gallery dedicated to famous landmarks, sport stadiums, historic buildings, city centres and more off-the-beaten-track locations around the world.

Other locations to have made the Special Collect archive include Unesco World Heritage sites such as Pompeii, Prague city centre, the Palace of Versailles and Stonehenge.

"Bletchley Park will form part of this collection, where viewers from all over the world can be made aware of this historical site, which played a pivotal role for Britain in World War II," Google said.

Back in March 2010, Bletchley Park was awarded £250,000 by the government to carry out repairs to the historic buildings that were in a poor state of repair.

Meanwhile, in February this year, a rare collection of offprints of Alan Turing's published works, including his seminal paper On Computable Numbers, were secured for Bletchley Park, thanks in part to a $100,000 donation from Google.