Google Donates £550k To Bletchley Park

By Amy Woodfield, 14th December 2011, 16:00

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Google has announced they are donating £550,000 towards transforming Bletchley Park into a heritage and education centre.

This money will contribute towards the project along with the £4.6 million from the Heritage Lottery Fund. 

Once the remaining funding is in place the Trust will begin restoring iconic code breaking huts 1, 3 and 6 and create a visitor centre and exhibition in the currently derelict Block C.  

The Bletchley Park Trust say this development will not only conserve buildings of highly significant heritage value but also will also considerably improve the educational offering and visitor experience.

Peter Barron, Director of External Relations for Google, said: 

"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.  We are delighted to make this charitable donation to help support the next phase of this important project"

Simon Greenish, Director of The Bletchley Park Trust says he is thrilled with Google's donation but says they actually have a lot to thank the park for:

"Google really came out of the history of Bletchley Park this story of computing and early computers, if it hadn't been for Bletchley Park would we have Google? So i think Google are seeing that they need to contribute back to where it all started"  

The Bletchley Park Trust is one of several dozen organisations receiving grants from Google.org at the end of 2011 and the grant is part of over $100 million in total charitable giving from Google in 2011.