A donation of £4.6 million has been made to the Bletchley Park Trust by the Heritage Lottery Fund to preserve the huts at Bletchley Park used to house the breakers of the codes used by the Germans during WW2, an achievement that helped the Allies avoid German submarines, plan D-Day and win the war.

The work was carried out in complete secrecy with Bletchley chosen because of location away from possible bomb targets, its access to London and its position between Oxford and Cambridge, with Universities that supplied some of the best mathematical brains in the UK. In particular the teams cracked the Enigma codes, produced by machines originally produced for business and offering millions of permutations that could be changed daily, and machines developed by the Bletchley teams to check permutations were forerunners of today’s computers.