Bletchley: a railway town whose wartime secrets helped shape the modern world

Bletchley is one of the most historically resonant places in Buckinghamshire, now part of Milton Keynes but older and more layered than the new city that later enveloped it. Its name is Anglo-Saxon in origin and the settlement grew from a modest village near Fenny Stratford into a substantial town after the arrival of the London and Birmingham Railway in 1838 and the branch lines to Bedford and Buckingham. That transport revolution shifted the area’s centre of gravity and turned Bletchley into a strategic railway junction. In the 20th century, however, the town’s place in history was secured by Bletchley Park, the country house and wartime codebreaking centre where the Government Code and Cypher School penetrated Axis communications, including the German Enigma and Lorenz ciphers. The work carried out there by figures such as Alan Turing, Gordon Welchman, Bill Tutte and thousands of others helped shape the Allied war effort and later the history of computing.
Population: 15,313 inhabitants (civil parish, 2011 census); the wider built-up Bletchley area had 37,114 inhabitants in the 2011 census.
Distance: about 5 miles south of Central Milton Keynes and within easy reach of Fenny Stratford and Wolverton.
Traditions and culture: Bletchley combines railway-town identity with an extraordinary legacy of secrecy, codebreaking and early computing.
Highlights: Bletchley Park, the National Museum of Computing, the historic railway station, Queensway and the wider urban history of old Bletchley and Fenny Stratford.