Google Donates Half a Million to Bletchly Park

Google is donating £550,000 to the restoration of Bletchley Park.

Google has donated well over half a million pounds to the Bletchley Park Trust. The donation will mean the trust, which is home to the National Museum of Computing and, during WWII, the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS), can soon begin the first stages of a £15 million project to transform the site into a world-class heritage and education centre.

"The Bletchley Park Trust has been doing great work to honour Alan Turing and the codebreakers who helped shorten the second world war and to educate the next generation about the history of modern computing," said Peter Barron, Director of External Relations for Google. "We are delighted to make this charitable donation to help support the next phase of this important project."

The half million pounds for the Bletchley Park Trust is just a small portion of the $100 million Google has ear-marked for charitable donations for this year. However, it alone will not be enough to kick start renovations. According to the trust, the Heritage Lottery Fund announced a £4.6 million grant for the Bletchley Park Trust in October of this year but it is conditional on the Trust raising £1.7 million in match funding.

Simon Greenish, CEO of the trust, noted that though Bletchley Park has received other generous donations, Google's is the single largest element of partnership funding.

"[The donation] is absolutely vital in potentially getting the project underway much sooner than might otherwise have been the case," said Greenish. "It would be wonderful if other donors follow Google’s example to help preserve our computing heritage. We could then proceed as soon as possible with restoration of the profoundly historically significant codebreaking huts."