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Bletchley Park Faces Financial Rescue
biscuitfever11 writes "Just two months ago it seemed that Bletchley Park, the home of Station X, Britain's secret code-breaking base during the War, was doomed as the codebreakers' huts rotted and the site fell into disrepair. But today Britain's Lottery Fund is set to step in with a grant to rescue the ailing heritage site. (There was an earlier story on ZDNet.)"
I wish I has to face getting a lot of money from the lottery...
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This won't solve the one big issue facing Bletchley, that of the site having very low appeal to visitors.
As much as they might wish it to be otherwise, a collection of huts (one of which is now a tea room, ah yes, nice treatment of history there guys...), a house, some vintage cars and a few cluttered rooms of junk that pass for 'exhibits' just doesn't appeal to people these days.
And yes, they really do look like rooms full of junk for the most part, sad to say, the presentation of their exhibits is not good at all.
Oh, and the reconstructed Collossus? It's just there, in the middle of a room, with barely any information top help kids or the otherwise uninformed relate to it.
Not that the site isn't ok to visit. If you're into WW2 stuff then its probably worth a look, but if you've got kids they will be bored out of their tiny minds all day.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I am glad these historic buildings have been saved - the disrespect they had been shown drew uncomfortable parallels with what happened to Alan Turing after the war (a war which almost certainly wouldn't have been won without him)
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
That makes no sense at all. When people have no choice it becomes easier to take advantage of them.
Most Slashdotters probably don't need to be told this, but anyone interested in historical fiction about Bletchley Park shouldn't miss Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson. It's entertaining and rich in technical detail.
It makes complete sense.
I took a class of learning disabled children to Bletchley Park a few years back - we had a great time trying on gas masks and stuff. Not a lot of money in that though, and it's not something they could easily let millions of people do. Having said that we also went to the Imperial War Museum in London - and it wasn't a patch on the Bletchley experience, and they seem to make it work.
The wooden huts surrounding a stately home are very much part of the deal - you can't really get rid of them : They really are historic. As for why it was left to rack and ruin - well that's because they just looked like old huts - no one realised they were historic. Also the work was so secret that hardly anyone had a clue what went on there until relatively recently.
Much as I'm glad it's survived though, I have to say my own kids prefer the indoor ski slope with real snow at the Sno Dome about 2 miles away. Which gives you some idea of what they're up against
I'm sorry, but if the nest we can do is Rockstar (not knocking them, just being realistic) then will the last systems designer in the UK please turn off the server before emigrating? Fortunately, I expect to retire in a couple of years. Hopefully to somewhere where Government and other systems work.
Slightly off topic, today we discovered that the UK Government new release of the on-line tax system shows the accountant name, not the actual person for whom the form is being filled in. The guy on the help desk, when asked when it would be fixed, replied "I am not at liberty to disclose that". Not only is UK Government IT incompetent, it is secretive about it. (The Editor of Computer Weekly said that on the box last week.) So
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
There's certainly an irony in using lottery income to fund culture.
But there's a bigger issue here: whether culture has intrinsic value, and whether it is worth raising people up. If we fund education for its effect in raising the consciousness of the population, we should also fund culture out of general taxation. All the same, given that the lottery fund is used for cultural promotion, Bletchley Park has a pretty good claim on a slice of that funding.
One almost wonders whether lottery funding is part of a deliberate attempt to degrade ("democratise") culture.
Raising the consciousness of the population cannot easily be argued either from a democratic position, nor a capitalist one, and justifications for it in terms of appreciation after the fact are too easily misused in other contexts, except for one thing: culture has a long track record. Additionally, culture works by extending people, unlike more political 'fixes' of limiting people in a manner that politicians deem to be good.
The antigony of culture with political ideas, together with the degrading effects of democratic "philsophical" relativism is hostile not only to the recognition of culture, but also to its very existence.
Without such things as culture and the abstract search for truth, our purpose on this earth is no more than the propagation of our genes (for an atheist), or else is a waste of the talents that have been entrusted to us (for a theist).
Wikileaks, no DNS
I guess the statement "We haven't put in an application yet" was missed by the OP. Bletchley isn't being rescued yet. They are in discussions preceding an application for the grant.
Other than this text, there is no discernible information contained in this sig.
Most Slashdotters probably don't need to be told this, but anyone interested in historical fact about Bletchley Park shouldn't miss Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges. It's entertaining, rich in technical detail and, wait for it, true.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I read the comments to this article just to get a joke along the lines of:
Oh the irony! A tax on those who are bad at math funding the history of the greatest mathematicians of WWII.
I am sorely disappointed, slashdotters. Was it too easy? Surely I'm not the only one that laughed at the though?
I agree. And in the UK specifically, that was true up to about the 1960s. Since then the poor have been getting more power, more say, more pandering, and there's more of them. Actually none of them are even genuinely, technically, poor any more. But since the late 60s the UK has been in steady decline. Now we have the fattest, drunkenest and most violent children in Europe, if not the World. That's what happens when you let the poor run a country. Lowest common denominator politics.
No, the choice is still there. It's a psychological thing, make them think one choice is better than the other.
Kind of like making them think they're choosing whether to cross a desert or jump into a beer fountain full of hot babes and fruit. But it's a kind of environmental thing too. If there were a "smart" lottery, where only smart people could get a ticket, you'd have a different opinion of it than a "poor-tax" lottery.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Well there must be some interest about Bletchley in the UK; BBC Radio 4 has run two seasons of "Hut 33" a comedy about Bletchley. It's a typical WWII BBC comedy; Polish jokes, German spies, class warfare, and smutty jokes.
I visited Bletchley Park a couple of years ago while on a trip to England. it was an easy day trip from London. The site is a very short walk from the train station, so no driving or bus is necessary to get there. It was a beautiful spring day when we were there and the grounds are quite lovely. They had the Colossus replica running which was very cool. The museum is quite nice as well. Later that night I met up for beers with some guys from my company's London office. They were shocked that we had made a day trip to Milton Keynes until we told them why we went. Apparently Londoners think of the area as a bit of a suburban wasteland.
I also got some cool semi-psychedelic pictures caused by a malfunctioning sensor in my digital camera.
I definitely recommend it as a place to visit if you have an afternoon in the greater London area.
The "Crap-shacks" are where the Historic and important stuff happened.
The main House is very nice (I used it for a seminar a few years back - I'd recommend it as a location for anyone doing something similar) but we are not particularly short of nice old house. Its the complex which is significant and thehastily thrown up wartime buildings are worth preserving, even if they don't look pretty
The summary is way off-beam. The Heritage Lottery Fund is nowhere near stepping in.
I quote: '"We are in serious discussions with the Heritage Lottery Fund. This is prime Lottery territory," said Greenish. "We haven't put in an application yet, but the rules have changed a bit which is helpful."'
Here's how HLF works. You put the application in. This is serious, serious hard work. It's not just "fill in a form and post it to PO Box Lottery". Expect to have a full-time team working on it for three months at least: and even then, really deserving projects have done exactly that and found themselves rejected.
Ok, so your application is good (and, just as important, there aren't any better ones at the time - HLF only has a finite pot of money, and in fact it's getting smaller, as the UK Government takes from it to fund the Olympics). You then get a "Stage One Pass".
This doesn't mean you have the money. This means they'll give you a small grant to help you with the cost of preparing the real application. At this point, they want to know everything: your projected finances, how it's going to benefit public access to an important bit of heritage, how you'll make it sustainable to avoid coming back for another hand-out in three years' time, the works. Remember that the Lottery funds were seriously burned in their early days by the fiasco of the Millennium Dome. They don't give it out lightly.
If you're really good, you might get through this and get the Stage Two Pass. This means you've got the money. (Where, incidentally, "the money" is probably much less than you wanted in the first place, because there's so much competition that the HLF advisors have warned you your only chance is if you lodge a lower bid.)
Oh... one more thing. HLF doesn't generally fund the entirety of a project. They give "match funding". In other words, "we'll pay 50% of the costs if you can find 50% from someone else".
So, with that in mind, allow me to rephrase the summary. "Britain's Lottery Fund has changed some rules to potentially allow these guys to apply for a grant which entitles them to prepare a proper application for a grant which might, if they're very lucky, pay for half the cost of a reduced-cost version of your total project." Sorry, not quite as catchy.