Slashdot Mirror
Bletchley Park's Bitter Dispute Over Its Future
An anonymous reader writes "Tensions are high at Bletchley Park between the new management who want a 21st century installment and the volunteers who want to show the whole story (and get dismissed for doing so). This report [Note: video, with sound] is from the BBC: 'The groundbreaking intelligence work carried out at Bletchley Park during the second world war was credited with bringing forward the end of the conflict. In 2011 the site was awarded a £4.6m grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF). But Bletchley is currently in the throes of a bitter dispute, between owners who want to create a brand new visitors centre, and volunteers who have been working on the site for years.'"
Similar experience with the Birmingham Science Museum, in my youth it had seemingly acres of operational industrial machinery, mercury arc rectifiers, van-de-graff generators, an operational beam engine, a steam train and Fresnel lighthouse lens (presumably not native to Brum) and countless other such well oiled triumphs of human ingenuity,
They closed it in '97 and replaced it some years later with the shockingly poor substitute that is Think Tank / Millennium point. Basically they scrapped 3/4th of the exhibits, replaced them with much easier and cheaper to curate "social history" (this is still allegedly a science museum) and started charging a small fortune to get in. It really upsets me that the closest my own children will ever get to the sights, sounds and delicious machine oil smells of our true industrial history is the occasional steam rally.