Bletchley Park to receive funds for infrastructure maintenance from the UK government
Image: Bletchley Park - the Mansion in 2025
Bletchley Park, in Bletchley, Buckinghamshire is to receive £2,451,350 from the UK government as part of a new £20m Museum Renewal Fund to ease the financial pressures facing English civic institutions. Jennifer Milton, Director of Support Services (which includes Buildings and Infrastructure, and the financial management of the Trust) will be joining our 'Cultural Cities' discussion forum next week to talk about the funding.
The investment in Bletchley Park will help the Trust care for the historically significant site by enabling crucial repairs to the roof of the Mansion. It also allows essential maintenance to take place to heating systems and for the Trust to replace the old boilers with more environmentally friendly solutions, helping to create a greener future for Bletchley Park.
Iain Standen, CEO of Bletchley Park Trust, said, “We are delighted to receive the generous support of DCMS and Arts Council England. The funding from MEND allows the Bletchley Park Trust to carry out extremely important infrastructure projects, which would not have been possible otherwise. The major investment in Bletchley Park will not only help to preserve and protect this nationally and internationally significant heritage site and museum, it will also enable us to carry out critical environmental improvements to our heating systems. This will create a sustainable future for the site, ensuring our ability to continue to tell the important story of what happened here to future generations.”
Delivered via Arts Council England for 2025/26, the fund will help keep civic museums open, protect opening hours and jobs, continue serving communities and tell the national story at a local level.
It is part of a major cultural sector funding package of more than £270m announced as part of the government's Plan for Change, which aims to boost local economies and increase opportunities to gain creative skills.
Hundreds of arts venues, museums, libraries and heritage buildings will receive a share of the Arts Everywhere Fund, which comes as the sector marks the 60th anniversary of the government's first ever arts white paper by the UK's inaugural arts minister, Jennie Lee.
The package also includes a fifth round of the Museum Estate and Development Fund (Mend) worth £25m, which will support non-national museums to undertake vital infrastructure projects and tackle urgent maintenance backlogs.
The wider cultural package also includes a 5% increase to the budgets of national museums and galleries sponsored by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS), which aims to support their financial resilience and help them provide access to the national collection.
An additional £120m will be directed to the Public Bodies Infrastructure Fund, which will ensure national cultural public institutions are able to address essential works to their estate.
£15m for Heritage at Risk will provide grants for repairs and conservation to heritage buildings at risk, while £3.2m will fund four cultural education programmes for children and young people in the next financial year, including the Museums and Schools Programme and the Heritage Schools Programme.
For this year's International Women's Day celebrations, Bletchley Park is highlighting the work of more than 70 former students of Newnham College, a women’s college in Cambridge. They were secretly recruited to work at Bletchley Park during World War Two, thanks partly to the close connections between key figures at Newnham and Bletchley Park.
In this exhibition, the story is told of how Newnham College supplied Bletchley Park with mathematicians, modern linguists, classicists, historians, English graduates and others to aid in cryptanalysis. Many of these women felt unable to reveal their part in this top-secret work to anyone, so lots of their experiences lay hidden.
The story of the women of Newnham College at Bletchley Park was slowly revealed and uncovered by painstaking research by Dr Sally Waugh, Dr Gillian Sutherland and College Archivist Frieda Midgeley, with the help of Bletchley Park.
Group photo of Principal and Fellowes in 1936, courtesy of Newnham College Archives.
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