Hut 11A - The Bombe Breakthrough

In January 2018, a permanent exhibition was inaugurated at Bletchley Park, which during the Second World War was the central site for British codebreakers and the Government Code and Cypher School. This exhibition recounts what went on at the base, where men and women cracked numerous secret codes used by the Germans during the Second World War, the most famous being the Enigma code. Commander Alastair Denniston was the operational head of GC&CS from 1919 to 1942 and his decision to create a team of codebreakers from a wide variety of backgrounds proved highly successful. This eclectic group included linguists, historians, chess champions crossword solvers and even an expert in papyrology. When Denniston realised that the Germans were using electromechanical cipher machines, he also recruited some of Britain’s leading mathematicians. In 1939, Alan Turing, a mathematician who had been teaching at Cambridge, joined the team. His role was to fine-tune a machine called the Bombe that would decrypt the Enigma code. The story of Turing’s fascinating struggle to decipher the code is the subject of the film “The Imitation Game”, which won an Oscar in 2015 for the Best Adapted Screenplay. At Bletchley Park, the various work groups were divided up into so-called Huts. The first version of Bombe was assembled in Hut 11A and it is there that Alan Turing worked.
The architects from the Nissen Richards Studio in collaboration with the lighting designers from Studio ZNA have turned Hut 11A into an exhibition space that allows visitors to immerse themselves in history as well as to touch the exhibits, including the Bombe and the iconographic installation alongside it, which includes infographics, diagrams and touchscreen applications. Palco projectors fitted with a 14° spot optic and mounted on Low Voltage track installed on special metal frames provide 3000 K accent lighting to these iconic exhibits. The resulting atmosphere is intimate, inspiring concentration through low lighting levels integrated with the accent lighting used to emphasise the key exhibits.