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By Tom Espiner, 12 March 2009 14:56

NEWS

The site of British codebreaking efforts during World War II is to get £600,000 from Milton Keynes Council and English Heritage.

The two bodies announced on Thursday that Bletchley Park, famous for its role in Allied codebreaking during WWII, will receive the funds over the next three years.

Speaking to silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Wednesday, Bletchley Park Trust director Simon Greenish welcomed the funding.

"This money will help put right the ravages of time," said Greenish. "We need to get the infrastructure sorted out."

The funds will be used to improve facilities including the roads, the drains - which on the site "only just function" - according to Greenish; power supplies and the clock tower, which Greenish is "concerned about from a structural point of view".

The huts in which mathematician Alan Turing and others worked on codebreaking will not receive any of the funds, said Greenish, as they form part of an application for funds from the National Lottery.

"Huts three and six will form part of a heritage lottery-fund application," he continued, adding that the buildings housing the National Museum of Computing are "in good order" compared with the rest of the site, and so were not such a priority.

The National Museum of Computing houses a collection of computers which includes the rebuilt Colossus, used to break high-level German codes during the war.

Last year both IBM and PGP contributed funds of $100,000 between them, and called for other companies to donate money to repair the site. Greenish said at the time that the whole site would need up to £10m to become a world-class museum complex.