Comment Articles

Saving Station X

Andrew Donoghue ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 01 Sep 2003 16:40 BST

The total cost of the Millennium Dome from its conception six years ago to the present day is somewhere in excess of £800m. This is a structure that was ostensibly used once for a party and then ignored. The plan to pay homage to the diversity of life in the UK, as a new millennium dawned, mutated into a cut-price carnival themed somewhere between Disneyland and a 1970s school science programme.

Its contribution to the well-being of the average UK citizen has been pretty minimal apart from the handful of people who actually visited it and the considerable larger group who glean cathartic pleasure from lambasting the whole sorry enterprise.

The Millennium Dome is an easy and obvious target but that doesn't detract from the fact that it was a gargantuan waste of money. If it's worth spending more than three-quarters of a billion pounds preserving the site of a New Year's party, what sort of price do you put on maintaining something of real worth? For example, how about a facility credited with bringing the Second World War to an early end and saving tens of thousands of lives, and believed to be birthplace of modern computing? Well if you're the government then the price you put on it is about the same amount of Lottery money spent on the Dome's toilets.

The auspicious place in question, Bletchley Park in Buckinghamshire -- aka Station X -- receives no direct government funding. The trust that manages the site -- a loose collection of sheds and outbuildings centred around a grand mansion house -- faces a continuing scramble just to keep the place ticking over. Yearly admin costs are something approaching £1.5m without even tackling the significant overhaul the site deserves.

The lack of attention the site gets is shocking enough given its role in WW2 but Bletchley's place in the history of computing -- thanks to genius mathematician Alan Turing building the first programmable computer to crack the German Enigma codes -- makes the government's attitude seem something akin to criminal negligence.

This is a site that attracts thousands of visitors a year, has had countless books written about it and at least two Hollywood films -- "U571" and "Enigma" -- yet is being left largely to support itself through a variety of ingenious fund-raising events. As well as the planned launch of new business incubator -- allowing technology start-ups to benefit from Bletchley's innovative history -- the site holds conferences and open days to boost funding.