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I'm travelling to the UK from Australia and wanted to visit a number of sites of scientific history.

One at the top of my list is Alan Turing. (WWII Codebreaker and Pioneer of the Binary Computer Architecture).

There appears to be a Computing History Museum at Cambridge.

There appears to be a memorial in Sackville Park, in Manchester.

There appears to be a section at the Twickenham Museum.

There appears to be a display at the Manchester Museum.

There is obviously the display at Bletchley Park, and the display at the National Museum of Computing.

There was also an exhibition at the London Science Museum - but this closed years ago.

There also appears to be the Alan Turing Institute at the British Library.

But can you visit a museum with a display about his life and works?

My question is: Are there any museums or sites in England honouring Alan Turing?

EDIT: Added note about London Museum display closing.

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    How many scientists/engineers are still on your list...? Apr 23, 2017 at 13:12
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    There should be a "the answer is in the question" close reason...
    – fkraiem
    Apr 23, 2017 at 13:22
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    @ThorstenS. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_British_scientists
    – JonathanReez
    Apr 23, 2017 at 19:19
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    @JonathanReez He said "on top of his list" consecutively for currently 7 scientists. I am curious how many questions more we may expect... Apr 23, 2017 at 19:35
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    I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because "your answer is provided along with the question, and you expect more answers" (from the help centre). Apr 24, 2017 at 11:25

3 Answers 3

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I think your notes in the question pretty much cover it, but there's much more at Bletchley Park than just a display. There is:

  • In "Museum in Block B", a whole gallery titled The Life and Works of Alan Turing, including:

    • Copies of 15 of his 18 published mathematical papers. Here's a little about the story of how they were saved by an online campaign
    • Original notebooks containing some of his thoughts and mathematical forumulas
    • A modern statue of him
    • Information about his life and achievements outside of his work at Bletchley Park, and his impact, including:

      ...a letter to Alan Turing's mother written 20 years after his death when she was told for the very first time what a huge contribution he'd made to the outcome of World War II and also the vital contribution he'd made to the modern computer

    • Various personal items donated by his family, including a teddy bear he used as a practice audience for his lectures, and a hand-drawn Monopoly board he played on as a child.

    • It's described as:

      ...the most comprehensive exhibition of the life and works of Alan Turing in the world

  • In Hut 8:
    • The real Office of Alan Turing, Head of Hut 8, recreated to how it would have looked in World War Two complete with the mug chained to the radiator.

    • Interactive displays about the work and methods of Turing and his team
  • And of cause, almost all the other exhibits about the codebreaking work during the war are related to Turing, including:
    • The only known example of used Banbury sheets, a system devised by Alan Turing to help find the daily-changing Enigma settings

    • The world’s only fully operational Bombe rebuild – the electro-mechanical device used to mechanise the process of breaking Enigma

    • Recreations of what the codebreaking rooms were like during the war

Bletchley Park is definitely the place to start, and it'll also be worth talking to staff and volunteers who are likely to be able to tell you plenty more about him and about which other sites are worth seeing.


There's also a little about him in his childhood home town of Guildford in Surrey (a short distance south of London), which is described in this article. There's not much to see (an English Heritage Blue plaque outside his old family home, a road named after him...) but there is a two mile guided walk available with more of a focus on his childhood and how his family saw him.

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It isn't about Turing in particular, but you can see a replica of the Manchester Baby, a computer that Turing programmed, and the first computer to store user-entered software in electronic memory, at the Museum of Science and Industry, Manchester.

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In Cambridge MA USA, at the MIT Flea (electronics junk market), I saw a guy showing artifacts from an Engima machine. Don't know if he has a more permanent exhibition or not.

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