Velocity Launch - How Bletchley Park Overcame Adversity

Bletchley Park

History

4.8 • 177 Ratings

🗓️ 23 May 2014

⏱️ 6 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

May 2014

Bletchley Park CEO Iain Standen has told a new support hub for businesses how focusing on the fascinating story of World War Two Codebreaking helped transform Bletchley Park from a ramshackle, derelict site into a vibrant heritage attraction.

Velocity, a new growth hub for ambitious small and medium-sized enterprises across the South East Midlands, was launched in the newly-restored Block C Visitor Centre at Bletchley Park on Friday 23 May. It will help businesses unlock their potential by helping them to find funding and support. Bletchley Park was the ideal launch location as it is in the final stages of completing an £8 million restoration programme; £5 million in Heritage Lottery Funding and £3 million match fund raised by the Bletchley Park Trust.

Picture: ©shaunarmstrong/mubsta.com

#BPark, #Bletchleypark, #VelocityGrowth, #MK

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ladies and gentlemen, good morning, welcome to Bledchley Park.
0:10.0	You are the first corporate organisation to be able to use this facility, so with OPEs you've chosen here to for this particular launch.
0:17.0	The brief I was given was to talk about turning businesses around university. I'm going to use two examples one of wartime Bletchley Park and one of
0:25.7	the journey of the Bleckley Park Trust over the last 22 years.
0:30.5	War Time Bletchley Park went from a cottage industry based largely in the mansion you see here
0:36.1	with a couple hundred people, to an
0:38.3	organisation of 9,000 on this site alone at the end of the war. So from a cottage industry
0:44.3	to an industrial co-breaking intelligence production factory. And the key lesson from the Second World
0:50.3	War to learn is it was all about these people, the people who worked here.
0:55.9	The organisation ran the place, the government at Coven Scyt School, thought about its people.
1:00.4	It thought about how to recruit them.
1:02.1	Even before the war started, it was going out to universities and talent spotting.
1:06.3	You've heard of people like Alan Turing, perhaps less well-known names like Gordon Welshman and Stuart Miller Barry, people who worked here, they were targeted in 1938, 39 to come and work here.
1:16.2	So when the war started, this place hit the ground running. And then during the war, it continued
1:20.3	to talent spot and bring people in. And it grew rapidly, organically at first, and more organised
1:25.1	later on, I said, and grew grew about 9,000 people 75% of
1:29.3	those were women but they were all brought in here to do the important job so the first lesson to
1:33.9	them from Bechtart is think about the people and then when they're here look after them the
1:39.3	reason the park is as it is today when you go out there you'll see the central of the park with a lake
1:43.2	lots of greenery in there was by by design, not by accident. All these wartime buildings were
1:49.0	built away from the central of the park at the behest of the chap in charge, who said
1:53.4	he wanted people to have somewhere they can rest, recuperate and recover from the difficult work
	...

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