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and sail upstream or down river, admiring the city’s beautiful architecture and landscape from a
totally unique perspective.

If poling your own punt sounds a bit too much like hard work, take a river cruise with Oxford River
Cruises. Sightseeing river tours, boat trips and private hire cruises on the River Thames in and
around Oxford. Many of the sightseeing tours cruise along the famous University Regatta course
from Folly Bridge.

Bletchley Park. It is one of the birth-places of computers and some of the most successful code-
cracking operations were carried out here – so it was also the birth-place of what today we would
call “hacking”.

During World War 2 this manor house was one of the most closely guarded secrets in the world. It
was here that the brilliant mathematician, Alan Turing, and a team of hundreds of code-breakers
worked around the clock to crack the supposedly unbreakable German Enigma Code, used by the
Nazis to relay orders to their military units around the world.

The work of Turing and his team were the subject of the film, The Imitation Game, starring
Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing.

Their success was credited with shortening the war by as much as four years.

The world’s first programmable computer was designed by a brilliant Post Office engineer, Tommy
Flowers who, after looking at Alan Turing’s electro-mechanical Bombe, the first attempt at
mechanising the enormous work in breaking a cipher, figured he could build an electronic version.

Radio valves were harvested from all over Britain to provide the innards of this and subsequent
machines. Called Collossus because of its size – 1800 radio valves take up a lot of space – it
began producing highly accurate translations of German code from the moment it went into
operation.

Flowers was bound by the Official Secrets Act and it wasn’t until the 70s that the magnitude of his
contribution to the war effort began to emerge. Until then he couldn’t even tell his family that he
had invented the world’s first true electronic computer, and what’s more built 10 of them with an
11th under construction when the war ended.

Until then it was always believed that ENIAC was the first computer, but it didn’t come into use
until 1946.

Attractions along the way

The Shuttleworth Collection at Old Warden Aerodrome, a collection of aircraft and cars, was
started by Richard Ormonde Shuttleworth, a passionate racer and pilot. It contains some of last
airworthy aircraft of their type remaining anywhere in the world. The collection opened to the public
in 1963, and further aircraft and vehicles have been added over the years. The aircraft and
vehicles, as much as possible, are all kept working condition.