Tour: Sunday 29 August 2021, 12 noon.
Meeting Place: Manchester Museum Reception, Oxford Road, Chorlton-on-Medlock.
Booking: Please press here to book with Eventbrite.
How wonderful that Alan Turing is now the face of the new £50 note, even though it is hardly an item of currency in everyone’s purse. Turing was a man vilified in his lifetime by the establishment and unknown to the public on account of the secrecy surrounding his war work. He was also named BBC’s Icon of the 20th century a while back.
Noting that the BBC’s own website on the subject wrongly claims that Alan Turing invented the computer, here’s the ideal opportunity to learn the true story…on this tour lovingly created by the New Manchester Walks team.
We start at the Manchester University campus to take in the great man’s Chorlton-on-Medlock sites, including the Alan Turing Building (the Maths Department, can you believe), the building where the computer was invented (but not by Turing) and his office, then make our way towards town to stop at the cinema where it all went wrong for him. We finish at the Alan Turing statue of course.
En route, we toss in fascinating stories about Turing’s life, his colleagues, their views on him, hear about the government’s early attempts at code-breaking, touch on what Alan Turing did during the war at Bletchley, and look at his role at Manchester University after the War, creating the world’s first commercially available computer at Moston (yes, really). We finish by examining in detail Alan Turing’s sad demise, stopping at the site where he is honoured.
* The next Alan Turing tour starts at the Manchester Museum Reception on Sunday 11 July, eight hours before the Euro final whose outcome he probably predicted in a computer model back in 1950.
