Move over, Alan Turing: meet the working-class hero of Bletchley Park you didn’t see in the movies
The Guardian, 11 October 2025.
Tommy Flowers Mural | launch event at Bletchley Park
August 15, 2026
In 2017, Garry founded the Tommy Flowers community pub on the Aberfeldy Estate in Poplar, East London. Named after the local hero Tommy Flowers, this initiative rapidly grew beyond a traditional pub, becoming a celebrated “new model of creative community engagement”. With the demolition of the pub and surrounding buildings, the mural of Tommy Flowers, which adorned the side of the pub, was relocated to The National Museum of Comptuting (TNMOC) at Bletchley Park. TNMOC was thrilled to mark Garry’s successful projects and the support from the National Lottery Heritage Fund by unveiling this significant new addition to the TNMOC’s collection: the Tommy Flowers Mural in its new, prominent home. This striking piece will now inspire new visitors to TNMOC.
In this video, Garry discusses his artistic career and how the mural came to exist. TNMOC, home of the reconstructed Colossus in its original Block H, was proud to host this special occasion.
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XMTR Radio Hour #41 Sounding Colossus
December 16, 2025
This XMTR Radio Hour is a little different. Lucia speaks to Garry Hunter the director of arts and heritage organisation Fitzrovia Noir – and composer/violinist Jack Campbell about a new commission from the educational foundation that has grown out of the Tommy Flowers community pub in Poplar, East London. The pub’s namesake Tommy Flowers designed and built Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, to help decipher the encrypted messages sent by the German High Command during WW2.
23-year-old composer and musician Jack M.Campbell has recently written and extensively performed a piece inspired by Alan Turing’s Bombe. With a bursary from TFF, he has now composed a score responding to Colossus, the computer built by Tommy Flowers to greatly expedite the reading of Lorenz traffic. The code was cracked by mathematician Bill Tutte, who, after the war, went on to teach at two universities in Canada, Jack’s home country.
Following the conversation about outsiders, music, algorithms and maths, is an exclusive rendition of this composition: ‘Colossus’ by Jack Campbell.
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Radio Sohemia, episode 16: Adventures in Coding
March 01, 2026
Former Sunday Times journalist turned bestselling author Andrew Smith explores the achievements of the little-known Cockney genius, Tommy Flowers (1905-1998), who led the team that created Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer. This revolutionary machine that enabled the wartime boffins at Bletchley Park to crack the previously impenetrable Lorenz ciphers used by the German commanders. Yet Tommy Flowers’s extraordinary achievements remained top secret event after the war.
In telling the story of the world-transforming technological revolution that Tommy Flowers unleashed, Andrew Smith will draw on his recent longform Guardian feature about Flowers. Andrew, the bestselling author of Moondust, talks to historian Matthew Worley about Devil in the Stack – his latest nonfiction book. It’s a genre-defying part memoir, part history, and part impassioned essay about computer code and the ways in which it’s reshaping the world and humanity.
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