Explore James Bond's real-life origins at Bletchley Park
This exhibition is licensed to spill about Bond's creator Ian Fleming and his real-life spy work.
The name's Bletchley. Bletchley Park .
The real-life espionage roots of the world's most famous fictional spy are revealed in a new exhibition exploring James Bond 007's origins in the wartime work of his creator, Ian Fleming.
Fleming created Bond in 1953 and the deadly spy's adventures have been entertaining us in print and on film ever since. But Bond's history goes back to Fleming's own experience as an intelligence officer during World War II. Fleming visited the then-secret but now legendary codebreaking centre at Bletchley Park, where Alan Turing and other scientists and engineers laid the groundwork for modern computing with their pioneering cryptography work.
The new exhibition Bond at Bletchley Park: Illustrations and Inspirations includes artworks from emerging artists inspired by specific scenes, themes or characters from Fleming's James Bond novels -- such as an awkward breakfast shared between Bond and Pussy Galore, inspired by the recent 007 novel Trigger Mortis and visualised by artist Alan Fears.
The exhibition opens on 25 May, ahead of the release of Forever and a Day, a new Bond prequel novel by Trigger Mortis author Anthony Horowitz.