Bletchley Park, the top-secret code-breaking centre which helped Britain win the Second World War, is to receive a “substantial" grant from the government’s historic monuments commission to save it from dereliction.

The plight of Bletchley Park was highlighted when the country’s leading computer scientists wrote a letter to The Times in July demanding that the government rescue the site, which has fallen into a “terrible state of disrepair”.

On Thursday English Heritage will announce a grant worth hundreds of thousands of pounds to prevent the Buckinghamshire mansion from falling down. The site, which is run by a charitable trust, receives no money directly from the government.

"Bletchley Park is renowned globally for the achievements of its code-breakers in the Second World War and workers here made an enormous contribution in a whole range of spheres from mathematics to computing," said Andrew Brown of English Heritage. "It is our job to make sure this site is properly protected and interpreted for future generations."

Times Archive, 1977: Bletchley Park secrets revealed

Codebreakers were regularly cracking Enigma from the spring of 1940 using the earliest computers ever to be built

• Scharnhorst dash aided by decoding failure

• Enigma disclosures

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However, the future of the wooden huts where the Engima codes were cracked is still in doubt. They have been described in the summer as looking “like a garden shed that’s been left for 60 years”.

Bletchley's codebreakers, led by the erratically brilliant Alan Turing, managed to crack the fantastically complex Engima codes, which the Germans thought were unbreakable. The intelligence that this generated saved countless Allied lives and may have shortened the war significantly.

As the German ciphers became ever more elaborate, the codebreakers fought back, and their efforts culminated in the Colossus, one of the world's first programmable electronic computers. It was an advance that kick-started modern British computing.

The site remained shrouded in secrecy even after the war, as the thousands who had worked there kept their vows of silence. After the government moved out in 1991 Bletchley was in an advanced state of decay and plans were drawn up to raze the building and put up a housing estate.

The Bletchley Park trust was formed to save the site, and eventually succeeded in opening it to the public. The National Museum of Computing, a charity, is now also housed at Bletchley. In July 97 leading experts signed a letter saying: "The future of the site must be preserved for future generations by providing secure long-term financial backing."

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