Navigating

We're assuming that most people will come by car. If you need advice on other methods of getting to MK, please e-mail for advice.

Town Planning : (Blue Peter Method)

Materials:

Sheet of blank A4 paper.
Pen or pencil
Ruler (if hands unsteady!)

Method

Lay the paper down in landscape orientation. With the pen and ruler (if required) draw eleven vertical lines spaced evenly between the left and right edges of the paper. It doesn't really matter if you end up with nine or ten.

Then draw ten horizontal lines, evenly spaced between the top and bottom edges of the paper. Now your New Town is really beginning to take shape! North is at the top of your drawing, by the way.

Label the rightmost vertical line with the legend 'V11'. The vertical next to it should be labelled 'V10'...and so on until you get to the leftmost vertical (which should be 'V1' if you drew the recommended number). Place your labels either at the top or the bottom of the lines.

Label the top horizontal line as 'H1', the second one down 'H2'...and so on until you reach H10. Again, place your labels at either edge of the paper.

You now have a schematic of Milton Keynes' road grid system. Most of this is dual-carriageway. Where grid roads meet there is a roundabout (excepting a handful of traffic lights in the shopping centre). Roundabouts have names as do (I'm sure you'll be relieved to know) the grid roads. East-West grid-roads have the suffix 'Way', whilst those going North-South have 'Street'. Thus H6 is also known as Childs Way. Knowing that, you can now add some more useful information to your map...

Find the Eastern end of H6 (Childs Way) on your map, where it meets the edge of the paper. Write 'M1 (J14)' there. When you come off the M1 at Junction 14 and head towards 'Central Milton Keynes', you're automatically on Childs Way...and about 4½ miles from the venue.

Bury Lawn School is on the North side of the dual-carriageway H3, between the V8 and V7 grid-roads. You should now be able to plot a course from the M1 to the venue without much trouble ("You can't miss it, mate"!). If you're coming from another direction there's advice available should you need it.

Town Planning : (Commission For New Towns Method)

In practice there are one or two instances where a grid-road doesn't go all the way across (or up-and-down) MK and the road pattern is slightly different in the city centre, but these shouldn't concern you. However, now you know what you'll be looking at, it would be best to test your route against what the planners actually came up with...

There is a street map of Milton Keynes available on MKweb. This link points to the venue's location, but you can use the map's pan and zoom facilities to see where it fits in to the real road-grid system.

If you'd rather have a detailed printed street/grid-road map there are two or three options. Should you want to take up any of these, please e-mail me:

There's a full colour (wow!) large-scale street map book of MK available at £4.75 which includes a Leisure Guide - well, someone might want to bring their skis! There's also the same map but in fold-up form for £4.25 (that doesn't seem to include the Leisure Guide, by the way).
The same large-scale map book, again no Leisure Guide, comes in black-and-white for a mere £2.95!

If you can't be bothered with all this, remember that we'll be sending you a road-grid map along with your ticket(s) - that's all you'll need if you're not wanting to find hotels or pubs or other MK addresses.

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