Adventures around Milton Keyneswith PlusBus
Concrete cows are just one of the distinctive icons of Milton Keynes. Enjoying city status since 1997, MK is also known for its many roundabouts, for the low-rise grids of its pioneering New Town and lots more. At Milton Keynes museum, you can discover the history of Buckinghamshire's largest settlement and even see the original concrete cows in the place where they were made. In the centre of the city you can shop till you drop, ski down the Snozone, and stroll through Campbell Park. Then hop on a bus to Bletchley Park and explore the world of war-time code breakers. Ask for PlusBus when you buy a train ticket to Milton Keynes and you can do all this and more. Read on for details.
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1. Milton Keynes Museum
A Victorian farmhouse in the countryside north of the city forms the heart of the fabulously varied interactive Milton Keynes Museum with its reconstructed street of local shops and huge collection of telephones. There are regular trains to Milton Keynes Central station from London Euston, Birmingham New Street, even Glasgow and from stations in between. Or you can take the train to Wolverton, closer to the museum. Add a PlusBus ticket for unlimited travel all day across the city and beyond.
- How do I get to Milton Keynes Museum by bus? From Milton Keynes Central station, turn left to find bus stop Z3. Hop on bus 6, which leaves every 20 minutes, and get off after about ten minutes at Stacey Bushes local centre bus stop. From the bus window, on the way to the museum, you can see some of the famous concrete cows and some picturesque countryside as you leave the city.
- From Stacey Bushes bus stop, it’s best to ignore the route Google suggests, which sends you along the main road. Instead walk a few steps back along the road the bus has dropped you on and turn left on a tarmac path, just beyond a mini roundabout. This pleasant path will lead you left under the main road. On the far side, turn right along the path and left near the steam train to the entrance. It’s about seven minutes’ walk altogether.
- Inside the museum, you can toast bread by the kitchen fire (see photos below), play musical instruments in the parlour, and climb on board an authentic wooden tram in the cavernous Hall of Transport. Doctor Who fans will be delighted to find a Tardis parked in the telephone gallery.
- The museum is developing galleries that will continue to tell the story of Milton Keynes beyond the 1970s and into the future. Here you can try your hand at working a Niftylift, manufactured in the city for decades. And don’t miss the the welcoming Granary tearoom, which has tasty lunches at bargain prices and great homemade scones and cakes.
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2. Midsummer Place
Back in the middle of the city, you can see Milton Keynes’ distinctive modern and postmodern architecture. Bus 6 from the museum goes to the Central Business Exchange. If you’re coming straight from the railway station, you could also get lots of other buses for two stops.
- From the Central Business Exchange, continue for a couple of minutes along the wide tree-line Midsummer Boulevard and you will see the huge glass-walled curve of Midsummer Place shopping centre ahead. You can buy almost anything here, from local honey in the Artisan Collective Farmshop to original paintings from Clarendon Fine Art Galleries.
- Just beyond Midsummer Place, you enter the area near Milton Keynes’ Theatre, lined with bars and cafes and close to Snozone, biggest indoor snow centre in Europe. And from here it’s less than five minutes’ walk to Campbell Park with its distinctive Light Pyramid, acres of green space and plenty of buses back to the station.
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3. Bletchley Park
Bletchley Park is famous today for its once-top-secret work breaking enemy codes during World War II, when nearly 10,000 people worked there. This mansion in Bedfordshire and the huts around it were the wartime home of the Government Code and Cipher School. The school’s mission was to read encrypted German messages, including those generated by the famous Enigma machine. Today, it’s a huge and fascinating museum and a must for budding codebreakers.
- How do I get to Bletchley Park by bus? From Milton Keynes Theatre District (or from the railway station) bus 4 runs every twenty minutes to Bletchley railway station, right next door to Bletchley Park. Bus 5, bus 6 and others also run regularly to Bletchley bus station, just a few minute’s stroll away. You can follow Good Journey’s directions or use the Good Journey travel planner to plot your own route. Best of all, Bletchley offers 2-for1 entry for visitors who arrive in the area by train.
- Once inside, explore the original huts where the code-breakers worked and see Alan Turing’s office and notebooks. There is also a reconstruction of the Bombe, a code-breaking machine operated by hundreds of Women from the Royal Naval Service (Wrens).
- As well as crucially helping to speed up the end of World War II, the work at Bletchley Park led to ground-breaking technological innovations. The cryptanalysts and engineers who worked there invented the earliest forms of today’s computers and launched the information age, changing the world in extraordinary ways.
