Things to Do in Milton Keynes: Code-Breakers, Safari Animals and a Pot You Made Yourself

Milton Keynes gets a reputation for roundabouts and a shopping centre, and it has both. It also has one of the most important buildings of the twentieth century, a safari park, a lake you can sail on, and a village on its edge with proper woods and a pottery studio. Here is a day in it, from the people who run that studio.

Bletchley Park

The wartime code-breaking site is the reason the town is on any list at all. The huts and the mansion are open as a museum, the story of Enigma and the people who cracked it is told properly, and it takes longer than you think. Give it a morning.

Woburn Safari Park and Woburn Abbey

Ten minutes from our studio, on the Bedfordshire side. The safari park is the drive-through kind, with the animals coming to the car. Woburn Abbey next door is the stately home with the deer park and the gardens. Either fills half a day; both fill it entirely.

Willen Lake

The town’s big open space: a lake with watersports, a lakeside walk, a peace pagoda and enough grass for a picnic. The place to go when the weather is on your side.

Make your own pottery, with your own hands (this is us)

Woburn Sands is the village on the south-east edge of Milton Keynes, one stop from Bletchley on the train, and our Milton Keynes studio is on Station Road there: Studio 150. It does everything. You can paint a ready-made piece from the shelves, sit at the wheel for a beginner taster, or hand-build from raw clay. Pieces start at £15, the studio fee is £5 per person, and paints, glazing and firing are all in.

Grown-ups only? The Sip & Paint evenings are BYOB: 18+, cans and small bottles. And if the wheel is the bit you have always wanted to try, the beginner tasters run here too.

Aspley Woods

Walk out of the studio and keep going: Woburn Sands backs onto Aspley Woods, pine and heath on the greensand ridge, with trails that suit a pushchair as well as a mountain bike. The village’s best-kept secret, and it is not that secret.

The Stables, Wavendon

The music venue Cleo Laine and John Dankworth built in the village next door. Jazz, folk, classical and comedy most nights of the week, in a room small enough that every seat is a good one. Check what is on the night you are here.

Back in town

MK Gallery, by Campbell Park, is the contemporary art space, with a serious programme for a town its size. Xscape has the indoor ski slope. And yes, the Concrete Cows exist: they graze near Bancroft, and you can see them for free.

Getting here

Woburn Sands has its own station on the Marston Vale line between Bletchley and Bedford, and Studio 150 is on Station Road, 150A. By car, we are just off the A5130, ten minutes from junction 13 of the M1, with parking in the village.

Nearer London? We have four studios there. See pottery painting in London for all of them side by side.