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There are exciting new plans being developed to create a new MK City Archive from 2025/2026 potentially housed at the Central Library, where the full archival story of the building of Milton Keynes will be presented.  

Currently Milton Keynes City Council (MKCC) has its public archives at the nearest legal Place of Deposit registered with The National Archives at Buckinghamshire County Archive in Aylesbury. To find out more about the current archives partners and collections check our Milton Keynes City Archives web page.

The new City Archive will rehome the formal archive collections held in Aylesbury and other archive collections throughout the city to the city centre. This new facility will provide a unique global resource both for our residents and for city planners, urban designers, foreign delegations and researchers from across the world.

The first part of the Plan in 2022-2024 will see MKCC and its partners run a series of resident, community and stakeholder engagement events and activities to introduce people to our amazing collections. It will research, develop and test new audience engagement through the archives, and to explore with them what this new City Archive should collect, and how an archive about building Milton Keynes can capture the buildings and communities of the future.

Alison Davies - Archivist in Residence and Pooleyville introduced Archive-opia!

In 2022 Milton Keynes City Council appointed Alison Davies, an architect and creative practitioner based in Nottingham, as its first ever 'Archivist in Residence'. Alison is well-versed in Milton Keynes' new town history and archives, having worked on projects with local partners using her University of Nottingham students to explore and reshape our designed spaces for new and future uses.

Together with MKCC, our three Archive Partners and Pooleyville Creatives, the partnership presented Archive-opia - a playful peep into the Milton Keynes Archives. This ran from 14 to 31 October 2022, holding drop-in events for different audiences across the city, including the launch of our new and amazing WikiPavilion!

The project will complete in Summer 2023 when Alison and the University of Nottingham students will present back to the city their ideas for how the city’s archives have inspired what a future Milton Keynes might look like.

Further events with the WikiPavilion are also planned for 2023 and 2024 so please keep checking back to the Archive-opia web page as well as council social media.