Milton Keynes grid road system
The system is unique in the United Kingdom for its innovative use of street hierarchy principles: the grid roads run in between districts rather than through them.
The grid road system also serves an important purpose of discouraging through-traffic from travelling through neighbourhoods and thus reduces traffic noise and pollution in pedestrian areas.
The geography of Milton Keynes – the railway line, Watling Street, Grand Union Canal, M1 motorway – sets up a very strong north–south axis.
Some double as national roads for parts of their routes; these are shown in brackets: Grid roads are characterised by high speed limits, generous landscaping and greenery along their routes, all pedestrian crossings being by means of under- or overpasses, roundabouts at every intersection and an almost total lack of road-fronting buildings.
The H1 Ridgeway runs from the southern edge of Stony Stratford, across V4 Watling Street to a point on the V5 east of Wolverton.
It starts its route as a local single carriageway road, at a roundabout with V4 Watling Street north/south and Calverton Lane continuing westwards.
The single carriageway section ends a six-way roundabout with the A5 and the V5 Great Monks Street, near Abbey Hill golf course.
It continues east under the West Coast Main Line railway until it reaches a bridge over the M1, where the formal H3 designation terminates at Marsh End Roundabout, south of Newport Pagnell.
It runs along the top edge of Central Milton Keynes, over Willen Lake and terminates at Northfield Roundabout with H6 Childs Way near M1 Junction 14.
The H6 Childs Way runs from Whitney in the west of Milton Keynes at Kingsmead to a point short of Junction 14 of the M1 motorway in the east.
The road then crosses the V6 Grafton Street and runs along the southern edge of Central Milton Keynes and Campbell Park before passing Willen Lake.
In March 2010, the route onward (Countess Way) was opened which links to Newport Road (former A5130) in Brooklands, a dual carriageway with a permanent bus lane on each side with traffic lights at either end.
A short distance after this point it reduces to single carriageway as it passes the industrial estates of Mount Farm and Fenny Lock.
At the end of this one-kilometre stretch the road crosses under the A5 at an unusual bi-graded triple roundabout, the eastern part of which forms a dogbone interchange.
The H10 then continues east, again as a single carriageway for a short distance before finishing as a local distributor in the district of Old Farm Park on the very south eastern edge of Milton Keynes.
The original alignment continues south from here as Denbigh Road, regaining its identity at a roundabout with V7 Saxon Street.
The V6 Grafton Street is a major local road in Milton Keynes key to the layout and urban form of the 'new city'.
In this form it runs straight through the heart of Central Milton Keynes between the Centre:MK and the Church of Christ the Cornerstone and then returns to being a single carriageway after its junction with the H7.
It begins at a roundabout with Wolverton Road, near Giffard Park and Newport Pagnell, and heads south serving much of the east of MK.
Indeed, the 1970 masterplan for Milton Keynes proposed that the stretch from New Bradwell to the M1 motorway bridge (near Newport Pagnell services) would be part of the H2.
[5] Part of this route has been downgraded into a densely built, slow-speed, mixed mode "City Street", despite some local opposition.
