Welcome to the website for Bradwell Parish Heritage.
This website is being developed. We welcome comments as we want to encourage the construction of a shared, critical and inclusive understanding of the development of Bradwell.
The Parish covers the area of Milton Keynes enclosed by the Portway, Saxon Street and Monks Way grid roads with the western boundary being the area to the west of the railway line known as Bradwell Abbey. It includes the old village of Bradwell surrounded by modern development, Heelands and Bradwell Common, Bradwell Abbey and the industrial area of Rooksley. It is bounded at the north and south by H4 Danstead Way and H5 Portway; at the east by V7 Saxon Street. Almost 1000 residents live in Bradwell Common, Heelands and Rooksley.
While we aim to record the development and heritage of the area, currently the focus is on the area bounded, roughly, by the A5, Colley Hill, Loughton Road, and Sharman Walk. This includes the Abbey, part of the brook (called both Loughton and Bradwell) the castle, the church the pubs and the railway line.
However, the village is far more than a geographical location. It can be imagined as a constellation of social relations, memories and imagination woven together at a particular site. There have been strong links to the nearby meeting place on Secklow Mound and, through trade and personal networks it has been connected to the rest of the country and to the wider world. People have come here from around the world and travelled from Bradwell to many places. George Austin Charnock was born in Bradwell in 1861, the son of a man from Tipperary who married a woman from Bradwell. George moved to Crewe, migrated to Canada and ended up in San Francisco, California.
There is plenty to say about Bradwell. If you would like to contribute, please get in touch with the editors.
Do call back from time to time to see what we’ve been able to add to the site.
Bradwell Common – named because Common Lane, which ran from Bradwell village across the common to the 10th Century Secklow Mound meeting place at the rear of Milton Keynes Central Library building, crosses it – is home to the first of the Development Corporation’s three innovative housing exhibitions Homeworld, in 1981, Energy World and Future World.
Heelands was the location of a Roman farmstead, a Neolithic settlement and in Medieval times was worked using the ridge and furrow system.
The ancient track from Stanton Low to Loughton crosses both Heelands and Bradwell Common grid squares.
Buildings at Bradwell Abbey are home to Milton Keynes City Discovery Centre who hold a wealth of material about the development of the New City of Milton Keynes.
Bradwell contains a number of Listed Buildings. One these, the Memorial Hall, commemorates the men connected to the village who gave their lives in the Great War.
New Bradwell and Stantonbury were historically associated with what we now know as Bradwell Village and you might like to visit our friends the New Bradwell Heritage Group’s site.