MK Pride Festival is at Campbell Park in Milton Keynes on Saturday 12 September 2026, its seventh edition. Gates open at noon and the site closes at 22:30, and the day is split in two. Pride by Day, from 12:00 to 17:30, is open to all ages. At 17:30 the site becomes Pride by Night and 18 plus only, with no under 18s admitted after that point. Last entry is 20:00 and there is no re-entry once it has passed.
Five programmes run in parallel on the site. The Main Stage is on from 13:00 to 22:30, the Community Stage and the Kids Stage from 12:30 to 17:00, the Comedy Stage from 19:00 to 22:00, and the Rainbow Market of independent traders and food stalls stays open from noon to the end. The organisers have announced Tulisa as the Main Stage headliner. Four days before the festival the rest of the bill, including the comedy programme and the DJs for the evening, was still listed as to be announced, so anyone planning around a particular act will have to keep checking.
Entry is free but not simply open. Every visitor needs a registered entry pass, and admission is subject to capacity and may be restricted at busy times. VIP upgrades are sold separately. Bars run Challenge 25, so bring photo identification if you intend to drink. Picnic food is welcome and so are sealed plastic bottles of soft drinks, while glass, alcohol brought from outside, chairs, blankets and large umbrellas are all turned away, along with drones, flares, laser pointers and flags on poles. The organisers point drivers at the centre:mk multi-storey car parks, which have a flat route through to the park. Dogs are allowed during the daytime on a lead and not after 17:30; assistance dogs are welcome throughout.
The access provision is worth reading before the day, because more of it has to be arranged in advance than at most festivals this size. There is a separate free Accessibility Entry Pass, a staffed accessible entrance, step-free routes across a site that is otherwise open grass, a Changing Places facility with a height-adjustable bench and hoist, charging points for powered wheelchairs and mobility scooters, a quiet space, earplugs at the welfare tent and British Sign Language interpretation on selected stage programming. One carer or personal assistant may accompany a disabled visitor. The detail is on the festival's accessibility page, which also warns that the grass turns soft in wet weather.
We list no venues in Milton Keynes itself, and the official afterparties at partner venues around the city had not been named four days out. What the date does offer is company. Four other Prides we list fall on the same Saturday within roughly 200 km: Pride in Gloucestershire in Gloucester, Derby Pride in Markeaton Park, East Coast Pride on the Lincolnshire coast and Chorlton Pride in south Manchester. Rushmoor Pride in Farnborough follows a week later, on 19 September.
The United Kingdom scores 43.9 out of 100 on ILGA-Europe's Rainbow Index. Marriage, adoption, anti-discrimination law and hate crime protection are all in place. What holds the score where it is is legal gender recognition and a ban on conversion practices that has been promised since 2018 and is still not law. Our country page for the United Kingdom sets out the rest.
