Venue: National Bowl
Town: Milton Keynes, GB

The National Bowl (originally the Milton Keynes Bowl) is an entertainment venue located in Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, England. The site was a former clay pit (for brick-making), filled in and raised to form an amphitheatre using sub-soil excavated by the many new developments in the area. It has a maximum capacity of 65,000. The arena is open-air grassland, without seats. The venue opened in 1979, with gigs by Desmond Dekker and Geno Washington. In 1992, Sony/Pace bought the venue and re-branded it as the National Bowl, building a massive permanent sound stage. They pulled out in 1996 citing profitability reasons. English Partnerships, which merged with the Homes and Communities Agency in 2008, bought the site in 2000. From 2006 to 2010, it was leased to a Gaming International/Live Nation UK consortium. On 23 January 2006, Gaming International/Live Nation won a further lease in a competitive tender. The consortium made proposals for major developments in a a development summary leaflet (previously linked from the 'Backstage' section of the National Bowl website, now removed). Gaming International handed The Bowl back to Milton Keynes Partnership towards the end of 2010 - so it is unlikely that any of the plans outlined in 2006 will ever be undertaken - apart from a temporary structure built close to The Bowl in summer 2010 which has a temporary three-year planning permission. In December 2011, Milton Keynes Council officially adopted proposals to make Milton Keynes an "International Sporting City" which included ambitious plans to redevelop the National Bowl into an international-standard sports training base suitable for hosting visiting international teams when they played at Stadium MK or elsewhere in the UK and also as a permanent home for MK Dons. Milton Keynes Council agreed to fund the training complex as part of a property deal with Inter MK, a property development company owned by MK Dons chairman Peter Winkelman, on land owned by the Council in Newpor