Help Me Improve My Navigation – Ideas Needed.

OK i run a community website related to a local Borough here in the UK.

When i post news or events or indeed pictures they are tagged with locations within the borough. This allows people residing in different parts of the borough able to drill down to a specific location they are interested in. Perfect but I want to do slightly more.

I want separate sections for each borough location with a set of pages.

Heres a quick idea.

Location 1
About Location 1
Schools in Location 1
Events in Location 1
Your Local Councillors etc etc

Location 2
About Location 2
Schools in Location 2
Events in Location 2
Your Local Councillors etc etc

Location 2 should not see location 1’s pages and vice versa.

Location 1 and 2’s landing pages should show news located only to that area.

So a visitor comes to the website, clicks a location he’s interested in in the sidebar (likely a tag ??) and the sidebar updates to show pages related to that particular location (within the sidebar) as well as the main content showing news from that area.

With a potential of 50 locations categories its likely not the best recourse and I have pages to content with as well.

So i’ve tried a variety of ideas to achieve this. I’ve tried making a main page for Location 1 and 2 and then the about, schools etc as sub pages. However I cannot include posts in pages without some issues arising with the sub pages not being displayed (if i assign a template page calling location news to the main location pages they loose focus for some reason on the sub pages).

I’ve tried manually coding on if / then’s in the sidebar, using the tag name which works until you clikc the page and then the sidebar looses focus. I’ve tried categories. I’ve tried all sorts to be honest and I think i’m looking at the problem from worn out eyes and feel there is an easy solution i’m just not seeing.

I also want to have a main page (front page) listing all news from all locations so thats why i opted for tags over categories in the first place.

I’ve tried all sorts of ways to achieve what i’m after but its just not working out well at the moment and I wondered if anybody has any direction for me to try ?

Please, any suggestions that i can try ?