Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes is a large town in England, in the borough of Milton Keynes. It is one of the "new towns" built during the 1960s to allow for urban expansion in the southeast of England. The town has a population of around 250,000. It was traditionally a part of Buckinghamshire but in 1997 the borough became a separate unitary authority.

Contrary to popular misconception, Milton Keynes was not named after the poet John Milton (or the economist Milton Friedman) and the economist John Maynard Keynes, but after a village that already existed on the site of the proposed new town. The village was renamed Middleton in 1991, to distinguish it from the town.

Milton Keynes is in the Guinness Book of Records 2001 for having the longest shopping mall, at 720 m long. It also has Europe's largest indoor ski slope, with real snow. Milton Keynes is the home of the Open University, the National Badminton Centre and the National Hockey Stadium, which is now home ground to Milton Keynes Dons F.C.

The town's layout was planned on the basis of a prediction of a high level of car ownership by its inhabitants. The road scheme is based on a wide grid of "horizontal" (H) and "vertical" (V) roads, intersecting in many roundabouts of similar design. The density of roundabouts is far higher than is typical in British towns: for example, within the city limits, the A421 route passes through 13 roundabouts in a 10.7 km stretch (the westernmost of which is called Bottledump Roundabout), and the A509 route passes through 12 roundabouts in a 6.4 km stretch. The famous concrete cows (now under threat), life-sized painted statues which are intended to convey a pastoral impression to onlookers — and which may be interpreted as a satirical commentary on the modernist ideals of the new town developments — are, like everything else in the town, located close to one of these roundabouts.

The road that goes through the centre of the town, Midsummer Boulevard, is so named because it is aligned so that the sun shines directly along it on midsummer each year.

Within the spaces between these major "H" and "V" roads, there is a variety of styles of development, ranging from normal urban development and industrial parks, to "village" developments.

Visitors to Milton Keynes often complain about the roundabouts and lack of landmarks along the roads, but the locals have learned to love the efficient grid-road network and are bemused when these complaining visitors are happy to go back to their towns and cities with all the traffic jams, one-way systems, narrow roads, traffic lights, pedestrians, cyclists and other things that make urban driving such a chore.

The Redways in Milton Keynes are a 200km network of paths for pedestrians and cyclists, generally surfaced with red tarmac, which criss-cross the whole town. The majority of these Redways run next to the town's grid roads and estate roads with underpasses or bridges where they intersect grid roads. One of the aims of the Redways is to make travel for pedestrians and cyclists convenient, safe, pleasant and accident free. However, the secluded nature of many of these redways has made some of them no-go areas after dark.

Local Cultural Groups

• Junktion14

Nearby settlements

• Cities: Birmingham, Cambridge, Coventry, London, Oxford, Peterborough
• Towns: Aylesbury, Banbury, Bedford, Bicester, Bletchley, Buckingham, Dunstable, Letchworth, Luton, Newport Pagnell, Northampton, Rugby, Rushden, Stony Stratford, Wellingborough, Woburn Sands, Wolverton, Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes in popular culture

Milton Keynes is parodied as "Milton Springsteen: It's Quite Nice, Really!" in Alexei Sayle's book Train To Hell. Rather than concrete cows, Milton Springsteen features "android yokels."

Milton Keynes also appears in Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett's book Good Omens, as an example of a town neither heaven nor hell take credit for, but both regard as a success: "it was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing."

The humourist Miles Kington once had a book cover cartoon with the caption "Miles Kington? I thought that was one of these dreadful new towns" — not simply an observation that his name resembles a place name, but almost certainly also a reference to Milton Keynes.

The UK TV and radio personality Noel Edmonds is credited with tainting the image of Milton Keynes in the 70's by repeatedly deriding it as a concrete jungle. The council is quick to point out that Milton Keynes has over 2 million trees.

Areas within Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes is divided into many areas. Each area is bounded by the major (V)ertical and (H)orizontal trunk road that run through the town. The areas include:

Giffard Park; Great Linford; Downsbarn; Shenley Brook End; Shenley Lodge; Shenley Wood; and Westcroft;

External links

• City Discovery Centre
• MKWeb
• Shopping Milton Keynes