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Milton Keynes

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Milton Keynes
PopulationExpression error: "184,506" must be numeric
OS grid referenceSP852387
Unitary authority
Ceremonial county
Region
CountryEngland
Sovereign stateUnited Kingdom
Post townMILTON KEYNES
Postcode districtMK1 - 15
Dialling code01908
PoliceThames Valley
FireBuckinghamshire
AmbulanceSouth Central
UK Parliament
List of places
UK
England
Buckinghamshire

Milton Keynes [ˌmɪltənˈkiːnz] is a large town in northern Buckinghamshire, in South East England, about 45 miles/75 km north-west of London, and roughly halfway between London and Birmingham. Milton Keynes was formally designated as a new town on 23 January 1967. Its 34 square miles (88km²) area incorporated the existing towns of Bletchley, Wolverton and Stony Stratford along with another fifteen villages and farmland in between. It took its name from the existing village of Milton Keynes, a few miles east of the planned city centre. Uniquely for the UK, the urban form uses a 1km grid for the top level of street hierarchy: the local form of most districts is more conventional.It is a place, where people with no money live, unsually they have abnormalities or are disabled. The highest rate of depression is in Milton Keynes, because people lack in enthuiasm, as they know they will never be successful or eventually happy in life. I know of one great person of Milton Keynes he is Servo (also a wiki) user, he seems to think Milton Keynes is good, however he has yet to realise that it is not, and is for people who are just short of being great because they are in the ghetto outside London.

At the 2001 census the population of the Milton Keynes urban area, also including the town of Newport Pagnell, was 184,506, and that of the wider borough of Milton Keynes, which has been a unitary authority independent of Buckinghamshire since 1997, was 207,063 (compared to a population of around 53,000 for the same area in 1961[1])

History

Main article: History of Milton Keynes

A new city

In the 1960s, the Government decided that a further generation of new towns in the South East was needed to relieve housing congestion in London.

Since the 1950s, overspill housing for several London boroughs [2] [3] [4] had been constructed in Bletchley. Further studies [5] [6] in the 1960s identified north Buckinghamshire as a possible site for a large new town, a new city, [7] encompassing the existing towns of Bletchley, Stony Stratford and Wolverton. The New Town (informally, "New City") was to be the biggest yet, with a target population of 250,000. [8] The designated area was 25,200 acres (10,200 hectares). The name "Milton Keynes" was taken from the existing village of Milton Keynes on the site.

The site was deliberately located equidistant from London, Birmingham, Leicester, Oxford and Cambridge with the intention[9] that it would be self-sustaining and eventually become a major regional centre in its own right. Planning control was taken from elected local authorities and delegated to the Milton Keynes Development Corporation (MKDC).

The Corporation's strongly modernist designs featured regularly in the magazines Architectural Design and the Architects' Journal. MKDC was determined to learn from the mistakes made in the earlier New Towns and revisit the Garden City ideals. They set in place the characteristic grid roads that run between districts and the intensive planting, lakes and parkland that are so appreciated today. Central Milton Keynes was not intended to be a traditional town centre but a business and shopping district that supplemented the Local Centres in most of the Grid Squares.[10] This non-hierarchical devolved city plan was a departure from the English New Towns tradition and envisaged a wide range of industry and diversity of housing styles and tenures across the city. The largest and almost the last of the British New Towns, Milton Keynes has stood the test of time far better than most, and has proved flexible and adaptable.[11] The radical grid plan was inspired by the work of Californian urban theorist Melvin M Webber (1921-2006), described by the founding architect of Milton Keynes, Derek Walker, as the city's "father".[12] Webber thought that telecommunications meant that the old idea of a city as a concentric cluster was out of date and that cities which enabled people to travel around them readily would be the thing of the future achieving "community without propinquity" for residents.[13] With both car ownership and ever more emphasis on e-commerce, his ideas, launched in the 1960s, have proved far-sighted, rarely more so than in Milton Keynes.

Moving to maturity

The Government wound up MKDC in 1992, transferring control to the Commission for New Towns (CNT) and then finally to English Partnerships, with the planning function returning to local authority control (since 1974 and the Local Government Act 1972, the Milton Keynes Borough Council, which was subsequently made a unitary authority in the 1990s). Most recently, the Government has assigned significant planning control to English Partnerships, charging it with increasing the population beyond to 300,000 by 2030.

The borough applied for formal city status in the 2000 and 2002 competitions, but was not successful.

Prior history

Reproductions of the Milton Keynes Hoard of torcs and bracelets (Milton Keynes Museum)

The area that was to become Milton Keynes encompassed a landscape that has a rich historic legacy. Evidence of permanent settlement dates back to the Bronze Age. The area to be developed was largely farmland and undeveloped villages. Before construction began, every area was subject to detailed archaeological investigation: doing so has provided a unique insight into the history of a large sample of the landscape of south-central England. When the boundary of Milton Keynes was defined, some 40,000 people[14] lived in the "designated area" of 8,851ha/21,833a. Collections[3] of oral history covering the 20th century completes a picture that is described in detail at the article History of Milton Keynes.

Urban design

The concepts that heavily influenced the design of the city are described in detail in article urban planning - see 'cells' under Planning and aesthetics (referring to grid squares).See also article single-use zoning.

Since the radical plan form and large scale of the New City attracted international attention, early phases of the city include work by celebrated architects, including (Sir) Richard MacCormac, (Lord) Norman Foster, Henning Larsen, Ralph Erskine, John Winter, and Martin Richardson.[11] The Corporation itself attracted talented young architects led by the young and charismatic Derek Walker. Though strongly committed to sleek "Miesian" minimalism inspired by the German/ American architect Mies van der Rohe they also developed a strand of contextualism in advance of the wider adoption of commerical Post-Modernism as an architectural style in the 1980s. In the Miesian tradition were the Pineham Sewage Works, which Derek Waler regarded as his finest achievement, and the Shopping Building designed by Stuart Mosscrop and Christopher Woodward, which is widely regarded as the finest C20 retail building in Britain (due for major redevelopment in 2007, following the failure of attempts to have it protected as a Listed building). The contextual tradition that ran alongside it is best exemplified by the Coproration's infil scheme at Coffereidge Close, Stony Stratford, designed by Wayland Tunley, which carefully inserts into a historic stretch of High Street a modern retail facility, offices and car park. The Development Corporation also led an ambitious Public art programme.

Grid squares

File:MK Ferris.jpg
The Ferris wheel in the theatre district of MK

Milton Keynes Development Corporation planned the city's layout according to street hierarchy principles, using a grid pattern of approximately 1 km interval, rather than on the more conventional radial pattern found in older settlements. Major roads within the city run between communities, rather than through them: the major roads are known locally as grid roads and the spaces between them are known as grid squares. Intervals of 1 km were chosen so that people would always be within walking distance of a bus stop. Consequently each grid square is a semi-autonomous community, making a unique collective of 100 clearly identifiable neighbourhoods within the overall urban environment. The grid squares have a variety of development styles, ranging from conventional urban development and industrial parks to original rural and modern urban and pseudo-rural developments. Most grid squares have Local Centres, intended as local retail hubs and most with community facilities as well. Originally intended under the Master Plan to sit alongside the Grid Roads, the Local Centres were mostly in fact built embedded in the communities and some are becoming unviable as a result of this and pressure from the new hypermarkets.

Roads and cycleways

Main articles: Milton Keynes Grid Road System, Milton Keynes redway system, and Segregated cycle facilities

Roundabout junctions were built at intersections since the grid roads were intended to carry large volumes of traffic: this type of junction is efficient at dealing with these volumes. The major roads are dualled, the others are single carriageway. Along one side of each single-carriageway grid road, there is a (grassed) reservation to permit dualling or additional transport infrastructure at a later date. The edges of each grid square are landscaped and densely planted, some additionally have berms. The purpose of the berms is to reduce traffic noise for adjacent residents but traffic noise can be significant at many locations, even some distance from the grid lanes. Traffic movements are fast, with little congestion since there are many alternative routes to a particular destination. The national speed limit applies on dualled sections of the grid roads (70 mph) and most single carriageway grid roads (60 mph), although some single carriageway speed limits have now been reduced to 40 mph. Consequently the risk to unwary pedestrians and turning traffic is significant, although pedestrians rarely need to cross grid roads at grade, as underpasses exist in several places along each stretch of all of the grid roads. Some pedestrians avoid some of the underpasses through fear or inconvenience, though this is not typical. Monitoring station data[15] shows that pollution is lower than in other settlements of a similar size. This can be partially attributed to the large number of trees, particularly to the fact that trees line grid roads in most places.

There is a separate cycleway network (the "redways") that runs through the grid-squares and sometimes runs alongside the grid-road network. These were designed to segregate slow moving cycle and pedestrian traffic from fast moving motor traffic. In practice, they are mainly used for leisure cycling rather than commuting, mainly because of they need to duck under the grid-roads regularly at the underpasses and because they take meandering scenic routes rather than straight lines. Despite what appears to be a desirable facility, rates of cycle commuting in Milton Keynes are well below the national average for urban areas. The detailed article includes a critical appraisal.

Height

The original design guidance for the city declared that "no building [be] taller than the tallest tree". However, the Milton Keynes Partnership, in its expansion plans for Milton Keynes, believes that Central Milton Keynes (and elsewhere) needs "landmark buildings" and has recently lifted the height restriction for the area. As a result, 14-storey buildings are now being built in the town centre. Some of the pedestrian underpasses are being closed in order to 'normalise' the townscape of Central Milton Keynes and the character of the area is set to change under government pressure to increase densitites of development.

Linear parks

The flood plains of the Great Ouse and of its tributaries (the Ouzel and some brooks) have been protected as linear parks that run right through the city. The Grand Union Canal is another green route (and demonstrates the level topology of the city - there is just one minor lock in its entire 10 mile route through from Fenny Stratford to the "Iron Trunk" Aqueduct over the Ouse at Wolverton. The Milton Keynes redway system of cycleways and footpaths uses these and other routes. The Park system was designed by landscape architect Peter Youngman, who also developed landscape precepts for the whole city; groups of grid squares were to be planted with different selections of trees and shrubs in order to give them distinct identities. However, the landscaping of parks and of the grid roads was evolved under the leadership of Neil Higson, who from 1977 took over as Chief Landscape Architect and made the original grand but not entirely practical landscape plan more subtle. A policy of creating "settings, strings, beads" for landscape features was introduced: 'settings' for historic villages and landscape features, 'strings' of landscape to make the linear parks hang together and 'beads' of public space where residents might linger. Higson also made the landscaping of the Grid Roads, one of the glories of Milton Keynes, more subtle, with 'windows' cut into the roadside planting so that motorists travelling through had a sense of the major city they were in; early critics had said of Milton Keynes 'there is no there there', as the city could not be seen by the motorist just passing through. The skill and lavish scale of the Grid Road planting makes, now that the trees and shrubs have matured, a dramtic and welcome change from the monotony of many British towns.

"City in the forest"

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Milton Keynes.

The original Development Corporation design concept aimed[12] for a "forest city" and its foresters planted millions of trees from its own nursery in Newlands in the following years. As of 2006, the urban area has 20 million trees. Following the winding up of the Development Corporation the lavish landscapes of the Grid Roads and of the major parks were transferred to the MK Parks Trust, a non-profit charity which is quite separate from the municipal authority and which was intended to resist pressures to build on the parks over time. The Parks Trust is endowed with a portfolio of commercial properties, the income of which pay for the upkeep of the green spaces, a city-wide maintenance model which has attracted international attention.[16]

Further development plans

Main article: Expansion plans for Milton Keynes

In January 2004, Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott announced[17] the Government's plan to double the population of Milton Keynes by 2025. He appointed English Partnerships to do so, taking planning controls away from Milton Keynes Borough Council and making EP the statutory planning authority. Their proposal for the next phase of expansion moves away from grid squares to large scale, mixed use, higher density development. The more detailed article expands on the details of their proposals. As the first stage in that plan, the Government expanded[18] the boundaries of the designated area, adding large green-field expansion sites to the east and west that are to be developed by 2015.

As might be anticipated, these plans are controversial — especially as planning control has been removed again from elected local authorities and placed in a central-government appointed body. Changes to Central Milton Keynes have been especially controversial and include the redevelopment of the Shopping Building, the finest monument of the New City.

Milton Keynes is at the centre of the South Midlands area identified by the government for growth. [4]

Culture

The open air National Bowl is a 65,000 "seat" venue for large scale rock (and classical) concerts. It is situated off the A5 near Furzton.

The 1,400-seat Milton Keynes Theatre [5] (Blonski-Heard) opened in 1999. Its high booking rate allows it to lay claim to the title "Britain's most popular theatre". The theatre has a unusual feature: the ceiling can be lowered closing off the third tier (gallery) to create a more intimate space for smaller scale productions. There are further performance spaces in Bletchley, Leadenhall, Shenley Church End, Stantonbury and Walton Hall.

File:Milton Keynes Gallery.JPG
Milton Keynes Gallery, surface by Michael Craig-Martin

The municipal (art) gallery (Milton Keynes Gallery, next to the main theatre) hosts various shows, although it has been critised for not hosting exhibitions by local artists.

In Wavendon, on the southeast edge of the city, The Stables provides a venue for jazz, blues, folk, rock, classical, pop and world music. It is closely associated with jazz artists Cleo Laine and John Dankworth. The venue also hosts an annual summer camp for young musicians.

Another music venue is The Pitz Club in the Woughton Centre, Leadenhall. It usually features a mixture of punk, alternative rock, and heavy metal.

There are two museums, the Bletchley Park museum of wartime cryptography, and the Milton Keynes Museum, which includes the Stacey Hill Collection of rural life that existed before the foundation of the new city.

The city also has a literature scene, with groups like Speakeasy meeting regularly and hosting performance events, and the city's only poetry magazine, Monkey Kettle coming out three times a year.

Education

The Open University's headquarters are based in the city, though as this is a distance learning institution, the only students resident on campus are approximately 200 postgraduates. Cranfield University, another postgraduate school, is located just outside the city, in Cranfield, Bedfordshire. Milton Keynes College provides further education to Foundation Degree level.

Milton Keynes Borough Council has identified the lack of a conventional local university as a problem.[19]

Like most of the rest of the UK (though not of Buckinghamshire), the state secondary schools in Milton Keynes use the "Comprehensive System". Results are above the national average, though below that of the rest of Buckinghamshire — but the demography of Milton Keynes is also far closer to the national average than is the latter.

Communications and media

Milton Keynes has one major commercial radio station dedicated to the area, Horizon Radio. The local BBC radio station is BBC Three Counties Radio, which covers Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, but has different programming from the Bow Brickhill transmitter at breakfast and lunchtime. CRMK is a minor cable radio station, broadcasting on cable and internet.

For television, the area is in the overlap between the Oxford and the Sandy transmitters and so receives BBC South and BBC East, and ITV Central and Anglia. Signal quality is weak in many areas due to distance and "terrain shadow". It was for this reason among others that Milton Keynes has one of the first Cable TV networks in the UK. MKTV is a small new TV station, broadcasting on Sky satellite.

Milton Keynes has two free-to-residents local newspapers, the Milton Keynes Citizen[6], which is twice-weekly, and the MK News[7], a weekly.

Economy, Demographics

This data is collected at the Borough level and can be found at Economy of the Borough and Demographics of the Borough. However, since the urban area is predomoninant in the Borough, it is reasonable to assume that the figures are broadly the same. Milton Keynes is one of the most successful (per capita) economies in the South East, itself the economic powerhouse of the United Kingdom. The population is significantly younger than the national averages.

Sport

Main article: Sport in Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes has professional teams in football (Milton Keynes Dons F.C.), ice hockey (Milton Keynes Lightning) and in basketball (Milton Keynes Lions). It is represented at amateur level in many sports, some at national level. For details see Sport in Milton Keynes.

Centre

Main articles: Central Milton Keynes, Milton Keynes Shopping Centre, and Milton Keynes Central railway station

As a key element of the "New City" vision, Milton Keynes has a purpose built centre, with a very large "covered high street" shopping centre, theatre, art gallery, two multiplex cinemas, hotels, business district, ecumenical church, Borough Council offices and the Xscape ski dome.

Other amenities

Part of the Blue Lagoon
  • The Blue Lagoon Local Nature Reserve in Bletchley.
  • Milton Keynes is[20] covered by a high speed WiMax network and the central area additionally has a free WiFi[8]. (Availability of conventional ADSL broadband in some parts of Milton Keynes suffers from the fact that British Telecom used very long runs from the exchanges and used aluminium rather than copper cabling. Also, the cable TV network was one of the earliest to be installed in the UK and apparently cannot support broadband).

Original towns and villages

The historical settlements have been focal points for the modern development of the new city. Every grid square has historical antecedents, if only in the field names. The more obvious ones are listed below and most have more detailed articles.

Liz Leyh's "Concrete Cows"

Bletchley was first recorded in the 12th century as Blechelai. Its station was a major Victorian junction (the London and North Western Railway with the Oxford-Cambridge Varsity Line), leading to the substantial urban growth in the town in that period. It expanded to absorb the villages of Water Eaton and Fenny Stratford.

During World War II, British, Polish and American cryptographers at Bletchley Park broke a large number of Axis codes and ciphers, including the German Enigma machine.

The Benedictine Priory at Bradwell was of major economic importance in this area of north Buckinghamshire before the Dissolution of the Monasteries. The routes of the medieval trackways converge on the site from some distance (many of which are now Redways or bridleways). Nowadays, there is only a small medieval chapel and a manor house occupying the site.

The windmill near Bradwell village, beside the playing fields

New Bradwell, to the north of the medieval Bradwell (Abbey) and just across the canal and the railway to the east of Wolverton, was built specifically for railway workers. It has a working windmill. The level bed of the old tramway from Newport Pagnell to Wolverton ends here and has been converted to a redway, making it a favourite route for cycling.

Great Linford appears in the Domesday Book as Linforde, and features a church to Saint Andrew dating from 1215. Today, the outer buildings of the seventeenth-century manor house form an Arts Centre, and Linford Manor is a prestigious recording studio.

Milton Keynes Village is the original village to which the New City owes its name. The original village is still evident, with a pleasant thatched pub, village hall, church and traditional housing. The area around the village has reverted to its original name of Middleton, as shown on old maps of the 1700s. The oldest[21] surviving domestic building in the area, a fourteenth century manor house, is here.

Stony Stratford high street in festive mood

There has been a market in Stony Stratford since 1194 (by charter of King Richard I). The Rose and Crown Inn at Stratford is reputedly the last place the Princes in the Tower were seen alive.

The manor house of Walton village, Walton Hall, is the headquarters of the Open University and the tiny parish church (deconsecrated) is in its grounds.

The Peace Pagoda

The tiny Parish Church (1680) at Willen contains the only unaltered building by the architect and physicist Robert Hooke. Nearby, there is a Buddhist Temple and a Peace Pagoda. The district borders the River Ouzel: there is a large balancing lake here, to capture flash floods before they cause problems down stream on the River Great Ouse. The north basin is a wild-life sanctuary and a favourite of migrating aquatic birds. The south basin is for leisure use, favoured by wind surfers and dinghy sailors. The circuit of the lakes is a favoured "fun run".

The original Wolverton was a medieval settlement just north and west of today's town. The Ridge and Furrow pattern of agriculture can still be seen in the nearby fields and the Saxon (rebuilt in 1819) Church of the Holy Trinity still sits next to the Norman Motte and Bailey site. Modern Wolverton was a 19th century New Town built to house the workers at the Wolverton railway works (which built engines and carriages for the London and North Western Railway).

Politics, demographics and economics

Political, demographic and economic data are collected at Borough level and are documented in the Borough of Milton Keynes article. In summary, there is effective full employment and economic activity per capita is among the highest in the South East region.

Modern parishes and districts

The Borough of Milton Keynes is fully parished. These are the parishes, and the districts they contain, within Milton Keynes itself. For a list of parishes in the Borough, see Borough of Milton Keynes (Rest of the borough)

Notable people from Milton Keynes

Transport

the Grand Union Canal passes over Grafton Street at Bradwell via the modern Bradwell Aqueduct

The Grand Union Canal (London/Birmingham) provides a major axis in the design of Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes is situated on the West Coast Main Line, which served Bletchley railway station and Wolverton railway station before the development of Milton Keynes. These stations are now only served by local services, and the Milton Keynes Central station has been developed between these and serves the city centre. The Marston Vale Line branches from the WCML at Bletchley, and has two stations : Fenny Stratford railway station and Bow Brickhill railway station.

The M1 motorway runs to the east of the city, and is served by junctions 13, 14, and 15A. The A5 road runs through the west of the city. Other main roads include the A509, which links Milton Keynes with Wellingborough and Kettering, and the A421 which goes west to Buckingham and east to Bedford.

Many coaches stop at the Milton Keynes Coachway, beside M1 Junction 14, near a park and ride car park, about three miles (5 km) from the centre (3.5 miles from MK Central station).

Milton Keynes is served by routes 6 and 51 on the National Cycle Network.

The nearest international airport is London Luton Airport. There is a direct rail connection to Birmingham International Airport. There is an aerodrome at Cranfield (10 km from CMK).

See also


References

  1. ^ Vision of Britain: historic census populations for modern Milton Keynes UA
  2. ^ [1]
  3. ^ [2]
  4. ^ Need for more planned towns in the South-East.The Times. December 2, 1964
  5. ^ South East Study 1961-1981 HMSO 1964, cited in The Plan for Milton Keynes
  6. ^ Urgent action to meet London housing needs. The Times. February 4, 1965.
  7. ^ Volume 1 of The Plan for Milton Keynes (Milton Keynes Development Corporation March, 1970 ISBN 0-903379-00-7 begins (in the Foreword by Lord ("Jock") Campbell of Eskan): "This plan for building the new city of Milton Keynes ..." (page xi)
  8. ^ Area of New Town Increased by 6000 Acres. The Times. January 14, 1966.
  9. ^ The South East Study 1961-1981 HMSO London, 1964: "A big change in the economic balance within the south east is needed to modify the dominance of London and to get a more even distribution of growth".
  10. ^ Llewelyn-David et al The Plan for Milton Keynes 1968
  11. ^ a b Jeff Bishop Milton Keynes — the Best of Both Worlds? Public and professional views of a new city. University of Bristol School for Advanced Urban Studies 1981. Cite error: The named reference "Bishop" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
  12. ^ a b Walker The Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes, Architectural Press, London 1981
  13. ^ M Webber (1963) 'Order in Diversity: Community Without Propinquity, in L Wingo (ed.) 'Cities and Spaces Hopkins, Baltimore
  14. ^ http://www.mkweb.co.uk/Milton_Keynes_General/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=285. Subsequent census data is 1971:46,500; 1981:95,800; 1991:144,700; 2001:177,500.
  15. ^ http://www.mkweb.co.uk/environmental-health/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=17335
  16. ^ http://www.theparkstrust.com/parks-trust/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=33214
  17. ^ http://society.guardian.co.uk/urbandesign/story/0,11200,1116879,00.html?=rss
  18. ^ http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2004/uksi_20040932_en.pdf
  19. ^ Memorandum by Milton Keynes Council to the Select Committee on Transport, Local Government and the Regions, 2001.
  20. ^ http://www.pocket-lint.co.uk/news.php?newsId=4384 WiMax in MK
  21. ^ http://www.mkweb.co.uk/statistics/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=11415
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