Milton Keynes
Milton Keynes (, ), often abbreviated MK, is a large town
Its 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 centre.
At the 2001 census the population of the Milton Keynes urban area, including the adjacent Newport Pagnell, was 184,506, and that of the wider borough, which has been a unitary authority independent of Buckinghamshire County Council since 1997, was 207,063 (compared with a population of around 53,000 for the same area in 1961 Vision of Britain: historic census populations for modern Milton Keynes UA Accessed 11 October 2006). The Borough’s population is currently estimated to be over 230,000. Miltonkeynes.gov.uk, pg. 5. Accessed 31-08-2009
History
Birth of 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 Clutch.open.ac.uk Accessed 10 October 2006 Clutch.open.ac.uk Accessed 10 October 2006Need for more planned towns in the South-East.The Times. December 2, 1964 Accessed 2006-09-21 had been constructed in Bletchley. Further studiesSouth East Study 1961-1981 HMSO 1964, cited in The Plan for Milton Keynes. Accessed 25 September 2006Urgent action to meet London housing needs. The Times, February 4, 1965. Accessed 2006-09-21 in the 1960s identified north Buckinghamshire as a possible site for a large new town, a new city,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) Accessed 25 September 2006 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,Area of New Town Increased by 6000 acres (24 km²). The Times. 14 January 1966. Accessed 21 September 2006 in a 'designated area' of . The name "Milton Keynes" was taken from the existing village of Milton Keynes on the site.Llewelyn-David et al. The Plan for Milton Keynes 1968. Accessed 2007-01-11 The site was deliberately located equidistant from London, Birmingham, Leicester, Oxford and Cambridge with the intentionThe 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". Accessed 2006-11-27 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 evident 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. 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.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. Accessed 2007-02-13 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 "father of the city".Walker The Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes, Architectural Press, London 1981. Accessed 2007-02-13 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.M Webber (1963) 'Order in Diversity: Community Without Propinquity, in L Wingo (ed.) 'Cities and Spaces Hopkins, Baltimore. Accessed 2007-02-13 With both car ownership and ever more emphasis on e-commerce, his ideas, launched in the 1960s, have proved far-sighted. 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). Since 2004 a Government quango, the Milton Keynes Partnership, has development control powers to accelerate the growth of Milton Keynes. Along with many other towns and boroughs, Milton Keynes competed for formal city status in the 2000 and 2002 competitions, but was not ultimately successful. Nevertheless, the terms 'city' and 'city centre' are widely used by its citizens, local media and bus services to describe itself, perhaps because the term 'town' is taken to mean one of the constituent towns.Prior history
The area that was to become Milton Keynes encompassed a landscape that has a rich historic legacy. The area to be developed was largely farmland and undeveloped villages, but with evidence of permanent settlement dating back to the Bronze Age. 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. There is evidence of Iron Age, Romano-British, Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Norman, Medieval and Industrial revolution settlements. Collections http://clutch.open.ac.uk of oral history covering the 20th century completes a picture that is described in detail at the main History of Milton Keynes article. When the boundary of Milton Keynes was defined in 1967, some 40,000 people MKweb.co.uk Subsequent census data is 1971:46,500; 1981:95,800; 1991:144,700; 2001:177,500. Accessed 21 May 2006 lived in three towns and seven villages in the "designated area" of 21,833 acre (88.4 km²).Urban design
The concepts that heavily influenced the design of the town 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 Milton Keynes attracted international attention, early phases of the town include work by celebrated architects, including (Sir) Richard MacCormac, (Lord) Norman Foster, Henning Larsen, Ralph Erskine, John Winter, and Martin Richardson.Jef Bishop Milton Keynes – the Best of Both Worlds? Public and professional views of a new city. University of Bristol School for Advanced Urban Studies. Accessed 2007-02-13. 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 commercial Post-Modernism as an architectural style in the 1980s. In the Miesian tradition were the Pineham Sewage Works, which Derek Walker regarded as his finest achievement, and the Shopping Building designed by Stuart Mosscrop and Christopher Woodward, which the Twentieth Century Society inter alia regards as the finest twentieth century retail building in Britain. The contextual tradition that ran alongside it is best exemplified by the Corporation's infill scheme at Cofferidge 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
Milton Keynes has professional teams in football ( Milton Keynes Dons F.C.), ice hockey ( Milton Keynes Lightning), and in basketball ( Milton Keynes Lions), and the Formula One motor-racing team ( Red Bull Racing) is based in the town. It is represented at amateur level in many sports, some at national level. For details see Sport in Milton Keynes. Milton Keynes is also home to the Xscape indoor ski slope. Advice to editors: this article is already too long. If you want to add material on sport, please consider doing so at "Sport in Milton Keynes" --> Senior football was a relatively late arrival in Milton Keynes. There had been several non-league teams based in the area over the years, but it wasn't until the late 1990s that it looked as though Milton Keynes would have a senior side. Local Businessman Pete Winkelman approached several clubs in and near London about a move to Milton Keynes. He got his wish in May 2002 when Wimbledon FC were given permission to relocate to Milton Keynes — 62 miles away from their home borough of Merton. Wimbledon moved into the National Hockey Stadium in September 2003 as a temporary home until a new, larger stadium could be built. A year later, Wimbledon FC became Milton Keynes Dons, and three years after that they moved into a new 22,000-seat in the Denbigh district of south Milton Keynes. In December 2009, the English FA awarded 'Candidate Host City' status to Milton Keynes, as part of the English 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cup bid. If England should win the bid, stadium:MK will host some games. For this to happen, the stadium capacity will need to be increased to 44,000. Milton Keynes in dreamland after being selected for World Cup bid The Times, 17 December 2009Centre
As a key element of the New Town 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 central railway station.Other amenities
- Milton Keynes has a 125 mile (200 km) network of cycleways/footpaths for pedestrians and cyclists called the Redway system, generally surfaced with red tarmac, which criss-cross most of town. The national Sustrans Sustrans.org cycle network runs to and through the town. The Swans Way long distance path does the same.
- Central Milton Keynes is home to the National Badminton Centre and was formerly home to the National Hockey Stadium. There is a in the Denbigh district near Bletchley, home of Milton Keynes Dons F.C.
- Near the station, the "Planet Ice" ice rink is used for professional and amateur ice hockey plus leisure skating and amateur figure skating. See Sport in Milton Keynes Ice hockey for details.
- Also near the station there is a covered "urban skateboarding" arena known as the Buszy, but the wide expanses and slopes of the station plaza remain very popular among boarders.
- There is a high security prison, HMP Woodhill, on the western boundary of the town.
- Willen Lakeside Park hosts watersports, and the North Lake is a bird sanctuary.
- The Blue Lagoon Local Nature Reserve in Bletchley.
- Milton Keynes is covered by a high speed WiMax network and the central area additionally has a free WiFi.
Original towns and villages
Notable people
- Andrew Baggaley, English table tennis champion
- Sam Baldock, professional footballer for Milton Keynes Dons
- Errol Barnett, an anchor and correspondent for CNN is from Milton Keynes. He lived in Crownhill and attended Holmwood First School and Two Mile Ash Middle School before moving to the U.S..
- Capdown, the ska punk band, come from and formed in Milton Keynes in 1997
- Chris Clarke, English sprinter.
- Adam Ficek, drummer of London band Babyshambles
- Lee Hasdell, professional Mixed martial artist and Kickboxer, and Pioneer of Mixed martial artist in the UK.
- James Hildreth, cricketer who plays for Somerset and has played for England
- Liam Kelly, professional footballer for Kilmarnock F.C.
- Shelly McErlaine and Karen Poole of Alisha's Attic lived in Milton Keynes, and their parents still live in Neath Hill
- Gordon Moakes, the bassist for the London-based rock band Bloc Party.
- Clare Nasir, the meteorologist, TV and radio personality, was born in Milton Keynes in 1970
- Craig Pickering, English sprinter
- Sarah Pinborough, English horror writer
- Mark Randall, professional footballer for Arsenal
- Greg Rutherford, English long jumper
- Jack Trevor Story, novelist, was a long-term resident of Milton Keynes.
- Kevin Whately, actor, is a resident of Milton Keynes
- Pete Winkelman, Chairman of Milton Keynes Dons Football Club and long term resident