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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. For ceremonial purposes Milton Keynes is a part of Buckinghamshire but since 1997 it has been administered as 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.
Amenities
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..Miton Keynes has a huge shopping district with major department stores.
Layout of the town
The town's layout was planned on the basis of a prediction of a high level of car ownership by its inhabitants. The roads are based on a wide grid of "horizontal" and "vertical" roads, intersecting in many of similar design. The number of roundabouts is far higher than is typical in British towns: for example, within the town limits, the A421 route passes through 13 roundabouts in a 10.7 km stretch, and the A509 route passes through 12 roundabouts in a 6.4 km stretch.
The road that goes through the centre of the town, Midsummer Boulevard, is named because it is aligned so that the sun shines directly along it on midsummer each year.
Within the spaces between these major horizontal and vertical roads, there is a variety of development styles, ranging from normal urban development and industrial parks, to "village" developments. Each area is bounded by the major Vertical and Horizontal trunk road that run through the town.
Milton Keynes has a 200km network of paths for pedestrians and cyclists called Redways, 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.
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 1970s by repeatedly deriding it as a concrete jungle. The council was quick to point out that Milton Keynes has over 20 million trees.
The Travel Writer Bill Bryson also features Milton Keynes in his book Notes From A Small Island, in which he gets lost in the pedestrian subway system.
Milton Keynes is the birthplace of Errol Barnett who is an anchor and reporter for Channel One in the United States. He lived in Crownhill (http://www.mkweb.co.uk/Housing/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=3187) and attended Holmwood First School (http://www.mkweb.co.uk/at%5Fschool/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=20300) and Two Mile Ash Middle School (http://tmaonline.org.uk/Home.html) before moving to the US.
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
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