Milton Keynes

Apologies for not updating sooner, have been very busy in London these past few days. I'd like to share my impressions of Milton Keynes, a town I visited on Monday. It stands as testimony to a bold social-engineering experiment begun half a century ago - to create a brand new modern city around a grid pattern of roads running north-south and east-west, each grid being roughly a square kilometre.

Roads are named 'H' for horizontal (east-west) 'Ways', and 'V' for vertical (north-south) 'Streets'. Built for the car, the Ways and the Streets intersect at roundabouts (no traffic lights on the grid) to allow for high-speed travel. But the cyclist and pedestrian were not ignored at the planning stage; there are plenty of cycle paths augmenting the road network.

An urban area of nearly a quarter of a million population, larger than say, Radom or Częstochowa,  or for that matter Northampton, Norwich or Ipswich, Milton Keynes has a prosperous air about it.

Below: Milton Keynes Central railway station (to the left), one of six stations serving the town, and the only one to have either 'Milton' or 'Keynes' in its name. The station itself is busy and extremely well connected with London, with up to eight trains an hour. Buying an off-peak return ticket on Saturday for a Monday journey cost me a mere £12.

Work to build Milton Keynes - a central business district surrounded by six existing villages - began in the late 1960s, and some of the architecture looks decidedly passé and shabby. The Old Bus Station has now become a car park. Given that the fastest journey time to London Euston is 30 minutes, the average is 38 minutes (48 miles/77 km), Milton Keynes is also an attractive dormitory town for the capital. It would be interesting to know how many people commute into London from here.

Housing in Milton Keynes is rather attractive - a kind of neo-vernacular Brookside Close, with tightly controlled architectural designs ensuring a harmonious visual environment. Features such as gabled dormer windows, decorative brickwork and traditional materials hark back to local history.

The interface between parkland, footpaths and roads. Below: this is H6 Childs Way crossing over a footpath that links Tear Drop Lakes to the housing estate shown in the above photo. Note the exposed concrete (béton brut) used for the ramparts - a very 1960s feature, now disappearing under ivy.

One of the Tear Drop Lakes (below) reminds me of Jeziorki - can you see the grey heron? It allowed me to get far closer to it that ones back home do. The wooden pier has been cordoned off for safety reasons. This tranquil scene is less than 500m from Milton Keynes Central station, and shows how closely nature can sit beside a thriving urban centre.

Back to catch my train, I glimpse the future as it was seen in my childhood; mirrored glass buildings set amid manicured landscapes, intersected by fast roads and railways (this footbridge crosses both).

It would be valuable to spend more time in Milton Keynes (preferably on a day of longer daylight duration) to get a better idea of the town's character; my first impressions were curiously positive; there's already an air of nostalgia about a vision of the future as seen from the not-to-distant past.

This time last year:
Warsaw by night, early winter

This time four years ago:
Burn less gas and do Ukraine a favour

This time seven years ago:
Early evening atmosphere

This time nine years ago:
Toponyms - how many names has Jeziorki?

This time ten years ago:
On the road to Białystok