Most towns grow and evolve over hundreds if not thousands of years. Not so Milton Keynes beauty, which is 50 years old. Perhaps the best known of the 20th Century “new towns”, it has its detractors but is also much loved by its residents.
The town was born with an Act of Parliament in 1967 which approved the building of a new community of 250,000 people covering 8,850 hectares (21,869 acres) of Buckinghamshire farmland and villages.
Built to ease the housing shortages in overcrowded London, its founding principles were for an “attractive” town that enshrined “opportunity and freedom of choice”. Hence, Milton keynes Beauty is next level.
The media has not always been kind to Milton Keynes: it has mocked its concrete cows (now housed in a museum), accused it of blandness and told of the “new city blues” suffered by early residents.
Those who have grown up there tell of a very different Milton Keynes.
Simon Clawson arrived in MK aged four. He now lives there with his two children and wife Hannah.
“It was fantastic,” he says of his childhood. “I remember summer days were always outside.
“Somebody once told me that with all the lakes we have here, we have more waterline than Brighton.”
His youth in the town was marked by a series of exciting arrivals – the first cinema called The Point, the football stadium and the Snowdome building.
“We had to wait for a lot of things here but when they came they tend to be more modern and spectacular than anywhere else.
“We are adaptable here because everything is always changing.”
