Milton Keynes

On Thursday Rob and I took a trip to Milton Keynes, which is about 75 minutes drive from us. We were told it had quite a large shopping centre. (Large shopping centre, sounded like a good idea to me.) The shopping centre was large, but rather stuck in the 80’s, and the outside of this quite large building looked like a product of the 70’s, and rather drab looking. On the upside, there was parking all round the outside of the shopping centre, and the dearest parking was cheaper than we pay in Oxford and Reading.

Unfortunately there was nothing to take a picture of, having said that, I wish I had photographed the outside of this building to show you. There are, apparently, some nice modern housing (they are building all the time), but we visited with preconceptions, so didn’t want to explore the surrounding areas. (I expect the original Milton Keynes village a quite lovely, ooops).

Milton Keynes was built in the 1960’s as a New Town, (there were several of these New Town’s built post war). The following is an extract from The English Partnerships – The National Regeneration Agency website.

In 1946 Great Britain faced a legacy of damaged homes and disrupted industrial infrastructure. The restoration of the nation’s war-torn cities provided an opportunity for improving urban conditions on a grand scale. New Towns were an important element in this strategy: they aimed to improve living and working conditions both in damaged areas and in wholly new settlements.