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Milton Keynes is a large town in northern Buckinghamshire , in South East England , about 45 miles (75 km) north-west of London , and roughly halfway between London and Birmingham . Milton Keynes was formally designated as a New Town on 23 January 1967 . Its 34 square miles (88 km&2) 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 City Centre . Uniquely for the UK, the urban form uses a 1 km grid for the top level of Street Hierarchy : the local form of most districts is more conventional. At the 2001 census the population of the Milton Keynes urban area, including the adjacent town of 2006 ) HISTORY See Also: History of Milton Keynes 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 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 km&2). The Times. January 14 , 1966 . Accessed September 21 2006 The designated area was 25,200 acres (102 km&2). The name "Milton Keynes" was taken from the existing Village Of Milton Keynes on the site. The site was deliberately located equidistant from London, 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 With both Car Ownership and ever more emphasis on E-commerce , his ideas, launched in the 1960s, have proved far-sighted, rarely more so than in Milton Keynes. Moving to maturity 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). Most recently, the Government has assigned significant planning control to English Partnerships , charging it with increasing the population beyond to 300,000 by 2030. The borough applied for formal City Status in the 2000 and 2002 competitions, but was not successful. Prior history See Also: History of Milton Keynes (Milton Keynes Museum)]] 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 covering the 20th century completes a picture that is described in detail at the Main Article . When the boundary of Milton Keynes was defined, some 40,000 peoplehttp://www.mkweb.co.uk/Milton_Keynes_General/DisplayArticle.asp?ID=285. Subsequent census data is 1971:46,500; 1981:95,800; 1991:144,700; 2001:177,500. Accessed May 21 2006 lived in three towns and seven villages in the "designated area" of 21,833 acre (88.4 km&2). URBAN DESIGN The concepts that heavily influenced the design of the city 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 the New City attracted international attention, early phases of the city 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 is widely regarded as the finest twentieth century retail building in Britain (due for major redevelopment in 2007, following the failure of attempts to have it protected as a Listed Building ). The contextual tradition that ran alongside it is best exemplified by the Coproration'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 Development Corporation planned the city's layout according to . Consequently each grid square is a semi-autonomous community, making a unique collective of 100 clearly identifiable neighbourhoods within the overall Urban environment. The grid squares have a variety of development styles, ranging from conventional urban development and industrial parks to original Rural and modern urban and pseudo-rural developments. Most grid squares have Local Centres, intended as local retail hubs and most with community facilities as well. Originally intended under the Master Plan to sit alongside the Grid Roads, the Local Centres were mostly in fact built embedded in the communities and some are becoming unviable as a result of this and pressure from the new hypermarkets. Roads and cycleways See Also: Milton Keynes Grid Road System Milton Keynes redway system Segregated cycle facilities 2006 shows that pollution is lower than in other settlements of a similar size. This can be partially attributed to the large number of trees, particularly to the fact that trees line grid roads in most places. There is a separate Cycleway network (the " Redways ") that runs through the grid-squares and sometimes runs alongside the grid-road network. These were designed to segregate slow moving cycle and pedestrian traffic from fast moving motor traffic. In practice, they are mainly used for leisure cycling rather than commuting, mainly because they need to duck under the grid-roads regularly at the underpasses and because they take meandering scenic routes rather than straight lines. Despite what appears to be a desirable facility, rates of cycle commuting in Milton Keynes are well below the national average for urban areas. The Detailed Article includes a critical appraisal. Height The original design guidance for the city declared that "no building {Link without Title} taller than the tallest tree". However, the Milton Keynes Partnership , in its Expansion Plans For Milton Keynes , believes that Central Milton Keynes (and elsewhere) needs "landmark buildings" and has recently lifted the height restriction for the area. As a result, 14- Storey buildings are now being built in the town centre. Some of the pedestrian underpasses are being closed in order to 'normalise' the townscape of Central Milton Keynes and the character of the area is set to change under government pressure to increase densities of development. Linear parks The where residents might linger. Higson also made the landscaping of the Grid Roads, one of the glories of Milton Keynes, more subtle, with 'windows' cut into the roadside planting so that motorists travelling through had a sense of the major city they were in; early critics had said of Milton Keynes 'there is no there there', as the city could not be seen by the motorist just passing through. The skill and lavish scale of the Grid Road planting makes, now that the trees and shrubs have matured, a dramatic and welcome change from the monotony of many British towns. "City in the forest" The original Development Corporation design concept aimedWalker ''The Architecture and Planning of Milton Keynes'', Architectural Press, London 1981. Accessed 2006 Further development plans See Also: Expansion plans for Milton Keynes ]] In January 2004, the boundaries of the designated area, adding large green-field expansion sites to the east and west that are to be developed by 2015. As might be anticipated, these plans are controversial — especially as planning control has been removed again from elected local authorities and placed in a central-government appointed body. Changes to Central Milton Keynes have been especially controversial and include the redevelopment of the shopping building, the finest monument of the new city. Milton Keynes is at the centre of the CULTURE The open air National Bowl is a 65,000 capacity venue for large scale concerts. It is situated off the A5 near Furzton. The 1,400 seat , Shenley Church End , Stantonbury and Walton Hall . ]] The municipal (art) gallery (Milton Keynes Gallery, next to the main theatre) hosts various exhibitions. In , Blues , Folk , Rock , Classical , Pop and World Music . It is closely associated with jazz artists Cleo Laine and John Dankworth . The venue also hosts an annual Summer Camp for young musicians. Another Centre, Leadenhall. It usually features a mixture of Punk , Alternative Rock , and Heavy Metal . There are two Museum s, the Bletchley Park museum of wartime cryptography, and the Milton Keynes Museum , which includes the Stacey Hill Collection of rural life that existed before the foundation of the new city. The city also has a magazine, Monkey Kettle coming out three times a year. EDUCATION The Open University 's headquarters are based in the city, though as this is a Distance Learning institution, the only students resident on campus are approximately 200 Postgraduate s. Cranfield University , another postgraduate school, is located just outside the city, in Cranfield , Bedfordshire . Milton Keynes College provides Further Education to Foundation Degree level. Milton Keynes Council has identified the lack of a conventional local university as a problem. Memorandum by Milton Keynes Council to the Select Committee on Transport, Local Government and the Regions, 2001. Accessed October 12 2006 Like most of the rest of the UK (though not of Buckinghamshire ), the state secondary schools in Milton Keynes use the " Comprehensive System ". Results are above the national average, though below that of the rest of Buckinghamshire — but the Demography of Milton Keynes is also far closer to the national average than is the latter. COMMUNICATIONS AND MEDIA Milton Keynes has one major Commercial Radio station dedicated to the area, Horizon Radio . The local BBC Radio station is BBC Three Counties Radio , which covers Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, but has different programming from the Bow Brickhill transmitter at breakfast and lunchtime. CRMK is a minor Cable Radio station, broadcasting on cable and internet. For television, the area is in the overlap between the Oxford and the Sandy transmitters and so receives BBC South and BBC East, and ITV Central and Anglia . Signal quality is weak in many areas due to distance and "terrain shadow". It was for this reason among others that Milton Keynes has one of the first Cable TV networks in the UK. MKTV is a small new TV Station , broadcasting on Sky satellite. Milton Keynes has two free-to-residents local newspapers, the Milton Keynes Citizen which is twice-weekly, and the MK News[http://www.mk-news.co.uk , a weekly. ECONOMY, DEMOGRAPHICS This data is collected at the Borough level and can be found at Economy Of The Borough and Demographics Of The Borough . However, since the urban area is predominant in the Borough, it is reasonable to assume that the figures are broadly the same. Milton Keynes is one of the most successful (per capita) economies in the South East, itself the economic powerhouse of The United Kingdom . The population is significantly younger than the national averages. SPORT See Also: Sport in Milton Keynes ]] Milton Keynes has professional teams in Football ( Milton Keynes Dons F.C. ), Ice Hockey ( Milton Keynes Lightning ) and in Basketball ( Milton Keynes Lions ). It is represented at amateur level in many sports, some at national level. For details see Sport In Milton Keynes . CENTRE See Also: Central Milton Keynes Milton Keynes Shopping Centre Milton Keynes Central railway station |
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