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About Milton Keynes

About Milton Keynes
Information From Wikipedia

Milton Keynes, sometimes abbreviated MK, is a large town in Buckinghamshire,
about 45 miles (72 km) south-east of Leicester and 49 miles (79 km) north-west
of London. It is the administrative centre of the Borough of Milton Keynes.

It was formally designated as a new town on 23 January 1967, with the design brief to become a ‘city’ in scale.

At designation, its 89 km2 (34 sq mi) 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 centre.

At the 2001 census the population of the Milton Keynes urban area, including the adjacent Newport Pagnell, was 184,506, and that of the wider borough, which has been a unitary authority independent of Buckinghamshire County Council since 1997, was 207,063 (compared with a population of around 53,000 for the same area in 1961[2]). The Borough’s population in 2009 is estimated to be nearly 241,000,[3] with almost all the increase arising in the urban area.



The history of the designated area, however, does not begin in the Middle Ages. Before the construction of modern Milton Keynes, the site was investigated by archaeologists who found evidence of human settlements as early as in 2,000 BC. Some of the most exciting archaeological finds include a Bronze Age jewellery hoard, a Roman villa, Roman gold coins and a wealth of artefacts from the Middle Ages.

Before designation of Milton Keynes, the area had a population of less than 50,000. Today, the town is estimated to have nearly 250,00 residents which means that the project has succeeded as the town was planned to provide a home to 250,000 people. One of the main reasons for this success also lays in its design which was created by some of the most respected urban planners and architects including Lord Norman Foster, Sir Richard MacCormac, Ralph Erskine, Henning Larsen, Martin Richardson and John Winter. They created a strongly modernist design and used the grid square system for layout.