Milton Keynes is a "New Town". It was designed and built from scratch in recent times rather than having developed from a small settlement over hundreds of years. Interestingly though it has incorporated a number of towns and villages that have a very ancient and interesting past, more of which is described in the section on areas and names. The majority of the town is, however, modern and has been planned - unlike traditional British towns that have simply had extra bits tacked on over the course of time.
The two main features of MK which distinguishes it from older towns are:
It is not a vast metropolis like London with all the things that such a city has to offer, or a quaint oldie English town. It is simply a provincial town of 200,000 people in the corner of Buckinghamshire with the most astonishing expanse of parks and lakes and modern facilities.
It is not a vast metropolis like London with all the things that such a city has to offer, or a quaint oldie English town. It is simply a provincial town of 200,000 people in the corner of Buckinghamshire with the most astonishing expanse of parks and lakes and modern facilities.
The principle road network in Milton Keynes is simply that, a net like grid. The reason is to distribute traffic so that no one route is necessarily more preferable than the other. (To get from one corner of the city to the other there are many permutations on the number of possible routes). This is a common enough concept in cities in the US, but in Britain most of the road layouts within towns were established before cars were invented. The roads divide the city up into approximately 1 Kilometre squares, most of the names of which are taken from an historical element from within the square. These roads are only for moving around the city, and have no frontage development, instead they are heavily landscaped. To gain access to anything in Milton Keynes the grid roads have turnings onto "Local" roads. The roads of the grid are named and numbered so that the "Vertical" (roughly north - south) roads are named as "Streets" (the Roman road of Watling Street is one of these) and have numbers beginning with V (Watling street is V4). The "Horizontal" (roughly west - east) numbered H are named "Ways" (Ridgeway [H1] and Portway [H5] roughly follow the routes of ancient tracks of the same names).