Milton Keynes

Sister cities

• Huai'an
• Schwerte
• Almere

History

In the 1960s, the UK government decided that a further generation of new towns in the South East of England was needed to relieve housing congestion in London. Since the 1950s, overspill housing for several London boroughs had been constructed in Bletchley. Further studies in the 1960s identified north Buckinghamshire as a possible site for a large new town, a new city, encompassing the existing towns of Bletchley, Stony Stratford, and Wolverton. The New Town (informally and in planning documents, "New City") was to be the biggest yet, with a target population of 250,000, in a "designated area" of . with the intention that it would be self-sustaining and eventually become a major regional centre in its own right. The corporation's strongly modernist designs were regularly featured in the magazines Architectural Design and the Architects' Journal. MKDC was determined to learn from the mistakes made in the earlier new towns, and revisit the garden city ideals. They set in place the characteristic grid roads that run between districts ("grid squares"), as well as a programme of intensive planting, balancing lakes and parkland. Central Milton Keynes ("CMK") was not intended to be a traditional town centre but a central business and shopping district to supplement local centres embedded in most of the grid squares. This non-hierarchical devolved city plan was a departure from the English new towns tradition and envisaged a wide range of industry and diversity of housing styles and tenures. The largest and almost the last of the British New Towns, Milton Keynes has "stood the test of time far better than most, and has proved flexible and adaptable". The radical grid plan was inspired by the work of Melvin M. Webber, described by the founding architect of Milton Keynes,…