New town in northern
Buckinghamshire, about half way between
London and
Birmingham built in the open country between
Bletchley and
Newport Pagnell, handily on a major transport corridor (the
M1 motorway, the
West Coast Main Line and the
Grand Union Canal) in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and named for one of the small villages which it engulfed.
The city is designed in clusters of residential "villages" and light industrial and commercial zones, separated by a grid of major through "H" and V" roads and permeated by a network of "Redway" cycle routes. It is probably the closest that the UK comes to American beltway suburbia.
Milton Keynes Central, the heart of the town, such as it is, comprises one of Britain's first great shopping cathedrals, a true place of worship of the One True Religion of Her Majesty's subjects, as well as a major cinema and entertainment complex (The Point), a more orthodox place of muiltidenominational worship, and the railway station; the streets in this area are in a strictly orthogonal grid which is said to be aligned precisely with the Great Pyramid of Cheops.