Milton
Keynes
Milton Keynes is a large town in South East England,
about 45 miles (72 km) north-west of London. It is also
the principal town of the Borough of Milton Keynes,
itself part of ceremonial Buckinghamshire. It was formally
designated as a new town on 23 January 1967. 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 city centre. Uniquely
for the United Kingdom, 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 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).
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