Milton Keynes 6.91

Milton Keynes, locally abbreviated to MK, is a large town in the Borough of Milton Keynes, Buckinghamshire, of which it is the administrative centre. It was formally designated as a new town on 23 January 1967, with the design brief to become a "city" in scale. It is located about north-west of London.At designation, its 89km2 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 2011 census, the population of the Milton Keynes urban area, including the adjacent Newport Pagnell and Woburn Sands, was 229,941. The population of the Borough in total was 248,800, compared with a population of around 53,000 for the same area in 1961.HistoryBirth of a "New City"In the 1960s, the British 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 21850acre. The name "Milton Keynes" was taken from the existing village of Milton Keynes on the site.