We are so proud to be Milton Keynes SME Business of the Year 2024
Being recognised at the MKBAA Awards as SME Business of the Year – for the city that has been our home for 36 years – was a real milestone moment for us. Our pioneering and growing city houses 11,000 other great SMEs within its borders, so it is special for us to be recognised. But rather than focus on us, we’d like to share 10 ways Milton Keynes inspires us (and how we aspire to represent these traits).
This first blog shares the first 5 inspirational attributes we strive to represent, grouped under the theme ‘achieving success by planning and design’.
1. A modern success story
Milton Keynes is one of the most successful examples of British planning in the 20th century. It is one of the UK’s newest cities (awarded city status in 2022 as part of the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Civic Honours competition) and was the last in the postwar programme of new towns. Its rise is testimony to the power of action, innovation and design, inspired by both technology and the natural world to try and make things better.
Today the city is among the most economically productive localities in the UK, ranking highly against a number of criteria. The city has the UK’s fifth-highest number of business startups per capita as well as being the home to many major national and international companies (and Chameleon Live).
2. Born from optimism and a desire to integrate the modern world with nature
MK Development Corporation (MKDC) was established on 23 January 1967 to provide the vision and execution of a “new city” that would be the modern interpretation of the garden city movement concepts first expressed by Ebenezer Howard 60 years earlier. These concepts focused on satellite communities surrounding a central city hub, separated with greenbelts. These Garden Cities would contain proportionate areas of residences, industry, and agriculture. The idea being to capture the primary benefits of the countryside and the city while avoiding the disadvantages presented by both.
It was envisioned as a “city in the trees” – the planning guideline for residential areas outside Central Milton Keynes was “no building higher than the highest tree” – at a time when multi-storey flats and office blocks were dominating the redevelopment of most city skylines.
The MKDC foresters has planted millions of trees, grown from its own nursery in Newlands over the years. Parks, lakes and green spaces cover about 25% of Milton Keynes; and in 2018, there were 22 million trees and shrubs in public open spaces. In a national comparison of urban areas by open space available to residents, Milton Keynes is ranked the highest in the UK.
3. An understanding of the importance of good location and easy access
The location for this last of the post-war new towns was carefully chosen as it benefited from direct motorway (the M1), canal and rail links (the West Coast Main Line) to both the capital city, London, and the second city Birmingham. Each were 50–60 miles away.
But the Romans had noted the importance of this location a long time before this. Their famous Watling Street still passes through the city. It served no less than eight large Roman villa estates in the city area 1,600 years ago and hosted the busy stagecoach service between London and the North over a thousand years later. This is where fanciful stories were christened ‘cock and bull’ stories after the two famous eponymous pubs in Stony Stratford.
The city also benefits from being the midpoint between the country’s principal seats of academia – Oxford and Cambridge. This proved to be a critical factor in the secret code breaking war effort based at Bletchley Park, where Colossus – the world’s first programmable electronic digital computer – was designed, built and operated.
4. Modern but with rich heritage
The Milton Keynes area encompasses a landscape that has a rich historic legacy even before the Romans. Construction workers unearthed fossilised bones while digging the city’s Caldecotte Lake. These belonged to the city’s first known resident – an ichthyosaurus (fish lizard) that swam and hunted 150 million years ago in an earlier lake. They also found (at the sites of new homes built at Pennyland, Loughton and Fenny Stratford) evidence of stone-age dwellers who left their flint weapons there 10,000 years ago.
The most notable archaeological artefact linked to the city is the Milton Keynes Hoard, which the British Museum described as ‘one of the biggest concentrations of Bronze Age gold known from Britain and seems to flaunt the areas past wealth’.
5. Led by a clear design vision and a dedicated and talented team
From his appointment in 1970, chief architect, Derek Walker’s attitude shaped a groundbreaking department where late-night presentations accompanied by a Pink Floyd soundtrack were not unusual. He developed the culture of the design team, inviting the American futurist Buckminster Fuller to give a talk in a local pub that went on for six hours (much to the annoyance of the publican) and taking the team to Capability Brown’s picturesque landscape at Stowe School in Buckinghamshire, which lay at the heart of Derek’s vision for Milton Keynes.
His ideals were perhaps also shaped by a meeting in the US with the visionary architect Frank Lloyd Wright and by his utopian plan to create the perfect community ‘Broadacre City’.
Wright’s ideal community was a complete rejection of the American cities of the first half of the 20th century. According to him, cities would no longer be centralised; no longer beholden to the pedestrian or the central business district. Broadacre City was a thought experiment as much as a serious proposal—one where the automobile would reign supreme. Wright’s utopia was ultimately an extension of the things that made him personally comfortable: open spaces, the automobile, and not surprisingly, the architect as master controller.
Derek Walker commissioned the best young architects to work on the new town, including the radical group Archigram, the young Norman Foster, Terry Farrell, Dixon Jones, Nicholas Grimshaw and many others who went on to define late 20th-century British architecture.
The result? The Guardian reported that “the [MK] project forged an intersection between the picturesque, pleasure gardens, new towns, consumerism, leisure and technology, to produce an almost psychedelic combination of public and private, need and desire, that was to represent the last great flowering of postwar planning”.
If you’ve made it this far we hope you have learnt something new about our pioneering home city and how it inspires our approach. Our second blog next week will share the final 5 inspirational attributes of MK we strive to represent, grouped under the theme “thinking carefully, boldly and differently to create unique environments”.