Welcome to the Concrete Jungle: Milton Keynes, from Cow to Sheep!

It is indeed a peculiar place to live. It's a bit of a love hate thing. Standard of living is (IMHO) very very good. It gets a lot of investment and has always been quite 'adventurous' in its architecture, resulting in such oddities as the point (shown in the pictures - should be obvious which one :nuts. It was of course, the first ever multiplex cinema in UK. It was also the first major shopping centre in UK (think Europe) and many other 'firsts' & biggests etc (1st Drive through restaurant, 1st service station are a couple others).
It does have its down side though. It was designed around the car. And with that in mind, it's a dream to drive around (when you know where you're going!!) but public transport is practically non-existent! I currently live in Prague, and you could not even start to compare the 2 transport systems!
Also, one big complaint is that there is 'nothing to see' when you drive around. Indeed, when being designed, everything was out of sight of the road. This was to improve air quality etc and has worked. Planners are well aware that it made the place 'boring', so these days it's much better.

Great pictures,

I always like to see pics from MK. I'm orriginaly from Rotterdam, but I have lived in Germany and in MK. All I can tell you is that MK is the best place I have lived.

As Aldredd mentioned, the standard of living is very high compared to many other cities of it size in the UK: Sunderland, Norwich, Swansea etc or even my hometown Rotterdam which has even triple the number of population 180.000 against almost 600.000.

MK has got so many facilities. I has got the longest shopping mall in Europe, Multiplex-Cinemas, a 22.000 seater football stadium, the National Hockey stadium, free wireless internet in the city centre etc. Also it the hometown of Red Bull Formula One and Marshall Amplification.

I still think that MK has got a good public transport system for it's size. Due to the grid squares everybody is living not furter than half a mile from a busstop. It has five trainstations and there there is MK metro that is serving the city with 25 busroutes. The only problem is maby getting ut of the city by bus. There are only aprox. five or six lines going outside the city boundaries. To Oxford, Cambridge and Luton Airport.

Although the city is designed for driving a car; the dual carriegeways allow you to drive 70 mp/h, the city still has about 130 miles of cycleways/paths for cyclists and pedestrians.

Milton Keynes is in England but it is not like England. The houses really look like the houses in Dutch new towns to me.