Milton Keynes
From Wikipedia, a free encyclopedia written in simple English for easy reading.
Milton Keynes is a large new city in England. People began to build houses, shops and factories there in 1967. More and more houses are built every year. There are about 275,000 people living there now.
Milton Keynes looks strange to people from other towns. Aeroplanes flying over ordinary towns can see roads that look like a spider's web. But when they fly over our city, they see that our big roads look like a net or a grid. We call the spaces between the busy roads grid squares and that is where we live. Nobody lives right next to the big roads, so there are no trucks going past your front door. So really, Milton Keynes often seems more like a 100 little villages than a big city.
Maybe you think that you have to cross a busy road to get from one grid square to the next one? No, because these roads go over bridges and you can cross safely under them. We call the paths that go under the roads and between the houses Redways, because they are red! Only people on bicycles and people walking are allowed to use them. Cars, lorries and motorbikes are not allowed to go on them. So you could cycle all the way across the city and never have to go on a busy road.
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[edit] What was it like before the builders came?
Before the builders came, there were many fields and a lot of villages. You can still see the old villages because the houses look different. There are many rivers and streams and lakes and a canal. There are no houses on the fields beside the rivers. Nobody can build on these fields because sometimes they get flooded when it rains a lot. But nearly all the time, they are just monster parks.
When the builders dug up the ground to build on, they found some strange things. The oldest was the fossil of a dinosaur fish, called an ichthyosaur. They also found a Roman farm - you can still see bits of it because they decided to leave it alone. They also found some buried treasure and gave it to the museum.
[edit] What is there to do?
There is one big theatre and four small ones. There are only two cinemas but each one has ten sections, so there are twenty movies on at a time. There is a ski slope with real snow, even in summer. That is because it is indoors, with a giant fridge to keep it cold. There are four big swimming pools. At the National Bowl, you can see your favourite bands and artists. Not very far away, at Silverstone, you see Formula 1 motor racing. There is a football stadium, where you can see our football club, Milton Keynes Dons F.C., play. You can see barges going past on the canal. Near the station, there is a covered skateboard place.
[edit] What are the concrete cows?
Everybody wants to know about the concrete cows! In about 1980, an artist thought it would be very funny to make some cows out of concrete and put them in a field. People from Milton Keynes thought that this was a strange thing to do, because you can see real cows nearby. People who are not from Milton Keynes decided that it must mean that everywhere is covered in concrete and that we would forget what a cow looks like. But we know that we have loads and loads of green space, and thousands of trees, bushes, flowers. We have birds and small animals. There is actually more wild life in the city than there is outside it! So we just laugh and think - "silly people, they believed the artist's joke".
[edit] Where is it?
It is in England. It is about half way between Oxford and Cambridge. It is about half way between London and Birmingham. You can get here on the train because we have five railway stations - the biggest one is Milton Keynes Central. You can come on the M1 motorway - get off at Junction 14. It takes less than an hour to get here in the train from London, maybe half an hour if you take an express train.
