When I was a little boy, I had a pen pal from milton keynes. I went to visit him there at one point; it was when our schools had an exchange trip. I remember thinking that all the milton keynes kids were slightly strange. One of them had a fetish for strange sandwich fillings – peanut butter, ice cream and jelly (or something like that). If you ask me he was one sandwich short of a picnic! Ha ha! (Excuse the pun, I promise the rest of this blog won’t be that shit). It was then I first suspected there was something not quite right with milton keynes!
Now I am a big boy living in milton keynes, and I am most certainly a sandwich short of a picnic and you might want to add three baguettes to that list also. In addition to going insane from living here I have (funnily enough) developed a liking for peanut butter sandwiches with unusual extras. In the hope of relieving myself of the insanity of this place (or maybe passing it on to someone else) I have decided to start writing this blog. Read on at your PERIL!
milton keynes, milton keynes, milton keynes…….founded in 1967 and built from 1970 onwards, its current population is 204,415 and it covers 34 square miles. It was the last and largest of the new towns in the UK…….yada yada yada, enough of that crap it is the bloody city of roundabouts! sorry no – TOWN of roundabouts (and your Highness, please don’t give this place a charter to make it a city because it will only feed its arrogance). Maybe I should refer to it as the Mecca of roundabouts. It seems as if the God of Roundabouts was outcast by all the other Gods (because he kept creating too many roundabouts) and banished here. He then continued to make lots of roundabouts and created the monstrosity that is milton keynes. Thank the Gods they didn’t banish him to London. I hope they set up some kind of magical barrier so his influence doesn’t expand into London. But we probably don’t need to worry about that, I’m sure the God of Congestion Charging will battle him off.
Anyway……….want to hear an amazing fact about milton keynes? This is the phrase you seem to hear too often from people who seem to like this dump. The fact is there are too many amazing facts about milton keynes, and I am sometimes left wondering whether they are actually that amazing:
Amazing fact number 1: milton keynes has more bridges than Venice and more shoreline than Jersey.
Yes, this is true. This is due to the fact that milton keynes has a number of big fuck off lakes and canals which enable it to snatch this poxy title. These lakes give it a grand figure of 400 acres of water space. It also had to include a lot of bridges for the roads to go over these lakes, canals and cycle paths as not everyone wants to drive around on the shit roads. I can thankfully still say however that Venice and Jersey are far more beautiful than milton keynes!
Amazing fact number 2: milton keynes holds a Guinness world record! How nice! And I bet you can’t guess what it is! Most roundabouts I hear you saying? No actually, that’s not it. It has the longest shopping mall in the world. Go figure.
This mall is 720m long. When you walk down the whole length it feels much longer. It has the same annoying grid system as the road which makes it impossible to find or remember where the shop is that you visited only yesterday. To make it even more of a challenge, at the weekend the whole population of milton keynes descends upon the mall or the Xscape centre and you start to think the Book of Revelations is fulfilling its prophecy. They seem to be very proud of this shopping centre, as they have a number of facts about it. The one that strikes me as the most pointless is that it is ‘unique for its size in its being lit by natural light’ – so what?
Amazing fact number 3: Superman IV The Quest for Peace (starring Christopher Reeve) was partly filmed in milton keynes
This was the one where Superman had to battle an evil caped man in black who shot lightning from his fingertips (Not many people remember this movie because it was a big flop and the series went in the dustbin after). The budget for making the film was poor also, so when they came to decide where to film, milton keynes was the obvious choice. The UN building in the film is actually the Central milton keynes railway station, a horrid construction of glass blocks.
Amazing fact number 4: About 20 million trees have been planted in milton keynes
And there is also about 4000 acres of parkland and open space. milton keynes actually does have some pleasant countryside and nice areas to go for a walk, if you don’t mind the busy dual carriageway roads every few hundred metres or so which stink of exhaust fumes and completely make up for the fresh air you were just breathing.
Amazing fact number 5: If London was built to the same density as milton keynes, it would cover East Anglia.
If you ever come to milton keynes the first thing you will notice (after the roundabouts) is that there seems to be hardly anything here. The infrastructure is very spread out, meaning the town is not very dense at all, which is more (or should I say less?) than I can say for the people of milton keynes.
The amazing facts go on and on, there is an endless list, and they get progressively more boring and pointless. It seems that they got carried away when compiling this list of facts and felt they needed to round it off to a fair number, so they decided to create amazing facts from useless information that doesn’t really mean a lot (e.g. number 5 above). A lot of the facts use the words ‘was’ and ‘when’ and ‘used to be’, for instance ‘The Point was the first multiplex cinema in Britain, built in 1979.’ and ‘The aqueduct, across Grafton Street, built in 1991, was the first in Britain for 50 years.’ and ‘When it opened in 1979, the central milton keynes shopping centre was the largest in Europe.’ and ‘In 1997, central milton keynes shopping centre was voted top out of 900 shopping centres.’ And ‘There are 12,000 parking spaces around the central milton keynes shopping centre’…………bloody hell. These are facts from the past and mean nothing now.
It also seems they use the amazing facts as a way of stealing history for the town. Unfortunately for itself, milton keynes has no history given that it was founded just over 40 years ago. The poor unfortunate towns that surround it however, (and have been ingested by it) do have a history which is quite interesting. Examples of the amazing facts that claim this history as part of milton keynes include ‘During World War II, 12,000 people worked at Bletchley Park decoding enemy communications’ and ‘World-famous Aston Martin cars are built in Newport Pagnell’ and ‘The phrase Cock and Bull story is derived from the two inns in Stony Stratford High Street’ and ‘The world’s first electronic computer was built at Bletchley Park’. These places are independent dammit! Stop taking their limelight mk!
I can’t remember any more amazing facts off the top of my head, but don’t fear, I’m sure they will come to me in the course of this blog. But for now, I leave you with one fact, which is not amazing, or boring, it is simply the truth: milton keynes is a shithole and it stinks of piss!
Now I am a big boy living in milton keynes, and I am most certainly a sandwich short of a picnic and you might want to add three baguettes to that list also. In addition to going insane from living here I have (funnily enough) developed a liking for peanut butter sandwiches with unusual extras. In the hope of relieving myself of the insanity of this place (or maybe passing it on to someone else) I have decided to start writing this blog. Read on at your PERIL!
milton keynes, milton keynes, milton keynes…….founded in 1967 and built from 1970 onwards, its current population is 204,415 and it covers 34 square miles. It was the last and largest of the new towns in the UK…….yada yada yada, enough of that crap it is the bloody city of roundabouts! sorry no – TOWN of roundabouts (and your Highness, please don’t give this place a charter to make it a city because it will only feed its arrogance). Maybe I should refer to it as the Mecca of roundabouts. It seems as if the God of Roundabouts was outcast by all the other Gods (because he kept creating too many roundabouts) and banished here. He then continued to make lots of roundabouts and created the monstrosity that is milton keynes. Thank the Gods they didn’t banish him to London. I hope they set up some kind of magical barrier so his influence doesn’t expand into London. But we probably don’t need to worry about that, I’m sure the God of Congestion Charging will battle him off.
Anyway……….want to hear an amazing fact about milton keynes? This is the phrase you seem to hear too often from people who seem to like this dump. The fact is there are too many amazing facts about milton keynes, and I am sometimes left wondering whether they are actually that amazing:
Amazing fact number 1: milton keynes has more bridges than Venice and more shoreline than Jersey.
Yes, this is true. This is due to the fact that milton keynes has a number of big fuck off lakes and canals which enable it to snatch this poxy title. These lakes give it a grand figure of 400 acres of water space. It also had to include a lot of bridges for the roads to go over these lakes, canals and cycle paths as not everyone wants to drive around on the shit roads. I can thankfully still say however that Venice and Jersey are far more beautiful than milton keynes!
Amazing fact number 2: milton keynes holds a Guinness world record! How nice! And I bet you can’t guess what it is! Most roundabouts I hear you saying? No actually, that’s not it. It has the longest shopping mall in the world. Go figure.
This mall is 720m long. When you walk down the whole length it feels much longer. It has the same annoying grid system as the road which makes it impossible to find or remember where the shop is that you visited only yesterday. To make it even more of a challenge, at the weekend the whole population of milton keynes descends upon the mall or the Xscape centre and you start to think the Book of Revelations is fulfilling its prophecy. They seem to be very proud of this shopping centre, as they have a number of facts about it. The one that strikes me as the most pointless is that it is ‘unique for its size in its being lit by natural light’ – so what?
Amazing fact number 3: Superman IV The Quest for Peace (starring Christopher Reeve) was partly filmed in milton keynes
This was the one where Superman had to battle an evil caped man in black who shot lightning from his fingertips (Not many people remember this movie because it was a big flop and the series went in the dustbin after). The budget for making the film was poor also, so when they came to decide where to film, milton keynes was the obvious choice. The UN building in the film is actually the Central milton keynes railway station, a horrid construction of glass blocks.
Amazing fact number 4: About 20 million trees have been planted in milton keynes
And there is also about 4000 acres of parkland and open space. milton keynes actually does have some pleasant countryside and nice areas to go for a walk, if you don’t mind the busy dual carriageway roads every few hundred metres or so which stink of exhaust fumes and completely make up for the fresh air you were just breathing.
Amazing fact number 5: If London was built to the same density as milton keynes, it would cover East Anglia.
If you ever come to milton keynes the first thing you will notice (after the roundabouts) is that there seems to be hardly anything here. The infrastructure is very spread out, meaning the town is not very dense at all, which is more (or should I say less?) than I can say for the people of milton keynes.
The amazing facts go on and on, there is an endless list, and they get progressively more boring and pointless. It seems that they got carried away when compiling this list of facts and felt they needed to round it off to a fair number, so they decided to create amazing facts from useless information that doesn’t really mean a lot (e.g. number 5 above). A lot of the facts use the words ‘was’ and ‘when’ and ‘used to be’, for instance ‘The Point was the first multiplex cinema in Britain, built in 1979.’ and ‘The aqueduct, across Grafton Street, built in 1991, was the first in Britain for 50 years.’ and ‘When it opened in 1979, the central milton keynes shopping centre was the largest in Europe.’ and ‘In 1997, central milton keynes shopping centre was voted top out of 900 shopping centres.’ And ‘There are 12,000 parking spaces around the central milton keynes shopping centre’…………bloody hell. These are facts from the past and mean nothing now.
It also seems they use the amazing facts as a way of stealing history for the town. Unfortunately for itself, milton keynes has no history given that it was founded just over 40 years ago. The poor unfortunate towns that surround it however, (and have been ingested by it) do have a history which is quite interesting. Examples of the amazing facts that claim this history as part of milton keynes include ‘During World War II, 12,000 people worked at Bletchley Park decoding enemy communications’ and ‘World-famous Aston Martin cars are built in Newport Pagnell’ and ‘The phrase Cock and Bull story is derived from the two inns in Stony Stratford High Street’ and ‘The world’s first electronic computer was built at Bletchley Park’. These places are independent dammit! Stop taking their limelight mk!
I can’t remember any more amazing facts off the top of my head, but don’t fear, I’m sure they will come to me in the course of this blog. But for now, I leave you with one fact, which is not amazing, or boring, it is simply the truth: milton keynes is a shithole and it stinks of piss!
