Milton Keynes celebrates 56th birthday, what do you love - or loathe - about our city?

Today it is 56 years since the government gave the green light for a brand new town called Milton Keynes to be built to ease the overspill from London.

There are many, many reasons to celebrate and even our late Queen was impressed enough to grant MK official city status last year.

Among the accolades are our acres of green space, which means nobody in Milton Keynes is ever more than half a mile from a park, and our 22 million trees and shrubs that brighten up the urban landscape.

We are also gaining a name as the city of innovative ideas, with robots roaming our streets and eco-friendly electric scooters and bike available to hire.

Our unique redway system spans more than 180 miles, giving cyclists, walkers and now scooter riders an easy way to travel without using our equally unique grid roads.

And so many people are impressed with the city that we welcome more than a dozen newcomers every day, many choosing to move into the new homes that spring up all over the former countryside areas.

In fact, last year our council congratulated itself on exceeding its housebuilding targets for the fourth year running, as statistics showed five brand new homes were being built every single day in Milton Keynes.

The city has seen almost 8,000 new homes built over the past four years, with 2,000 of them built in the past year alone. These include hundreds of new apartments in the city centre, some of them in high rise blocks and others converted from disused offices.

When MK was originally planned all those decades ago, it was vowed that no building on the new landscape should be higher than the “tallest tree”. Now, however, this rule has disappeared and among the latest ‘skyscraper’ plans is a 33-storey tall 'vertical village' of flats in CMK.

Meanwhile, MK City Council plans to make Milton Keynes a metropolitan city big as Liverpool, Manchester and Bradford by 2050. They are preparing a blueprint for future housing, which would see our population almost double from 287,000 to 500,000 by 2050.

Amid the shiny new houses are the old estates, some of them becoming more downtrodden by the day. In these areas of high social deprivation, just under one in three children in the city are officially living in poverty – a statistic described as “shocking” by The Child Poverty Commission.

Along with MK’s growing population has come a disturbing growth in crime rates. Between September 2021 and August 2022 some 23,481 crimes were recorded by police in MK.

Violence with injury offences rose by 50% with 18,998 incidents recorded. Sadly, these included six murders.

Several years ago, knife crime started to raise its ugly head. Between 2017 and 2019, knife crime soared by a staggering 90% here – a rise on a par with London.

Last year we saw four fatal stabbings in just 13 weeks, leading to an outcry from the public and a special ‘Operation Deter’ to be launched by police, with officer warning offenders: “You WILL go to prison if we catch you carrying a knife”.

What do you love – or loathe – about our city? Does the good outweigh the bad? Email us your views at [email protected]