Amid the celebrations of the Queen’s 70 years in the top royal job, the sporadic ritual whereby towns are upgraded to cities has once again reached a conclusion. As ever, the winners and losers of the jubilee civic honours competition do not necessarily make much sense. Reading, for example, lost out to Douglas on the Isle of Man. Particularly in the era of levelling up, the exercise seems true to that national tradition whereby flags and badges are pinned to things, but almost nothing actually changes: city status might deliver a boost to local morale but brings no new funding, functions or powers. But this time, in the case of at least one of the winners, it is worth suspending any cynicism and saluting its achievement.
Milton Keynes – or “MK”, as many local people call it – has been trying to get city status for more than 20 years. Born via a “new town designation order” in 1967, this large patch of Buckinghamshire – just 33 minutes from London by train – is now the home of 230,000 people, and the population continues to grow. Like such postwar new towns as Stevenage, Harlow, East Kilbride and Telford, in a country arguably more mired than ever in nostalgia it remains a fascinatingly anomalous creation. What hit me when I first visited was the future-facing ambition Milton Keynes once symbolised: politicians, planners and architects conceived of a new kind of British metropolis and then made it a reality, as the place filled up with people who then brought everything to life.
