New Town, Home Town. (Milton Keynes Edit)

An edited version of the BBC documentary 'New Town, Home Town' focussing purely on the Milton Keynes related content. All material copyright held by the BBC.

[@BreakBeatStu]

Gotta say as a kid growing up in Milton Keynes in the 80s was the nuts! Every house was a young couple with 2.4 children just like my family. You had like 20 best mates just in the same street, soo many of us all used to hang around together as kids. Good times!!! Big up Oldbrook!!!

[@LordmonkeyTRM]

Lol Ramesh's was amazing...

[@geoffcrabtree657]

Couldn’t have put that any better man 👍🏻

[@amandanithavrianakis2996]

I was bradwell age 5-8 years , so happy. Loved it!

[@audreysandbach637]

Some council estates not very nice now

[@14sgdpg82]

as a 20 year old watching this in 2023 its shocking to see how far we have gone back these days look like heaven compared to today

[@hedgemist691]

Oooh a tree voucher. I'd love that. I bought a blossom tree from Woolies twenty years ago, it's a beautiful mature tree now.

[@stephenryan7698]

I moved here 1995 never wanted to bring my kids up in London. Yes it has it's problem areas but without doubt it's a fantastic place to live, it has all the benefits of a City while at the same time having all the benefits of the country, so many parks, woods, lakes it's a beautiful well planned place to live and I would not want to live anywhere else. GOD BLESS Milton Keynes.

[@roaarylion5214]

But that will decline their social skills

[@danw1374]

And now they are building on the open spaces 🙄

[@topcat4643]

Dump 😢

[@Bodanki]

About Fishermead "It isnt finished yet, but signs are that its working out fine".....wow that didnt age well haha

[@Thesilentmajorityuk]

I came here when i was 5 years old from Brixton, We moved away back to London and Northern Ireland for about 3 years, Moved back for good when i was 17. 55 years old now love the place brought up a family of 4 Kids here. We have it all, Thanks to the People who are responsible for the vision and hard work of getting Milton Keynes to where we are now, Thank You All

[@keztrucker7478]

Born in Bletchley in the early 1960s, then MK was built exciting place to grow up , school, started work, Married and got my first council house in the early 80s moved away in the 1990s and travelled the world came back from time to time to visit parents and siblings, all sadly gone now including the lovely little market town I grew up in. Now closed shops or charity shops , Many strange faces and accents and dialects graffiti drugs broken windows broken dreams , "if only every city was like Milton Keynes" They are in Britain , European Union , post industrialisation, uncontrolled immigration. ........ concrete cows lots of trees and a mile long shopping centre and wide open parks doesn't make up for that .

[@PhilofBristol]

I went to a boarding school near Milton Keynes 1979 to 1984, and went to Stantonbury Campus Leisure Centre many times. Also I used to cycle around the "Redway" cycling routes. As my dad was a chartered surveyor, I gained a liking for looking at some of the new developments and going round the show homes. Probably not what most teenagers liked but never mind.

[@xr6lad]

We always used to go looking at show homes. Enjoyed it a lot as a teenager.

[@user-blaster_2012]

I'm visiting Milton Keynes for the first time tomorrow. I thought i would check out the towns history, so i watched this. i'll break away from the town centre and see if i can find some of the homes with that wonderfully dated but futuristic architecture as shown in this film.

[@littleowldme]

How was your visit? Totally different to this video! Would love to hear your story though.

[@davidwicks3334]

A great video especially as we moved to MK in 1980 There is no other place I’d rather want to be ❤️❤️

[@susanbennett2219]

We moved there in 1975, as 1 of the first new families to move from London to MK.

[@wokenup5273]

I was 1 year old in 1974 when my mum and dad moved from South East London with the promise of a house and work for my father who was a carpenter.

[@littleowldme]

Nah, we were there in 1972.

[@shojaejlali1290]

I was in rehab 20 years ago and it was full of people from milton keynes. They all said it was a shithole and even back then it was infested with Somalian drug gangs. I dont know what it was about the "futuristic" planning of the 60's and 70's of post war Britain but looking at it now it was doomed to fail. Anything great in Britain was built in medieval times or especially the victorians. Even now theyre making the same old mistakes because making a few quid is much more important than creating a beautiful place to live. Leeds is absolutely chocca with new high rise apartments supposed to be designer inner city living. They built way too many,they built them on the cheap and theyre already starting to look grubby. They built so many that they ended up being let out by housing associations or councils to anti social tenants...its sad. For such a prosperous country that was the world superpower 150 years ago britain is just sad now. No community.....no sense of pride in the communitys that people share. It breaks my heart. No one is doing a damn thing about it apart from a few grass roots organisation's but they barely scratch the surface.

[@Custardpoint948]

The guy looking in the kitchen cupboard’s while the women is being told about the garden and shed 🤣

[@amarsbarr]

This was from 21st February 1979 in case anyone wanted to know as the uploader failed to put in the date

[@NikBull]

I didn't realise it was compulsory 😏 it's dated at the end of the video, you only have to look.

[@amarsbarr]

@@NikBull haha sorry it's just if I hadn't seen this I would be dying to know the year I always love history

[@NikBull]

@Big Valerie Big Valerie not really. The comment implied failure where there was none. It was a poorly constructed comment which I met with sarcasm.

[@matthewjohnpotts]

Loving the very big orchestra in the secondary school!

[@BossySwan]

The tree planting voucher is a stroke of genius

[@parallaxview2143]

I live in Southend and everyone loves to pile in and say how rubbish it is. I love my hometown with warts and all. It strikes me that Milton Keynes is one of those rare places where people really feel invested in their surroundings and want the best for everyone who lives there. Very interesting program.

[@Precious-Crystal]

I moved from mk to the kursal

[@littleowldme]

No they don't! It's one of them places that is all smiles & back slaps...as long as you think exactly like they do & like what they like. If you don't, you're fkd!

[@Hadrian363]

​@@littleowldmelike every other place in the UK then 😂

[@littleowldme]

@@Hadrian363 nah!... Mk is the next Brighton...just no beach!

[@xr6lad]

@@littleowldmeoh you mean they can recognise someone with a chip on their shoulder a mile away and can’t be bothered putting up with people like that?

[@andrewashdown3541]

I remember walking around the unfinished shopping centre - hard to describe the thrill of that strange apparition arising out of the fields. However, the housing proved to be mind-numbingly dull, a Brave New World shock of anonymity, unfamiliarity, creating a sense of disorientation, amplified by the lack of community, and of heritage, tradition - to use the buzzword - 'place'. The architects (excluding my father) all bought themselves farmhouses, Georgian country retreats and Edwardian mansions in Aspley Guise or Woburn. The vision has long been abandoned. Housing quickly reverted to ''rat-trad' and then all-out mock- Tudor kitsch. The Centre's Miesian geometry has come under sustained attack from commercial developers, eschewed in favour of raspberry retro-Deco (Midsummer Blvd), The original height limit - the very USP of the place - is now abandoned with a new hotel. The thrill has gone, and the dream with it. The move toward becoming just another expanded out-of-town warehouse / bland shopping centre / limitless estateville - like so many others - seems inexorable..

[@gracequinn4845]

i came here on stantonbury with my children in 1974 it was a happy friendly place we all helped each other ,a real comunity not lke now its got so bad there is no comunity any more

[@danw1374]

Sadly the same could be said for most places now.

[@antonyjohnson6759]

Defo

[@markwright5223]

Stantonbury was a rough area in the late 80s ...I remember the kids there used to come to Newport pagnell for fights

[@wokenup5273]

@@markwright5223 I was a ousedale pupil in the mid eighties. One lunchtime a group from stantonbury turned up. The PE teacher handed out baseball bats to the oldest pupils I was reliably informed. The same teacher was later found guilty of sexual offences.

[@lindapirie7021]

​@markwright5223 I was at Bradwell Middle School from '87-88, and most of the kids in my year went on to Stantonbury or Ratcliffe. My parents thought these schools were too rough, so they sent me to a private school in Bedford instead.

[@KaiDiesAgain]

i feel so sorry for the people who thought Fishermead was going to be a nice place to live in it's just a rats nest of druggies and crime.

[@drtydawg73]

good video, I like what he said about housing density being to high in most towns so mk was going to spread them out for better living! it started off good but now the council are just building flats in every little space they can squeeze them in! its the council that is destroying mk!!

[@antonyjohnson6759]

I grew up on eaglestone 72 to 85 loved it Falconhurst school was a right crack

[@wokenup5273]

Was a great place then but now it's a complete shithole. Visited at the weekend. The first underpass I walked under I found several people smoking crack. Sad thing is I can understand why they might feel the need to escape reality. I cut short my weekend and returned home. Weird to say that considering I lived in mk/Newport Pagnell for 28 years.

[@stuartcrosbie3799]

lived here all my life. was brought up in eaglestone and was nice to see it displayed in this video,, sadly its slightly run down and appears the council has given up on the estate from my last walk around the old place,, i have to say though its one of the first estates so of course these older parts of milton keynes are likely to be run down. milton keynes is a magnificent place to live, its awful reading some peoples comments on this page about how milton keynes is all drugs and crime,,, im yet to witness this version of the town.. i think youll find its just the same as anywhere in the uk... its becoming a big town/city and with that your likely to get trouble in certain areas on the outskirts of town or even in the centre of town.. however its been a great place to live and i hope i never have to leave... happy 50th birthday milton keynes

[@Cazzy1213]

I grew up in Oldbrook then we moved to Westcroft. It was great back then, but my parents say people get stabbed in the street now, so it's not as safe as it used to be! I've since moved over seas.

[@littleowldme]

And westcroft is like little Africa meets little Syria!

[@Aaronswilliams1881]

It's all gone down hill, however it is nostalgic as the 80s and 90s were good times

[@lucaschapman2188]

Milton Keynes has gone down hill even from 12 years ago from when my sister moved there.Councils have moved alot of problem cases up from London .My sister says there are some really rough parts of Milton Keynes I wouldn't want to go to.

[@markwright5223]

Milton Keynes has had rough areas for decades I first moved there 36 years ago .. But then council estates are usually rough places to live.

[@littleowldme]

And then to add insult to injury...literally the last two or so years...further overspill from Brixton, Toxteth & Lambeth! 🙄

[@doktoruzo]

Presented by Colin Ward, a pioneering and radical thinker on social housing and social historian. He was an architect and anarchist and widely regarded as one of the greatest anarchist thinkers of the past half century.

[@crickcrot]

More like a antichrist socialist have wreaked working class communities up down Britain.

[@mathewgreen4099]

Thanks for posting. I'm just reading When The Lights Went Out by Andy Beckett, Britain in the seventies. Towards the end of the book he describes the planning, building & impact of Milton Keynes both in the 70s & 30 years later.

[@LordmonkeyTRM]

Lol moving on up to...Eaglestone 😂😂

[@elayneyoung1837]

I like living in a new town ... Lots of green space, and not the hassles of the city, no air b n b, student blocks everywhere like in cities,

[@littleowldme]

Eh?! Have you been hiding under a rock?! Course we are riddled with them.

[@elayneyoung1837]

@@littleowldme yeah I hear you, since living here, were now getting more of them, and students, who can't find a place in the city.....it is slowly creeping in...my town isn't too bad ....yet, but I do notice of late, things are changing, and commute to work in the city is now an effin nightmare,

[@ianhorsburgh9867]

Bred in Milton Keynes, a lot of the council estate, now dumps, fine if you've got money, or can move to the "newer" estate, but wouldn't touch Beanhill, Netherfield etc with a barge pole

[@nickpellatt]

Our family was the 2nd family to move to Netherfield, 1974. My friend Adrian's family were first ... they ran the newsagents. My dad ran the Co-Op.

[@LordmonkeyTRM]

I lived on Coffee Hall our house had literally just been built when we moved in.

[@nickimontford]

Same here. We moved to Daniels Welch in May 76 from London. Such a nice community on the estate then.

[@heidiwhole6978]

I lived on Daniels Welch from 77 to 98 x

[@LordmonkeyTRM]

Rochfords 78-91 also Nyeka Thomas and Keith Gregory sound familiar??

[@agnosticevolutionist3567]

You poor bloke

[@dav01kar]

Ms Booth would not recognize the place now.

[@dav01kar]

40 years ago OMG,

[@susanbennett2219]

200,000 people?! Its gotta be way more than that now surely? They are building everywhere!

[@danw1374]

As of 2020 stats the population of MK stood at around 270,200.

[@GucciandMimiACatsWorld]

Nice sharing stay connected 🇬🇧👌😋

[@Timo199]

The start would be good for Russell Brand's ponderland. The guy looking in the cupboards and the other one asking if they get two trees... As if that would have mattered.

[@danw1374]

Funny the things people considered "Essential"

[@user-ro9jg8yc2q]

Make Britain Great Again

[@D-777i]

10:12 - Surely some blue blood running in her veins!

[@kevh6948]

What does he think he's gonna find in the cupboards? 😂

[@kevinlewis3029]

He had to look like he was interested, it's like when you go to a garage to look at a car and kick the tyres like you know what your doing.

[@danw1374]

Free bottle of HP sauce lol

[@markjcu2477]

Grew up in redbridge and went to stantonbury campus 1985_1989 brindly dianne moylans class

[@jc2462]

This is absolutely brilliant.. the way they go and see how there getting on in their new house is completely fuxxed up. Like they have just inhabited the planet 🙄

[@liamdavies2542]

Fishermead is a scary name...

[@quagmirewasere]

Or anyone in this video still around would love to chat to one of them

[@mistofoles]

@7:58 - "Shit ! Is it the bailiffs ??"

[@luciancollins3961]

Didn’t live in Milton Keynes but my parents did and they have told me all about the madness of fisher mead and Springfield not a very nice place to live well my dad did get stabed 2 times

[@nu3ero]

Well fishermead and some surrounding areas are dodgy areas of mk but some of it is alright like Bletchley Wavendon little Brickhill the Shenleys etc etc

[@kris-jm9el]

Now is like you are in Kabul or in Somalia ....

[@quagmirewasere]

Is the Chris ward still alive if so anyone no how I could contact him

[@jh2392]

The Tin Man on beanhill wow

[@ryanohara476]

The BBC TV end of credits copyright ©️ year in roman numerals is MCMLXXIX 1979. Incase anyone wanted to know the year. 😂

[@shojaejlali1290]

The Olympic games in Milton Keynes 😂😂😂

[@yoransom]

HAHAHA 🤣 Olympic games

[@amarok5048]

5:18 She can't complain about the radiators, she's got her own central eating!

[@markegg262]

Christ she is thick

[@vooveks]

One tree voucher per house.

[@mistofoles]

What year was this ? It's obviously archive footage, my guess would be 1981.

[@rich00cap]

So that's where Miss Mckenzie started her career in local council before moving to Peckham.

[@danw1374]

A new career in a new town, David Bowie..lol

[@craigbailey79]

Mk massive 🤝🏻

[@888ssss]

'here is your new dream home' 🤑

[@ChangesOneTim]

Wow! That place is up there with Bath and Edinburgh for UN World Heritage Site status.

[@Dan-gv2zy]

Lived here my whole life, total shithole All the estates are full of crime and drugs

[@dibbler08]

leave then....

[@drtydawg73]

that's just the people the council have put there, its not the town, buildings etc!

[@dibbler08]

leave then....

[@drtydawg73]

who you talking to?

[@liamdavies2542]

Scary Furzton

[@liamdavies2542]

Scary Buzzacott Lane

[@janetmurphy4124]

It's a town not a city In 2021 There are areas I would not walk around but I did as a teenager Now we have gangs And the council Ignore the poor areas The and just build big posh house's My kids when grown up will never be able to live here

[@janetmurphy4124]

100% agreed with you

[@kris-jm9el]

6:47

[@cardjunkie]

why do people look inside a kitchen cupboard?

[@anonymouse74]

He was probably expecting it to be stocked up with food lol to go along with his £3.50 tree voucher 😜

[@jenny2tone242]

Look at those shirt lapels 😳😂

[@Lensman864]

Good grief! The horrific complacency of everyone interviewed especially the "welcoming" official. Urrghhhh!

[@Reece8976]

3.11

[@crickcrot]

Some of the housing was just like large sheds go look at Netherfields and Bean hill MK just a boring place could not get away from it fast enough.

[@Manoharan]

Which year was it?

[@NikBull]

MCMLXXIX = 1979

[@MancstaSam]

& all those council housing estates even the popular ones ended up becoming drug & crime infested

[@elayneyoung1837]

Because of failure of councils to vet people moving in, they used to be fussy etc..now it's all((in my city )) folk with issues or asylum seekers who are housed before ordinary working people with connections to the area, whole system is wrong

[@savannahw112]

Lmao now it's jus roadies

[@ivorgriffiths1859]

Lived there in the 80s great place then, now it's shit , glad I don't live there now , just visit for a look round and I have to say I don't like what I see, it's just another city now and its shite

[@Manoharan]

Which is the best city according to you now?

[@JC-il6ps]

Some of the Boomer entitlement in this makes me sick.

[@lyndiborthwick2098]

its not that great when you actually live here. I mean sure the shopping centre is helpful but not what its cracked up to be