About the town » Milton Keynes, Milton Keynes, England, Great Britain

Milton Keynes, sometimes abbreviated MK, is a large town in Buckinghamshire, about 45 miles north-west of London. It is the administrative centre of the Borough of Milton Keynes. It was formally designated as a new town on 23 January 1967, with the design brief to become a 'city' in scale. At designation, its 89 km area incorporated the existing towns of Bletchley, Wolverton and Stony Stratford along with another fifteen villages and farmland in between. It took its name from the existing village of Milton Keynes, a few miles east of the planned centre. At the 2011 census the population of the Milton Keynes urban area, including the adjacent Newport Pagnell, was 226,180, and that of the wider borough, which has been a unitary authority independent of Buckinghamshire County Council since 1997, was 248,800, (compared with a population of around 53,000 for the same area in 1961), with almost all the 41,000 population increase since 2001 arising in the urban area.