Fire and Ice

After the last topic which isn’t anything I know much about, I decided to go for one that I am a bit more interested in - and Monkston Park also has relatively few street names so choosing this one next was a no-brainer! It would also give me a chance to go outside Wikipedia for the research, as I have far too many books on the London Underground, Tube stations and the like. I will also take this opportunity to plug the London Transport Museum , which has possibly the greatest shop in all museums , ever!  Before we jump into the Underground stations, a bit about Monkston Park. This is one of the newer developments, originating in the late 90s or early 2000. Interestingly, the Milton Keynes hoard was found here, which is a series of items made of gold, from the Bronze Ages and now in the British Museum. I wonder why they didn’t go with a related theme for the street names? However, I’m pleased they went with London Underground Stations. As I was compiling the list of street names f...

Oldbrook is one of the estates near Central Milton Keynes and the streets are named after mostly famous cricketers or cricketing terms. Apparently, the street layout is based on the markings of a cricket pitch although having had a good look on Google maps , I personally can’t see it. Let me know if you do! This was a challenging estate to tackle for two reasons: one, there are lots of streets here so it took a while to check all the terms. The second, and possibly more important reason, is that I know very, very little about cricket. I find the game confusing and slow so it doesn’t really grab my attention, and it also seems to have its own language which can be impenetrable to those of us outside the sphere of its influence. This post risked being a very long list of people that were all cricketers and I don’t think that is very interesting, so I tried to find little bits of information that were a little more unusual and made these men (because they are ALL men) come alive a little ...

The theme for Pennyland’s streets is coinage - appropriate given the name of the estate! I assume there was nothing accidental about the theme choice, of course.  Pennyland is a grid square located on the side of the Grand Union Canal, on the north side of Milton Keynes. It was built in the early 1980s and I recently learned that this grid square was part of an experiment - the Pennyland Project - designed to learn more about the energy-saving of current (at the time) building regulations, vs a more demanding version.  This experiment sounds fascinating as it was comprehensive, including even the layout of the houses before they were built to make the most of the solar energy. It also included control houses in Pennyland and in other Milton Keynes districts. The project was sponsored by the UK Department of Energy, Department of Environment and Milton Keynes Development Corporation, and using the technical expertise of the Open University Energy Research Group. I spent a very...

As discussed previously , some people in Milton Keynes Council get to have a lot of fun by choosing the themes and street names of the neighbourhoods that make up the new city. Admittedly, there are fewer new grid squares being created these days but I can only imagine the great deal of excitement that someone had with this! I live in Blakelands which I think was built in the early to mid-80s and it is a relatively small estate: it’s essentially a handful of streets surrounded by two industrial estates. This may sound awful but in reality, you’d hardly notice the industry as the roads are independent. We also have a lake within the grid square: Tongwell Lake . There is a path all the way around the lake which makes for many pleasant walks around there, as well as the chance to see all sorts of wildlife: we barely even notice that we are next to the M1! The theme in Blakelands is Industrial Revolution (fitting, given the location within the industrial estates, I guess) however the stre...