If you can’t have a good time in Milton Keynes, there’s something wrong with you — B-List Britain

Welcome to B-List Britain, an exclusive Metro Travel series in which Ben Aitken, the award-winning author of Shitty Breaks, explores unsung cities that are quietly brilliant.

The aim is simple: to seek out the good stuff, uncover hidden gems, and demonstrate that anywhere (like anyone) can be interesting, if approached with the right attitude.

This week, he’s in a ‘new town’ once referred to as Satan’s layby…

If you can’t have a good time in Milton Keynes, there’s something wrong with you. The city is weird, and that’s why I loved it.

While everyone’s parents are odd, MK’s parents are an Act of Parliament and an urban theorist called Melvin.

Conceived in the late 1960s to deal with overcrowding in London, the masterplan for MK included a grid of roads and a three-storey height limit.

All the design principles were laid out in a book called The Plan for Milton Keynes – which was an unexpected bestseller in 1970, knocking a three-year-old Richard Osman off the No.1 spot.

The city, famously dubbed ‘Satan’s layby’ by Bill Bailey, recently made it onto The Times’ annual list of the 11 most happening UK postcodes. Off I went to see what it was all about.

When I stepped out of the station, I immediately turned on a sixpence to see where I’d come from. The station was glassy, boxy, shiny. It looked … formerly modern, somehow – like 80s synthpop.

I followed my nose to a café called Bogota – a decent indie with a banging long black. The café’s owner had come back from Colombia determined to inject a bit of character and indie spirit into MK.

As well as Bogota, he has opened Canal St Coffee, where the cakes are done by a Bake Off star called Tracy (and are very, very good).

I walked north along Midsummer Blvd, the main drag. As I did so, I felt a sharp sense of being someplace else.

I’ll say it again: MK is an urban anomaly. The layout, the look, the intent behind it all – it amounts to an oddness that is almost exotic, and is certainly provocative.

Milton Keynes gets you thinking. I’d already suffered at least seven trains of thought since turning up – which is more than I suffered during the whole of my twenties.

Here’s something that really got me thinking: the local JD Wetherspoon. It had no name.

I did a bit of research and found that this was the only Wetherspoon in the country without a name. There’s The Whispering Moon in Croydon. The Mechanical Elephant in Margate. The Bank Statement in Swansea. Cool names. Weird names. Poetic names. Clearly, anything goes.

And yet the one in central MK is … nameless. It’s a tragicomic oversight.

If the only thing that comes of this series of articles celebrating unfashionable Britain is that the Spoons in MK gets a name, I’ll be happy.

I stepped out of the pub and bumped into a delivery robot. I had been warned: MK is a bit of a hotspot for experimental urban technologies.

The robots run on electric, have a maximum speed of 3.7 mph, and like to chat.

‘Asher’ speaks like a university student. ‘Sunshine’ is always upbeat. While ‘Harry’ has the voice and manner of a posh English butler.

Someone from the company that designed the robots is on record as saying that while the residents of MK tend, on the whole, to respect the well-being of the robots, they do sometimes get kicked, especially Harry.

You can do a lot of things in Milton Keynes – waterskiing, snowboarding, rock climbing.

Taken together, the list of optional diversions almost reads like an apology.

You can also skydive, indoors, which is what I did now. I entered XSCAPE, found the skydiving corner, and was inducted to the sport by Nora, an iFLY instructor.

When Nora advised me to keep my legs straight, my chin up, and my arms above my head, I was reminded of a motivational tea towel my nan once had that conveyed much the same message.

As I weighed up the vast upturned hair dryer that was keeping my fellow divers airborne inside a massive plastic tube, I wanted to say no.

In actual fact, I did say no, but Nora couldn’t hear me on account of us both wearing earplugs, and so in I went, horizontal I got, airborne I became.

And do you know what? I took to it. I felt calm. I felt relaxed. I felt at peace. When my minute was done, Nora had to wake me up.

My next port of call was Bletchley Park, home of Second World War codebreaking. When the government acquired the site just before the war, the old manor house at its heart was the organisation’s only office.

By the middle of the war, however, Bletchley Park had become a veritable intelligence factory, employing thousands.

At no point in its life was Bletchley Park ever just Alan Turing in a garage being independently brilliant while surviving on Pringles.

Of the things I encountered during my free tour of the museum, a good many have stayed with me, not least the story of Betty Webb, a recent centurion, who joined the codebreaking effort at Bletchley because she wanted ‘to do something more for the war effort than bake sausage rolls’.

(At one point, almost 75% of employees at Bletchley were women.)

I cycled back into the centre, docked my bike, then had the best jacket potato of my life at a joint called Home Ground, which I’d read about on a blog called Sophie etc., which covers MK’s burgeoning food scene.

Post potato, I went to the art gallery to see an exhibition of photographs by Saul Leiter, who spent his life searching for everyday beauty.

As well as Saul’s photos, I enjoyed reading the sentiments and feelings of the artist, which were displayed around the gallery.

‘It is not where it is or what it is that matters but how you see it.’ I’m on board with that notion.

The gallery is just across from the theatre, which is a whopper. I managed to score a cheap ticket to see a comedian called Tom Allen, who you may have seen being sassy and acerbic on the telly.

He didn’t have much of a set, if I’m candid, basically just went along the front row taking the piss out of his fans. He signed off by saying: ‘I love you MK, no matter what they say.’

Mr Allen – you took the words right out of my mouth.

Ben Aitken is the author of Shitty Breaks: A Celebration of Unsung Cities.

Come back next week for a jaunt around Preston.