Origin of town name Milton Keynes
 

To settle a debate we are having at work does anyone know how the town Milton Keynes got its name - was it something to do with economists Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes?<BR><BR>Hope you can help<BR>Andrew

Sorry, no economists. When the New Town was being planned in the late 60s, it absorbed a variety of villages and hamlets, and the name derives from the smallest of the lot.<BR><BR>http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homep...is/ofguidb.htm

Thanks Jen - that's a real help

Besides which, we would have a rather more impressive source for the name Milton than a foreign economist - even one from Chicago

There's a little more to the name: going back a few hundred years the village was named Middleton and the dominant family was the Cahaines and the two names became corrupted to become Milton Keynes

There is a wonderful book called something like "A Dictionary of British Place Names" that answers all such questions.

OK, David - I'm (honestly) curious how you found this 8 year old thread.

Did you really search back to 2002 for <i>Milton Keynes</i>???

Sheesh. I made the mistake of getting off the Motorway at the MK exit and it took me half an hour to make it back to the highway. Awful traffic situation. We never did find the Red Bull Formula One HQ.

A bit late in replying: I live in MK and have a history book on the old buildings of the town/village.
Red Bull racing is close to Brickhill railway crossing

I see this is an old thread but I was just researching the area around Milton Keynes and Bletchley which is also part of the greater Milton Keynes area. I also read that back in 2011 Bletchley was an area where some of the rioting took place. Are there areas to avoid if touring around Bletchley and West Bletchley and looking for dinner in the area or would it be a safe place for tourists?

I suggest the most likely crisis in MK is if John Lewis ( a well known cooperative type store) decided to close early and the middle classes couldn't get their teapots and cushions.

Bilboburgler--would that apply to the West Bletchley area as well?

"I also read that back in 2011 Bletchley was an area where some of the rioting took place"

In 2011 there were riots in Oxford (attacking the McD on the ring road, rather than its notorious bastions of privilege). Every single year at least one demo in central London gets sufficiently hijacked by loonies to "justify" lurid headlines about riots the following day.

If you worry about places in England that have had a riot in the past few years, you wouldn't come here - and you'd avoid the centre of the towns you've come to visit. Rioters, generally, riot in places handy for photographers and they attack buildings worth attacking. They rarely damage their own homes, or expect paparazzi to trudge out to some woebegone council estate to give them their 15 mins of photo-fame.