Milton Keynes; Saturday, 17 June, 2023

I had a relatively early breakfast and then headed out of the hotel over to the nearby bus stop to catch the bus over to my first stop of the day at a small field by the railway tracks halfway between Central Milton Keynes and the suburb of Wolverton. The reason was to visit one of the more infamous icons of Milton Keynes, it’s Concrete Cows.

Two sets of concrete cows were built at the time the new tow was being built with the original set moving around the town to various locations over the years, whilst a replica set was placed in a field by one of the main roads coming into town, consequently it’s the replica set that has probably been seen by more people that the originals.

Having taken in the cows I walked the half mile or so through the country park, that the cows graze the southern tip of, to the ruins of a 4th century AD roman villa that has been uncovered. Whilst its only really the floor plan of the villa that survives it does still show that the area has been inhabited for quite some time.

From the Villa it was about a 10-minute walk further north to reach the Milton Keynes Museum. The museum is housed on land that was, until the 1970s and the start of building works on the new town, a farm. Locals rallied round to save the land from development and today the farmhouse, gardens, barns and some new additions have been turned into the Milton Keynes Museum that tells the history of the area before the arrival of the boulevards and concrete.

The museum is also now home to the original set of the Concrete Cows, fitting in slightly better in a farm environment than on the side of the road in a park. Alongside the cows and the rural history, the museum also houses an exhibition on telephones and communications and a hall of transport that charts the history of Wolverton as the worlds first town purpose built to serve the railways.

From the museum I walked down to the nearby bus stop to catch the bus back into town. I ended up waiting over half an hour as one bus has been cancelled and the next one was running late, as it was picking up all the passengers from the cancelled bus, so by the time I got back into the city centre it was already nearly 3pm and I was starving – so I grabbed a late lunch and then headed over to the National Film and Sci-Fi Museum.

The museum was a bit pricy for what there was, a couple of galleries of props and some autographed memorabilia from Films and TV, and they had a very strict no-photos policy which meant that I was round and out in not a particularly long amount of time.

I stopped off for a quick cup of coffee in town before heading back past the Church of Christ the Cornerstone located almost in the centre of the city. The church opened in the early 1990s and is a shared facility with the city’s Anglican, Baptist, Methodist, Roman Catholic and United Reform congregations all sharing the space.

Having looked around the church I walked back to my hotel to freshen up before heading out into the now quite unpleasantly muggy evening in downtown Milton Keynes to find some dinner before heading back to my beautifully air-conditioned room for a good night’s sleep.