Guiding a mud-spattered 4×4 around a vast, 561-acre site in Buckinghamshire, Stephen Kirwan beams at the M1 in the distance.
For the moment, it’s a boggy expanse, but he insists that within a few years it will feature 5,000 new homes—one more sign of a place that has outgrown its “new town” reputation and is angling to become a magnet for technology businesses and young professionals alike.
Long caricatured for its concrete cows and roundabout-laden roads, Milton Keynes is now staking a serious claim as the UK’s next great tech hub. The city, which grew up alongside the M1, has spent decades attracting enterprise. Companies from Rightmove to Red Bull Advanced Technologies have arrived, while Santander’s UK headquarters is establishing a tech-savvy footprint beside a cluster of start-ups. With major developers planning new residential towers around the railway station, the vision for Milton Keynes involves mixing well-paid, high-skilled jobs with relatively affordable house prices—even by South East standards.
Yet it is Chancellor Rachel Reeves’s recent plan to connect Oxford and Cambridge more efficiently—via both road and rail—that could prove the making of Milton Keynes. Currently, a two-and-a-half-hour journey by train between the two ancient university cities hampers potential collaboration, but Reeves aims to transform that with a revived east-west rail link. Under the proposals, Oxford to Milton Keynes would take less than 45 minutes, slicing in half existing travel times and eventually extending on to Cambridge.
The assumption has been that Milton Keynes would serve as a commuter hub for talent priced out of two of the UK’s most expensive property markets. However, local figures insist the flow of workers will be in both directions. Peter Marland, the Liverpudlian council leader, highlights the dynamic appeal of a place where “a third of the jobs are in tech” and SMEs proliferate—12,000 and counting.
To outsiders, such optimism might seem grandiose. After all, science and R&D giants like AstraZeneca (employing 2,000 scientists in Cambridge) and Moderna (opening a vaccine research centre near Oxford) appear immovable cornerstones of the knowledge economy in their respective cities. But Milton Keynes’s claim is that it offers something they cannot: the space to expand cheaply and quickly, plus a growing track record of tech collaboration.
A prime example is Bletchley Park—infamous for codebreaking during the Second World War and, more recently, a magnet for cybersecurity and cryptography research. Nearby is His Majesty’s Government Communications Centre, known informally as the ‘real-life Q’ for its top-secret innovations and tie-ins with private tech ventures. Local artificial intelligence (AI) consultancy Aiimi, with clients spanning Jaguar Land Rover to Rolls-Royce, thrives here precisely because, as its chief executive Steve Salvin puts it, Milton Keynes connects affordable office space with quick journeys to London, Oxford and Cambridge.
The city was never anointed with the romantic grandeur of its university neighbours, nor the cultural capital of its big sister, London. Yet Milton Keynes’s wide roads, meticulously planned housing developments and strong salaries—averaging over £40,000 a year—have seeded a distinctive, if somewhat American, way of life. Indeed, an existing network of cycleways and footpaths is now sharing space with autonomous electric bus trials and grocery-delivery robots trundling down suburban pavements.
Couple that willingness to embrace technology with the new commuter infrastructure, and Milton Keynes may be on the cusp of a transformation. Critics note that April’s rise in National Insurance contributions and the higher minimum wage could put upward pressure on pint prices in local pubs—a far cry from the concrete cows of yore, but a reminder that real economic growth brings real-world costs.
Despite the naysayers, the city is forging ahead with new builds, new businesses and a flurry of modern developments designed to accommodate a swelling population of nearly 300,000. If the east-west rail route and road upgrades become a reality, those commuter journeys may well be reversed, and Milton Keynes could soon be just as famous for its tech innovation as it once was for its roundabouts.
