Milton Keynes’ ‘hippies in helicopters’. Photo by Stephen Chung
60 years ago, a group of starry-eyed idealists looked down upon the Buckinghamshire countryside from the skies and imagined a city. These were not your average stuffy and suited urban planners brandishing blueprints and briefcases; they were radicals, visionaries, ‘hippies in helicopters’ with a blank slate to start from and a remit to ‘make no small plans’. The city they imagined was experimental, mould-breaking, controversial and unapologetically optimistic. It fused the practical and the poetic, the ancient and the modern – a place where mirrored modernism and pagan-inflected mysticism could sit side by side.
Today, 10 August 2026, Milton Keynes officially launches its bid to become UK City of Culture 2029 with an affectionate tribute to the activist architects and flower-power planners who looked out of that helicopter cockpit and envisaged a better way to live.
The delivery of the City of Culture bid is designed to bring together and honour all of the wilful weirdness, innovation and contradiction that Milton Keynes represents. It is supported by the poem ‘An Ode to the City’, by resident poet Maureen Onwunali, which celebrates ‘the movers and the shakers, the Bletchley code breakers, the city of what-ifs and bold risk-takers, An ode to the star-reaching change makers’ who have contributed to the city’s story so far. The poem is accompanied by a film by Simon Beckett of Factotum Film, which translates the feeling, rhythm and momentum of the poem into a visual journey through the city's history.
In anticipation of the bid’s official launch, Maureen performed her poem to an audience of 50,000 at Milton Keynes’ Reggae Land, Europe’s largest reggae festival, on 1 August, ending with a line that echoes the bid’s central theme and embodies the city’s youth, ambition and unstinting optimism: ‘We’re just getting started.’
Poet Maureen Onwunali at Reggae Land. Credit: Zetteler
Together, the poem, the wider bid-launch campaign and the bid itself are designed to overturn the preconceptions and stereotypes that have dogged Milton Keynes since those hippies first took flight. As a New Town – ‘an invented place’, as Onwulani describes it – Milton Keynes has been much mocked and misunderstood over the years. Some people know it only for concrete and roundabouts; others don’t know it at all. But for the 300,000+ who call Milton Keynes home – including the 2,500 people who have been involved in shaping the City of Culture bid – who experience its peculiar fusion of the visionary, the eccentric, and the brilliantly functional every day, it is the most extraordinary city in Britain.
With a winning bid, Milton Keynes will have a unique opportunity to re-energise its cultural programme and tell its extraordinary story – and that of the New Towns movement that created it – on the national stage. And if the bid isn’t successful… well, as the last 60 years have shown, those hippies do not give up on their dreams.