Dave's Diary

THERE ARE MORE LEGENDS PER SQUARE MILE IN MILTON KEYNES THAN CAN BE FOUND IN ANY OTHER TOWN< CITY OR VILLAGE IN BRITAIN   ·        Signs and roundabouts – Someone once joked that Milton Keynes was a place of signs and wonders. There were signs pointing everywhere and everyone wondered where they were actually pointing to.   Built on a unique grid road system the H roads are those which run Horizontally across the city, broadly West to East. The V roads run North and South up and down the plan. The H roads are all WAYS – Portway while the V roads are Streets – Fulmer Street and so on. Where each V road intersected with an H road there was a roundabout, at one time with a smile it was said that there were three hundred and sixty-five roundabouts, one for each day of the year. I think, somehow, that is just a legend with the tiniest possible grain of truth. Approaching a roundabout the first set of signs told the driver the local/immediate d...

  LOCATIONS, LEGENDS, ICONS, HISTORY AND HERITAGE As I write this part of my presentation I will have to be careful and try to keep it   short !   I could actually write a book. I HAVE written a book, two books: Not The Concrete Cows published in 1991 and Milton Dreams The City That Never Was published   in 2020. Of all locations in Britain I think I would be right in saying nowhere can beat Milton Keynes for such a large number and wide diversion of legends. A legend ?   It could be true, it may be true, it doesn’t have to be true but it is the grain of truth within a legend and what it contributes to a legend that counts. Fenny Poppers – Saint Martins Church in Fenny Stratford Milton Keynes is the only church in the country with a firearms licence ! It needs this to store the gunpowder for the annual firing of Fenny Poppers. I am deeply honoured to have been invited to fire the poppers not once but twice. The poopers are fired on Leon Recreation Ground, ...

WE BUILT THIS CITY ON ROCK AND ROLL    So Starship claimed for San Francisco but take a moment and see just how much Milton Keynes is built on Rock and Roll – We BUILT THIS NEW CITY ON ROCK AND ROLL. Go to Los Angeles, to the Hollywood Walk of Fame and there you will find a star dedicated to a Milton Keynes giant of Rock and Roll ! Jim Marshall, The Lord of Loud was an Mkeyneyan who founded Marshall Amplification and told the world’s pop musicians to turn the volume up to eleven. All of Marshall’s world famous amplifiers do indeed have volume knobs rotating up to number eleven. Without Jim Marshall of Bletchley, Milton Keynes so many pop groups of international fame would not have achieved all they did. I met Jim Marshall a number of times, he was a generous man when it came to supporting music and schools. His attitude was: The answer is YES, how much do you need ? What do Freddie Mercury, David Bowie and Michael Jackson all have in common ?   They all played T...