Tag Archives: Milton Keynes

Mar 19 2024
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Daily Post, Portrait, Stranger

Pixel Heaven

Sunday 17th March 2024, 10.45am (day 4,588)

Pixel Heaven, 17/3/24

A dull and chilly morning in Milton Keynes was passed in ‘Pixel Heaven’: not my term, but the name of this retro video arcade, or is it a working museum? £15 or so gets you three hours of indulgence. Which, I have to admit, was not as nostalgic an experience as anticipated — I seem to prefer pinball these days — though if the place had had a Bubble Bobble machine, it would have been different. The kid certainly looks as if he is enjoying watching Dad on this one, however.

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Mar 19 2024
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Daily Post, Landscape

Woburn Sands

Saturday 16th March 2024, 11.05am (day 4,587)

Woburn Sands, 16/3/24

Among the activities booked in for this weekend in Milton Keynes was another County Top walk, which was a perfectly OK walk to do but turned out to be not all that exciting photographically. However, I quite like this one, if only for the way it seems to head back in stages through the landscape, starting with the allotments occupied by a mysterious single figure. This is the village of Woburn Sands, where I finished the walk: note that whatever it is named for, it’s not a beach — we are nowhere near the sea here.

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Mar 16 2024
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Daily Post, Interior

Enigma

Friday 15th March 2024, 12.30pm (day 4,586)

Enigma machine, 15/3/24

Found another excuse to leave home for a while and come for a weekend in Milton Keynes, which may not sound the most immediately glamorous destination, but it does have the significant draw of Bletchley Park. It was here that World War 2 was won, arguably, when a (largely female) staff of thousands worked tirelessly to crack German ciphers, mainly produced by the now-famous Enigma machines, of which the museum still has a few dozen, out of about 450 surviving ones apparently.

Do you know that if Enigma had ever enciphered a letter as itself, the code would have been near-impossible to crack? But this was its fatal weakness, giving just enough indication that particular strings of gibberish might just be commonly-used phrases like “Wetter für heute” [‘the weather for today…’] and allowing each daily machine setting to be worked out.

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Jul 25 2019
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Art and architecture, Daily Post

Pyongyang (or, Milton Keynes)

Wednesday 24th July 2019, 4.40pm (day 2,890)

Pyongyang MK, 24/7/19

This blog (and my general sanity) depends on a steady drip-feed of new places to explore and photograph. This place is one of the weirder ones: Milton Keynes, the new city built from the 1960s on, and now a very strange mix of comfortable suburbia and stark brutalist architecture that looks to me like I expect Pyongyang, North Korea to look. This is particularly true around the railway station, which is to my right as I took this shot (but architecturally is much the same).

I may be coming back more times in the future if a work collaboration comes to fruition, but if I do, I will need to find ways to get my head around Milton Keynes…. at the moment it just confuses me.

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