I came here as a junior in 1972 and joined the Development Corporation where I developed my career to becoming the commercial director, responsible for selling Milton Keynes to the world!

People saw this as a concrete jungle, so I made sure the ads I agreed refuted this claim. All of our ads were aimed to get people to come and look at the place, to see it wasn’t just concrete.  It was a fantastic job because I believed in MK.  There was a lot of heartache on the way – it wasn’t just a case of putting up the ads and they all came tumbling in.

Bob Hill talking to MK People

Heartache came when you bust a gut to try and persuade a company to come to Milton Keynes and they didn’t.  I remember a big bank was looking to move to either Milton Keynes or Bournemouth – they were their final two. and they chose Bournemouth.  Not because they didn’t like Milton Keynes, but because the senior managers liked sailing, but not on a lake!  they wanted to sail on the sea.

I grew up in London and didn’t think there were any opportunites there so I moved to Milton Keynes at the age of 16.

I’m now the youngest manager of the biggest and best leisure asset in Buckinghamshire; Xscape.

Milton Keynes for me is an amazing place.  If I had not made that move, I would never have had the opportunities I did and I would not do what I do now.  For me, Xscape is like the bad relation in the family in Milton Keynes.  Everything’s square with the grid roads and then you have this huge building which just dominates the skyline and it breaks all the rules and regulations.

The Xscape building dominating the skyline in Milton Keynes

We kind of do the same.  It has a reputation for bringing the best or the first of everything.  We had the first real snow ski slope in the country, the first indoor sky diving tunnel and the biggest casino outside of London.

In the 1970’s my parents moved from Surrey to work for the Development Corporation, the organisation behind the visionary New Town of Milton Keynes.

A decade or so later I was one of the first babies to be born in its hospital.

Chris estimates there must be over 250 million daffodils in Milton Keynes!

My father worked in the Landscape Department and I was destined to follow in his footsteps, working in the horticultural industry. For the last 11 years we have been business partners operating from offices in our town.

It’s incredible what’s happened in fifty years, where you can see the growth that’s gone particularly in the last twelve that we’ve been here, so where it’ll be in the next 50 years is what is fascinating, but it’s one of the fastest growing cities or towns in the uk

Milton Keynes has been very good for us – I mean location wise it’s fantastic – easy access to the airports, to a lot of suppliers who are local to this vicinity, Silverstone just up the road, so it’s worked incredibly well for us.

Christian Horner is Team Principal of the Red Bull Racing Formula One team

When Red Bull bought the team from what was Jaguar Racing, which had previously been Stewart Grand Prix, it was by accident that we found ourselves in Milton Keynes but quickly came to realise that location wise, and access wise it was a perfect location for us.

Since then over the last twelve years we’ve invested very very heavily in the site here and expanded and made MK our long term home.

When I was a kid 50 years ago, this was parkland and meadows.

Our regular weekend walks with my mum and dad and two brothers was to go up through Old Bletchley, past the church, work our way along footpaths and across the old railway footbridge which is still there, through the little village of Simpson, by the canal, back to Water Eaton and home.

Colin looks out over where he used to take walks as a child with his family

I would have been in about the fourth year of my secondary school when it was announced that Milton Keynes was going to be built. I remember going to Bletchley library and seeing a huge architect’s model of the new Lakes Estate and thinking that was a pretty big area.