The big MK Move - Why we moved to Milton Keynes

Moving house is one of the most stressful things you’ll ever do (up there with divorce apparently. And I imagine moving house causes a few of them!) Add in the fact you’re moving to a new town, a new county and oh yeah, it’s all happening through a global pandemic (!) and you’ve got yourself a doozy.

So why did we feel the call from the roundabout haven itself, the big MK, Milton Keynes?

Let me start by saying I never thought I’d ever live in Milton Keynes.

Milton Keynes was somewhere you go to get lost on the way to IKEA (I’m never going to understand how my sister and I couldn’t find that massive blue building years ago) or when you want a shopping day out somewhere with more shops than Hemel has to offer. It’s obviously very famous for roundabouts and concrete cows and let’s be honest, it has a habit of popping up in comedy routines and tv shows as a terrible place to live (a fact that now I live here baffles me)

SO - Why did we decide to move here?

In 2014, we actually got married in the lovely *Woughton House Hotel, which very sadly closed it’s doors recently. We lived in Hemel and my husbands family are in the Midlands and Milton Keynes fell nicely in the middle. Even then if you’d ask me if I’d ever live in MK I may have laughed in your face. I had nothing against it, I just knew nothing about it (apart from IKEA…..).

in January 2020 our dream house came on the marked in Hemel, so we put our house on the market and kept our fingers crossed it would all work out ok. Spoiler alert - it didn’t. We missed out on that house and a few others after that while a global pandemic rocked the world and made the whole moving house thing 10 times more difficult.

With the market being so slow over the pandemic we realised that we had to spread our Rightmove net a little larger to get what we want - in comes Milton Keynes.

Researching Milton Keynes

As I’ve mentioned already, the only thing I really new about Milton Keynes was IKEA, so I started my research into areas that appealed to me as well as what else it actually had to offer.
I joined Facebook groups where I could ask questions and also reached out a couple of people I knew in the area to get their opinions.
Not knowing the areas made it really tough but we soon learnt we wanted to be on the outskirts rather than in central MK, we didn’t want anything brand new and we needed a good local park for dog walks. Apart from that we were open to anywhere.

We viewed houses in all areas, from Walnut Tree, Deanshanger, Two Mile Ash, Bletchley. North, south, east, west - you name it, we viewed it.

It became apparent really quickly that once you get out of the centre, Milton Keynes is such a green place. Not only are there beautiful parks, lakes and woods everywhere, there’s pathways and The Redway linking it all together making getting around on foot, bike or scooter really easy.

A little fact we soon learnt is that it generally takes no longer than 15 minutes to get anywhere by car. The grid roads are really easy to navigate, and we were finding our way around without a satnav in no time.

Another thing that excited me about Milton Keynes is the sheer amount of things there are to do here.
If you’re moving from a large city like London I could understand how it might not be as impressive but compared to a lot other towns in the UK, to me this place has everything.
Multiple cinemas, bars, restaurants, the snow centre, climbing walls, crazy golf, Stadium MK, historical sites like Bletchley Park, small museums, go karting, water activities on Willen Lake. The list goes on an on.
If you ask locals about the shopping centre, some will say that it’s gone down hill in recent years but I think that’s a countrywide issue, not a local one. Yes, there are a few empty shops but there is still much more choice than I have ever been used to.

We found our home in Emerson Valley

A few months after our MK search began, we found a home we wanted to buy in Emerson Valley, which is south-west Milton Keynes. It was actually the only house we had viewed in this area and due to circumstances out of our control we could only view it once and there were no photos online so it was quite the gamble.
We walked around the local area a little and found the perfect park for dog walks, a couple of shops within walking distance and as with all of Milton Keynes, the grid system made it easy to get around and onto the M1 when we’re visiting family.

15 months after putting our house on the market and 7 incredibly stressful months after having an offer accepted, we are officially Milton Keynes residents!

I hope this has given you an insight into what went into our heads when deciding to move here and hopefully has helped you with your decision as well.

If you have decided it’s the place for you as well - Welcome! I’m loving it here so far and I hope you do to x

*It’s apparently pronounced Woof-ton, a fact my hair dresser corrected me on after I had called it wow-ton for 7 years.