SEEING RED IN MK

Milton Keynes’Redways make it England’s most overlooked cycling town. Rob Ainsley has takeaway food for thought...

My path was blocked by something like a cute miniature fridge on roller skates. Its lights blinked. Its pennant twitched. It waited for me to pass, and scuttled on its way.

It was a takeaway delivery robot being trialled. A self-driving pizza. A smart jalfrezi. A homing pad thai. Welcome to Milton Keynes, England’s most overlooked cycling town. It has a Dutch look, thanks to its new-build blocks linked by a network of car-free cycle paths, the ‘Redways’. But rather than being Utrecht without the canals, or Almere with concrete cows, it’s more like Britain’s version of Los Angeles: our MK to its LA.

This is car country. No traffic lights, lots of parking. The Redways – while very good by British standards, hence a bit rubbish by Dutch ones – are hardly crowded. Only three per cent of journeys are made by bike, a similarly miserable proportion as other UK towns. On some stretches you’re more likely to encounter a battery-driven chicken fried rice than a bike.

Which is a shame, because those Redways make MK a great place to get around by bike. They can take you anywhere. Indeed, anywhere is where you usually end up, thanks to disorienting underpass mazes and cryptic signage.

Luckily MK’s residents seem a friendly lot. In villages, directiongiving is one thing – ‘left at the Old Forge, past the Old Post Office, right at the Old Station...’ In MK, it’s another – ‘Left at Nando’s, past Wetherspoons, right at the Travelodge...’

It’s not only A to B cycling that’s inviting, it also has plenty of familyfriendly leisure routes amid greenery and water: parks, villages, lakes, streams and a few whopping puddles when we visited.

Some have artworks, like the concrete cows (they look more like badgers), a lorry-sized chameleon, and the ‘ancient’ Stone Circle near Willen Lake, built circa 2000; Milton Keynes is apparently an Irony Age settlement.

There’s a London-style Santander bikehire scheme; its docking-station pocket guides are the only paper MK cycling maps available until the council gets around to reprinting its versions. And the Grand Union Canal towpath, tarmacked all the way up to Cosgrove and down to Leighton Buzzard – another unpublicised artwork, perhaps, because the surface is evidently a relief model of the Pennines.

Nearby Bletchley sums up what’s right and wrong with cycling here. Getting there is pleasing enough: a few traffic-free miles from central MK past the football stadium, feeling oddly like mid-west US. Bletchley Park, now a museum, was the home of the codebreakers who helped us win World War Two, and trailblazed modern computing in the process. They may have cracked the Enigma cipher, but the logic behind the awful bike parking would defeat them. The shed by the entrance is covered, but has strange slotted wheelbender concrete slabs, D-locking is impossible. And there’s no left luggage, so you have to lug your panniers around the park.

One of the displays, among the codebreakers’ huts and computer shacks, is a replica of the 1940s bike sheds, complete with town clunkers as used by those boffins, dutiful clerks and posh muckersin. Computers have moved on a bit since then. The bike parking hasn’t.

It encapsulates MK’s problem. Bike provision is a mishmash of good, bad and ugly. Ultimately, it’s easier and more convenient to drive. Indeed, you almost see more cyclists in the quiet lanes of the surrounding countryside, on lively local club jaunts to the cafés and pubs of those pleasant Bucks villages, than on the Redways. MK’s lesson is that half-decent bike facilities won’t tempt people out of their cars.

At least the Redways will prove useful for those robots, so maybe there’s hope. Britain’s streets are becoming ever more clogged with vans delivering boxes from Amazon et al. Robots that can carry those, as well as pizzas, could be more in demand to address the problem. But they’ll need safe, smooth, connected, carfree paths – paths that can also benefit cyclists. Maybe that’s how we’ll persuade councils to give us decent urban bike networks, so long as we’re not constantly dodging cute mobile fridges.

On some stretches you’re more likely to encounter a batterydriven chicken fried rice