Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes is Britain's great planned experiment — a city drawn on a grid in 1967 across the north Buckinghamshire farmland, all boulevards, roundabouts and lakes, mocked for decades for its concrete cows and now studied for its parkland logic: six thousand acres of green space threaded through the squares. It contains multitudes older and stranger than its age. Within its borough lies Bletchley Park, where ten thousand people worked in wartime secrecy and Alan Turing's codebreakers shortened the Second World War; the Open University, the world's first distance-learning university, has its home here; and in the village of Wavendon, the jazz legends Sir John Dankworth and Dame Cleo Laine founded The Stables in their own grounds in 1970 — now one of Britain's best-loved music venues, with hundreds of concerts a year and a biennial international festival. The city centre's flagship stage is Milton Keynes Theatre, opened in 1999 with 1,400 seats and a ceiling that can be lowered to intimate scale. It was here, in May 2002, that the archive records a full six-night operatic residency: three performances of "Tosca" and three of "Il barbiere di Siviglia" with the Plovdiv company.