At first glance Milton Keynes may not seem like promising territory for a writer interested in landscape and history but a competition to write a short story set in Milton Keynes as part of the town’s 50th birthday celebrations sparked my interest. My short story The Morning Run was the result and featured in an anthology published to coincide with the inaugural Milton Keynes Literary Festival in September 2017.
I knew I wanted to look at some aspect of Milton Keynes’ history and jotted down a few ideas and potential settings. My initial thought was to focus on the archaeology and early history of the area. For example, The Milton Keynes Hoard was acquired by the British Museum and dates from the late Bronze Age, local finds have included Bronze Age jewellery and Roman coins. Stony Stratford has a long history, chartered as a market town in 1194 and also mentioned in Shakespeare’s Richard III. It is on the A5 (the Roman road known as Watling Street) an area rich in finds – iron working, pottery, bronze working, jewellery and coins. There are churches, abbeys and mills in the Milton Keynes area that could also have provided fertile ground for a story.
However, I kept coming back to the Grand Union Canal, partly because it acts as a kind of physical boundary and partly because of the interesting social and economic history strands that writing about it would throw up. The key landmark would be the brick kilns at Great Linford, built in the late 1800s. In the winter, when the ground was soft, the Oxford Blue clay was dug up, mixed with sand and left to dry out. In the spring the bricks were fired and then loaded onto horse drawn barges to be transported further down the canal network. Brick making has a long history in the area – dating back at least 500 years.
The canal was opened in 1805 and connected the industrial Midlands (which needed coal for heat and steam for power) to London and the docks. At that time it was known as the Grand Junction. The boats were crewed by men and boys – and later, whole families – who lived onboard.
I was also attracted to writing about the idea of roots – how deep can they be if you live in a new town and what else might root you to a place? In my story the narrator’s daily run by the canal is a physical reminder of his father’s interest in the history of canals.
A trip to the Canal Museum at Stoke Bruerne is well worth a visit if you are interested in the history of the area and of the canal in particular. It covers lots of information about life on the canals, the process of building a canal, engineering, practical skills like carpentry and blacksmithing as well as the distinctive arts and crafts associated with canal boats. There are plenty of objects on display and it helps to explain how the canals became vital to the Industrial Revolution and the impact of the arrival of the railways. Today there is also a pleasant canal side walk and local nature reserve to explore.
Underneath the modern urban sprawl of Milton Keynes lies a collection of villages in rural Buckinghamshire – there is a rich vein of history waiting quietly for those who care to look.
[Voices from the Grid was published in 2017 by IngramSpark]
Shelly Dennison 
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