Chartered Surveyors Milton Keynes Buckinghamshire

Approximate Population: 184,506

Milton Keynes is home to The Open University’s headquarters - based in the Walton Hall district. Though as this is a distance learning institution, the only students resident on campus are approximately 200 full-time postgraduates. Cranfield University, another postgraduate school, is located just outside the town, in Cranfield, Bedfordshire. Milton Keynes College provides further education to Foundation Degree level.

In the early-1990s a purpose built polytechnic was opened at Kents Hill in Milton Keynes, opposite the Open University’s Walton Hall site. At around the time the existing Polytechnics converted to Universities, “MK Poly” merged with the former Leicester Polytechnic, De Montfort University and the site was rebranded the DMU MK site. However in recent years, DMU closed the MK site and the Open University has expanded to take over the buildings.

Although Milton Keynes does not yet have its own conventional local university, its founders hope that the new University Centre Milton Keynes will be the seed for one.

Like many parts of the UK, the state secondary schools in Milton Keynes are Comprehensive schools, although schools in the rest of Buckinghamshire still use the Tripartite System. Results are above the national average, though below that of the rest of Buckinghamshire – but the demography of Milton Keynes is also far closer to the national average than is the latter.

Milton Keynes has one major commercial radio station, Heart 103.3 (formerly Horizon Radio), part of the Global Radio group of radio stations, which provides local programming for 10 hours a day (4 hours at weekends), with other hours being provided by network programming. The local BBC radio station is BBC Three Counties Radio, which covers Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire, but has different programming from the Bow Brickhill transmitter at breakfast. CRMK Online is a voluntary station broadcasting on the Internet.

For television, the area is in the overlap between the Oxford and the Sandy transmitters and so receives BBC South and BBC East, and ITV Central and Anglia. Signal quality is weak in many areas due to distance and “terrain shadow”. It was for this reason among others that Milton Keynes has one of the first Cable TV networks in the UK. However, the cable network is now ageing and in need of modernisation to cope with the imminent digital TV switchover due by 2012; many residents have already opted for roof-top aerials and satellite dishes.

Milton Keynes has two free-to-residents local newspapers, the Milton Keynes Citizen[6], which is twice-weekly in some areas, and the MK News, a weekly.