Milton Keynes, with its grid streets, shopping malls, shiny steel’n’glass newbuild, and sprawling scale, is like America without the guns. Or Trump. But with good bike paths, Greggs and Wetherspoons.
So I like Milton Keynes. It was built from scratch starting in the 1970s as a new town halfway between Birmingham and London. Now a city of 270,000 diverse people, it was still all just farms and fields when Abba were first in the charts.
Actually, quite a lot of it still is green and pleasant. MK has several parks threaded through it with artificial lakes. These provide very nice, tranquil green corridors to cycle right through the city if you fancy an alternative to the prosaic roadside bike paths and roundabouts.
I took some of these to leave the city, fortified by a Greggs bacon roll and coffee. In Campbell Park I admired the east-facing panorama from the viewpoint pyramid: rural England one way, midwest USA the other.
I continued to follow NCN51, the Sustrans ‘Varsity Route’ route. It’s so called because it links two great university cities, ie Oxford and Colchester. Plus it also goes via Cambridge.
Quiet country roads and lanes through flattish farmland and villages got me to the outskirts of Bedford. And there was a surprise as I cycled the good new traffic-free path parallel to the River Ouse into the centre from Kempston through Great Denham Park. I was taken aback to see a grand Indian palace glowing in the low winter sunshine. If the morning had felt like Atlanta, Georgia at times, this was more like the Punjab.
The building is Bedford’s magnificent Guru Nanak Gurdwara: one of Britain’s largest Sikh temples, built this century on donated money and using marble imported from the subcontinent.
A very nice young chap in a turban showed me round. The dining hall often feeds hundreds at a time as a demonstration of all-welcome inclusion and hospitality that characterises Sikhism. It was empty today and the kitchens were silent, but maybe one Sunday I’ll come back for their free dhal, curry and rice.
Another remarkable piece of engineering is just along the riverside path close to the centre: a cycle underpass burrowing below a railway bridge that must be among Britain’s lowest-headroom infrastructure.
The ‘height’ is just 4ft 9in, or 1.4m. I had to keep my head down as I went through, but I’m used to that. I’ve been keeping my head down for the last thirty years.
I lunched in Bedford and carried on car-free east out of the city. First I went along the river dodging the icy puddles, then to Sandy along the course of the old Bedford-Cambridge rail line.
Just south of Bourn, I had some unexpected good news. There was a heavily-enforced road closure, with emphatic barriers, signs warning of CCTV surveillance, and a Highway Maintenance guard sitting in a van.
Good news, because as so often I was welcome to cycle through, thus enjoying three miles of guaranteed car-free road to myself. In Longstowe I could stop to chat to a dog walker and celebrate the lack of vehicles. At one point I couldn’t resist parking my bike right in the middle of the empty road for a snap.
After that it was mostly half-decent roadside bike paths to the edge of Cambridge and into the west side of the centre.
My target, Queens’, is there in a cluster of colleges just south of the more famous and cathedral-like King’s. I didn’t bother going in to Queens’ – they rush visitors a fiver to look round, and I was there as recently as, er, 1980 – though I could get a good snap of its famous Mathematical Bridge from the road.
This wooden structure was built in 1749 without nails purely on engineering principles. But, the legend goes, when they took it apart later to see how it worked, they couldn’t put it back together again. This is a concept familiar to any amateur bike mechanic who’s tried to repair a bottom bracket.
My trip was at an end, with another beginning: I was met at Queens’ by my writer friend and Cambridge resident Tim. Conveniently, he lives round the corner. Even more conveniently, he had a donated barrel of beer in his house looking to be used up. A regal way to end a regal trip.
Miles today: 54
Miles Queen’s to Queens’: 94