Milton Keynes is a large town in South East England, about 45 miles (75 km) north-west of London. It is also the principal town of the Borough of Milton Keynes, itself part of ceremonial Buckinghamshire. It was formally designated as a new town on 23 January 1967. Its 34 square miles (88 km²) area incorporated the existing towns of Bletchley, Wolverton and Stony Stratford along with another fifteen villages and farmland in between. It took its name from the existing village of Milton Keynes, a few miles east of the planned city centre. Uniquely for the United Kingdom, the urban form uses a 1 km grid for the top level of street hierarchy: the local form of most districts is more conventional. At the 2001 census the population of the Milton Keynes urban area, including the adjacent town of Newport Pagnell, was 184,506, and that of the wider Borough, which has been a unitary authority independent of Buckinghamshire since 1997, was 207,063 (compared to a population of around 53,000 for the same area in 1961). The open air National Bowl is a 65,000 capacity venue for large scale concerts. It is situated off the A5 near Furzton. The 1,400 seat Milton Keynes Theatre (Blonski-Heard) opened in 1999. Its high booking rate allows it to lay claim to the title "Britain's most popular theatre".[citation needed] The theatre has an unusual feature: the ceiling can be lowered closing off the third tier (gallery) to create a more intimate space for smaller scale productions. There are further performance spaces in Bletchley, Leadenhall, Shenley Church End, Stantonbury and Walton Hall. More on Milton Keynes 

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