Victoria Butterworth

Victoria was born in Croxley Green, Hertfordshire in June 1986. She first visited Milton Keynes in 2014 for a shopping trip with her husband. She knew nothing about it before the visit. They walked from the station to the shops and she was taken by all the trees. She had her photo taken with the Concrete Cows and, before they’d left, decided that it was where she wanted to move.

When they had the means to move, she researched the best estate for them. The redways were important because she and her husband cycled everywhere. There had to be a vet nearby for their dog and they needed non-vehicular access to shops. She chose Walnut Tree. Then she and her husband hired Santander bikes at the station and cycled out to and around the estate. They moved in 2021.

She found people in Milton Keynes much friendlier than those in London, possibly because everyone is from another place.

Previously she’d worked in a pharmacy in Watford. After moving, the commute left little time for anything else. She got a job with Macfarlane Packaging in Kingston. It’s a big supplier of packaging and it partners with Blue Cross, providing free warehouse space for its pet food. The company takes good care of its staff  and has become like a second family. She was new to the office environment and has been promoted. Her husband works for Sports Information Service, also on Kingston, as a referee for online sports.

Caldecotte Lake is a special green space for her because it made such an impression when they first cycled round the area. Campbell Park is also important and the view of fields from the Light Pyramid puts the lie to Milton Keynes being all concrete. So much thought has been put into the planning and she’s building a library about it.

Bus services are poor: it takes 45 minutes to get to the centre and one hour 20 to go to Bletchley. She couldn’t learn to drive. She tried an e-scooter, which was terrifying.

For the future she’d like the estates outside the centre to retain the ‘tallest tree’ height restriction so it will always be a ‘land of trees’.

She has a special memory of the Midsummer Festival, but her best memory remains when she first got off the train – she has a tattoo of the coordinates of the station.

She wants to be involved in Milton Keynes’ future. She does litter-picking, takes part in charity events and intends one day to be a councillor.

She would like the Museum exhibition to show the original plans and models and what the planners thought it would be like 20 years on.

She has a bucket list of things to do in Milton Keyes and adds to it constantly. One that she achieved was to go to the top of La Tour and a panoramic photo she took there was used in the submission to the Queen for Milton Keynes to become a city.

When Milton Keynes became a city, she went into work with cakes to celebrate. She celebrates #LoveMK by dressing up. Her downstairs toilet is dedicated to the Concrete Cows. For the interview she wore shoes with a cow-print that she’d accessorised with cow-print laces and sprayed with ‘MK’.