Aran Lemaur

Aran Lemaur was born in Spain in 1990. She first came to England, to London, in 2009, but returned to Spain the following year because university tuition fees were so high. She graduated with a degree in Translation in Servicing. After working in Spain, she joined a company in Cambridge in the fashion industry in 2015.

By 2017 she was freelance and the job had changed to correcting machine translation which did her head in. She started to code and get into ‘PEG’ and IT. A couple of years later she was hired as a tech engineer by a London bank. She commutes to London from Wolverton twice a week, working ‘flexi’.

She moved to Milton Keynes in October 2018 when her partner got a job there. At first, she thought it was weird: all roundabouts and no people to be seen. They rented in Shenley Church End which had a big Sainsbury’s, little shops and a community centre. She met people who told her every estate formed its own community. Being a cyclist, she thought the redways were great. They moved to New Bradwell which had 200 years of railway history and the countryside nearby.

Coming from another country in her twenties, it was difficult to have friends. She practices music at home and recently joined the Development Band of the Bradwell Silver Band, playing tuba. The Band gave her free tuition. There were no women in old photos of the Band, but now there are many. She became interested in music as a child and can read music and play piano and guitar.

The only change she’d noticed in Milton Keynes was the new hotel opposite Campbell Park. There’d been a lot on Facebook about it.