Hot Off The Press – New Titles This Week

This week at The Archive we’ve added a fantastic 202,120 brand new pages to our collection, as we take a trip to new town Milton Keynes with the addition of new title the Milton Keynes Citizen. That’s not all, we’ve also added a brand new Derbyshire newspaper the Glossop Times, whilst from Clitheroe to Coleraine, from Matlock to Morecambe, from Skegness to St. Andrews, we’ve updated nineteen of our titles from across the UK.

So read on to discover more about our new and updated titles of the week, and also to learn more about life in the new town of Milton Keynes in the 1980s and 1990s.

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And it’s to Milton Keynes we now go with the addition of the Milton Keynes Citizen. Established on 1 October 1981 to serve the Buckinghamshire new town of Milton Keynes, which had been appointed as such by a ‘new town designation order’ in January 1967, the Milton Keynes Citizen is a weekly paper that appears every Thursday.

Milton Keynes Citizen | 8 July 1993

Providing ‘news you can trust since 1981’, the Milton Keynes Citizen or the MK Citizen publishes a range of sections, with pages devoted to readers’ letters, lifestyle articles, gardening advice, as well as leisure, cinema, and television guides. The paper also publishes a motoring and sport section.

With a large modern circulation of over 30,000 copies, the Milton Keynes Citizen now serves a city, Milton Keynes having been given city status in 2022.

We’re off to Derbyshire now with our second new title of the week, which is the Glossop Times. This newspaper was founded in 1869 as a localised version of the Tory paper the Derbyshire Times, itself founded in 1854.

Glossop Times | 10 January 1891

The Glossop Times was a weekly paper that appeared every Saturday, at the modest cost of just one penny. Serving the market town of Glossop, this incredibly detailed paper filled eight pages with seven columns of text. The title published an array of international, national and local news, its local news reporting covering the likes of Buxton, Bakewell, Chatsworth, Clay Cross, Great Hucklow, Derby, Heanor, Ilkeston, Whittington, Duffield, and Mansfield. Meanwhile, the Glossop Times published ‘notes from Derby,’ and the latest from the Chesterfield County Police Court and the Derbyshire Quarter Sessions.

As well as publishing such local news, the Glossop Times reported extensively on market activity, as well as printing weekly serialised fiction, such as one story entitled ‘The Workhouse Lady – A Derbyshire Tale.’

That may be it from our duo of new titles this week, the Milton Keynes Citizen and the Glossop Times, but there is still plenty amongst our updated titles of the week for you to explore. Our biggest update of the week is to the Lincolnshire Standard and Boston Guardian, to which we have added over 35,000 brand new pages, whilst we have also paid special attention to the coastal Sussex town of Worthing, as this week sees over 32,000 brand new pages joining the Worthing Herald, and over 26,000 brand new pages joining the Worthing Gazette.

Meanwhile, we’ve also added new pages to a trio of Scottish titles, these papers being the Kirriemuir Herald, the Kilsyth Chronicle and the St. Andrews Citizen. Across the Irish Sea, we’ve made updates too to the Coleraine Times.

Milton Keynes – Life in a New Town

The new town of Milton Keynes was established by a 1967 Act of Parliament, the name for the new town, which was expected to be the biggest yet in the UK, coming from an existing village in the area. Indeed, it was hoped that this new town of Milton Keynes would become as large as a city, with a population of 250,000 and its strategic position near to the cities of London, Birmingham, Leicester, Oxford and Cambridge.

Norfolk House, Milton Keynes | Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News | 1 March 1983

By the 1980s, as the town’s newspaper reveals, Milton Keynes had the image of an ‘affluent, booming, Yuppie city.’ Indeed, the town was drawing attention from abroad, as one letter to the newspaper on 30 March 1989 revealed. The letter writer, Gabry Ghislaine, stated how:

I am studying English in France and to obtain my degree I must write a thesis. My subject deals with Milton Keynes as a new town and life in Milton Keynes. I would like to ask your readers to write to me about the reasons which led them to move to Milton Keynes – I would like to know if Milton Keynes as a new town is a better place for living or if it is just the same as any other town.

A housing estate in Milton Keynes | Illustrated London News | 1 March 1983

She went on to ask some more Milton Keynes specific questions, writing:

Are they [Milton Keynes residents] sensitive to the environment (green belt, red paths…) and to the local facilities (shops…)? In short I would like to know what they think about Milton Keynes, its accommodation and if they think it will be a good idea to wind up, after 1991, the MKDC?

An ‘ultra-modern house’ in Milton Keynes | Illustrated London News | 1 March 1983

Sadly, however, only a week later, the Milton Keynes Citizen reported on the ‘despair for [the] city,’ with a tragic rise in people taking their own lives in the area. The article, which was penned by Steve Larner, detailed how:

According to the Samaritans 22 people took their own lives last year – a rise of 57 per cent since 1986. And despite a recent survey showing that Milton Keynes households have more cars and consumer gadgets than the rest of the country, calls to the 24-hour listening service jumped 10 per cent in 12 months to 15,000.

The report also contained a quote from Samaritans Deputy Director Harry, who said:

…Milton Keynes has its share of new town problems. People coming here from established communities suffer isolation and loneliness. There are a lot of people for whom things here are rosy. Milton Keynes is a good place to live, although the calls to us seem to tell a different story…

A walkway linking shopping and residential areas in Milton Keynes | Illustrated London News | 1 March 1983

As well as these issues of isolation and loneliness, in the new town of Milton Keynes there was the sense of a quest for identity, a battle between beige bureaucracy and a more colourful sense of place. This tension came to the fore in March 1993 in the pages of the Milton Keynes Citizen over, of all things, the naming of a roundabout.

On 11 March 1993 Ken Blundell’s letter to the paper was published, in which he stated how ‘Bottledump Roundabout was a wonderful name for a roundabout.’ His mind, he says, was conjuring up visions of ‘all sorts of exotic discoveries that might have been made during the groundworks for the H8 Standing Way extension to the City boundary.’ However, ‘along with all the broken bottles,’ his ‘dreams [had] been shattered’ when the decision was made to rename the roundabout Buckingham Roundabout.

Central MK | Illustrated London News | 1 November 1979

Ken slammed the ‘unimaginative’ name, although he did wonder whether ‘the original name Bottledump came about because somebody misread somebody else’s bad writing?’ However, a letter from H.H. Milwood Wildey from Whaddon on 25 March 1993 revealed the interesting history behind the name of Bottledump Roundabout, highlighting how it was not a mis-transcription of ‘Buckingham.’

The letter explained how:

I recall telephoning for help, in 1946, from a public telephone attached to a gipsy caravan at the Bottledump when my car had broken down on that corner. An old lady was living in the caravan and she charged me sixpence for the call! The owner of the site, incidentally, whose name I forget, was always ready to support any of the nearby village’s fetes by bringing his ponies and providing rides for the children.

An open space in Central MK | Illustrated London News | 1 November 1979

The correspondent continued by slating the ”New Town Bureaucrats’ who decide the names for roundabouts,’ penning how they displayed ‘little inspiration or care’ for the area. The name Buckingham Roundabout, finally, they judged to be ‘quite silly, and dreary.’

Find out more about the evolution of Milton Keynes as a new town, new towns across the UK, and much more besides, in the pages of our Archive today.

New Titles

Updated Titles

This week we have updated nineteen of our existing titles.

You can learn more about each of the titles we add to every week by clicking on their names. On each paper’s title page, you can read a free sample issue, learn more about our current holdings, and our plans for digitisation.

You can keep up to date with all the latest additions by visiting the recently added page.  You can even look ahead to see what we’re going to add tomorrow.