I wrote this when the year was new, on a day that felt similar to day: bright and blustery. I haven’t been back to Milton Keynes since, although I feel I’ve spent a lot of this year travelling around the country. All these different hometowns.

If you grew up in a village, the notion of a home town can be amorphous. I spent 15 years – from living memory to leaving home – living in a community of around 200 houses, of which the first we occupied was among the newest, and the second among the oldest. There was a shop, two pubs, a church, a school, and ribbons of history formed mostly in the mouths of the handful of older people who were born there, when there were more of these things. Our village was a short drive from one small town, a longer drive from a larger town, and a longer drive still from the city-not-city of Milton Keynes.

My parents left the village about a decade ago now, and moved to another one nearby before heading to Kent – new ground. There is no reason to return: the clutch of adults who helped raise me have dissipated, their children grown up. We buried no loved ones there, our childhood homes have been filled with others’ childhoods.  

But I have been back to Milton Keynes; twice over the past year. There is a gallery there that puts on intriguing exhibitions and I’ve travelled out – always with people who have never been there before – from Euston, reversing the journey I used to take as a teenager, for gigs and shopping, small paper train timetable tucked in my purse.

We didn’t live in Milton Keynes but we had “MK” in our postcode. I learned young and fast that this was less than ideal. Milton Keynes has earned an underwhelming reputation: for roundabouts, for concrete cows, for being nothing more than a shopping centre. It is difficult to argue with these things. As teenagers we spent our Saturdays roaming around the shops, the cinema, the bus stop. A faded version of what we’d seen glossier kids do in American malls on screen. By 16, I’d hardened to it, rankled by the frictionless lack of “culture”. I scoffed at Milton Keynes, escaped it, avoided explaining that I was from there and only returned to leave it again for 13 years. 

In the last of those years I would read about Milton Keynes. It has the kind of story I’d like to probe into – I’ve tried to, a few times. One of big hopes and daft cock-ups that resulted in the grander plans (arts initiatives, a monorail) getting caught up in the admin. Nevertheless, it is true that its grid system is aligned with the movements of the sun on Summer Solstice: the address of my student bank, scrawled on the forms of my early twenties, is Midsummer Boulevard, because that dual carriageway would frame the longest day’s sunrise. It is true that I grew up immune to the choking gyrational systems and ring roads more familiar to British town planning; that cycle paths into the city were a norm; that the passage into the city – from and to anywhere - was flanked by wide strips of green landscaping. This was someone’s utopia. 

To go back and leave the station on foot, to walk up Midsummer Boulevard, is something I’ve only ever done as an adult; we always drove before. It’s a straight line between the station and the gallery, at the tail end of the shopping centre, and 30-minute mental rolodex of memories. A red-and-white-striped shirt; best friends; a blue handbag; a small, piercing humiliation; a Sony Ericsson pay-as-you-go handset with room for 10 precious text messages. 

I take immediate notice of what has cropped up (a Brewdog pub, some newbuild flats), what has vanished (the Waitrose car-park, a Riad-like structure swagged, inside, with hanging plants), what is more present for its absence (the Gap sign, now a grey hole; the infamous ancient oak). The “old bit” of the shopping centre - built in 1979 - has aged well for a chic and airy temple to consumerism. The palm and banana trees that filled the ceilings and hosted garden birds during my childhood were re-planted a few years back

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We go to the gallery, look the art. The show – a Laura Knight retrospective – is worth the journey. In a corridor, there is a piece based on the OS Map for the local area: a swirl of city in the midst of rural Buckinghamshire and I’m surprised by how much I recognise it. 

We take our lunch into Campbell Park, sit on a bench and talk about where our families came from, buttoning up against the wind. Our view drifts north, over a small flock of sheep and a perfectly spherical pond that ripples blue on this clear, gusty day. It’s a strange sight, one that sits somewhere between the pastoral and the man-made. Somehow, it feels like the future, but it’s not one I’m going to have.