Milton Keynes Time Capsules

This is a DRAFT chapter for my work Milton Keynes The City of Legend. In it I speak of two tinme capsules I know have been hidden for future generations to find. Can you  help me ? Do you know of any others about our city I could include ? Message me or drop me an e-mail: dashford566@gmail.com THANKS

TARDIS – Time And Relative Dimension In Space – TARDIS

You’ll need to be as geriatric as I am to remember the very first episode of Doctor Who broadcast by the BBC on Saturday 23^rd November 1963. Audience figures were well down on those expected so it was run again the following week before that very first series was run out. Why were audience figures down ? Because the world’s attention was focussed on news reports following the assassination of US President John F Kennedy the day before. Yes, I did watch that first episode and for a while all those following but I have never become a fan of the Doctor whizzing through time and space in a police telephone box. I am geriatric enough to remember such blue boxes on our streets in the days before portable two-way radio.

Not a fan of Doctor Who but within my writing time travel is a major genre. My very first book, published in 1992, written for my son’s twelfth birthday was Peter’s Magic Fountain Pen. Peter’s great-grandfather gives him a pen which when Peter uses it to write he is transported

to the time and place in his story.

Set aside for the moment while I finish writing this kaleidoscope through our City of Milton Keynes, I am currently writing My Ka’s Adventure In A Brave New World where the central character is taken forward in time to help the few remaining inhabitants of our planet understand why extinction came about.

Speaking once with a professor of astrophysics I asked him if time travel was theoretically possible. His answer was so long and complicated I am not sure if he said yes or no.

I am writing this chapter to tell you that time travel is possible and where it has happened in Milton Keynes.

Come back with me to the early 1970’s. At the junction of Buckingham Road an Water Eaton Road before Abbey National, now Santander stole the land there was a football pitch on which local kicked a ball about every Saturday. (Playing football on a Sunday back in those days was not the done thing.) Within the foundations of the building a group of the pitch’s former players put together a time capsule inside a football and buried it.

I wonder what they put into their football before lacing it up. Do you remember when footballs were laced up ? We are talking half a century ago, no internet, no mobile phones, computers were science fiction as far as the general public was concerned. £1 in 1975 is worth £10 today. When some distant day in the future how special will it be when this time capsule is opened.

Under the direction of community artist Bill Billings Leon School students put together a time capsule which was placed in the stomach of Leon Dinosaur during its construction in 1990. Sadly, unless the decaying statue is rescued as a matter of priority we will here in the third decade of the twenty-first century have an insight into teenage life in the last decade of the twentieth century.

This book is all about heritage, NOT history. History is bunk and static while heritage moves and travels with time. I am going to take a copy of this book and seal it into a time capsule to be secretly buried for Milton Keynes Citizens hundreds of years into the future to find and read not of 2023 but of Milton Keynes heritage as far back as the Romans.

Saturday 6^th May 2023 will be the coronation day of His Majesty King Charles III. I would like to make a suggestion to you as something you can do for your family in decades, centuries to come within our monarch’s coronation day. Create your own time capsule with contents reflecting your life at this time. Will you do that ? Your family giving heritage to its future members.

Wouldn’t it be nice if all cities had as many time capsules as Milton Keynes.