MK City Council uses "hippies in helicopters" to officially launch 2029 City of Culture bid

Milton Keynes City Council officially launched its 2029 City of Culture bid this week, with the council using “hippies in helicopters” as a nod to the city’s foundation.

The City Council said the packaging was a nod to an event where, in the 1960s, some of the people who were architects of Milton Keynes observed the landscape and drew up plans to turn the site into the city it has since become.

The council said, “60 years ago, a group of starry-eyed idealists looked down upon the Buckinghamshire countryside from the skies and imagined a city. These were not your average stuffy and suited urban planners brandishing blueprints and briefcases; they were radicals, visionaries, ‘hippies in helicopters’ with a blank slate to start from and a remit to ‘make no small plans’. The city they imagined was experimental, mould-breaking, controversial and unapologetically optimistic. It fused the practical and the poetic, the ancient and the modern – a place where mirrored modernism and pagan-inflected mysticism could sit side by side.

“Today, 10 August 2026, Milton Keynes officially launches its bid to become UK City of Culture 2029 with an affectionate tribute to the activist architects and flower-power planners who looked out of that helicopter cockpit and envisaged a better way to live.

“The delivery of the City of Culture bid is designed to bring together and honour all of the wilful weirdness, innovation and contradiction that Milton Keynes represents.”

MK City Council added that the launch of the bid is supported by the poem ‘An Ode to the City’, by resident poet Maureen Onwunali, which celebrates ‘the movers and the shakers, the Bletchley code breakers, the city of what-ifs and bold risk-takers, An ode to the star-reaching change makers’ who have contributed to the city’s story so far. The poem is accompanied by a film by Simon Beckett of Factotum Film, which translates the feeling, rhythm and momentum of the poem into a visual journey through the city’s history.

In anticipation of the bid’s official launch, Maureen performed her poem to an audience of 50,000 at Milton Keynes’ Reggae Land, Europe’s largest reggae festival, on 1 August, ending with a line that echoes the bid’s central theme and embodies the city’s youth, ambition and unstinting optimism: ‘We’re just getting started.’

Nine cities have been longlisted as candidates to be UK City of Culture 2029 – namely Blackpool, Inverness-Highland, Ipswich, Middlesbrough, Milton Keynes, Portsmouth, Sheffield, Swindon and Wrexham.

Bids were formally submitted to the City of Culture’s judging committee this month, with an announcement to take place later this year to name the final four shortlisted cities. 

An independent panel of judges selected for their wide range of expertise, chaired by legendary television producer Sir Phil Redmond, will make the decision. Judges will visit all shortlisted cities, and the UK’s City of Culture for 2029 will be announced in early 2027.