At designation, its 89 km2 (34 sq mi) area incorporated the existing towns of Bletchley, Wolverton and Stony Stratford along with another fifteen villages and farmland in between. It took its name from the existing village of Milton Keynes, a few miles east of the planned centre.
At the 2011 census the population of the Milton Keynes urban area, including the adjacent Newport Pagnell and Woburn Sands, was 229,941,[1] and that of the wider borough, which has been a unitary authority independent of Buckinghamshire County Council since 1997, was 248,800,[3] (compared with a population for the Borough equivalent area of around 53,000 for the same area in 1961,[4] with almost all the approx 196,000 population increase since then arising in the urban area).