Here’s a fun fact for you: if you were to divert your attention to the perilously amusing website Google Maps, and enter the term ‘England’ in the search engine, a large red arrow marked ‘England’ will drop down right in the middle of Milton Keynes.

I’m being serious. Go and try it now, if you don’t believe me. You will then see for yourself that, somehow, Google Maps is suggesting that ‘England’ exists primarily in a small town in the middle of Buckinghamshire, and whatsmore, one which is commonly the stuff of comment lamenting mid-20th Century British underachievement. Milton Keynes isn’t known for any majestic archiecture, world renowned historical figures, or indeed pretty much anyone or anything of laudible note. Rather, Milton Keynes is famous almost simply for being famous, much in the way that Vanessa Feltz is well known because no-one can work out quite why she’s so well known at all. Milton Keynes is a place known primarily for its road construction methodology – and I frankly can’t work out why this hasn’t yet been enough to draw crowds from across the globe. It is a town mainly famous for having built its roads to the formation of a square grid, all conjoined by endless roundabouts, and named only with numbers and letters – so it is possible in Milton Keynes to receive directions which tell you to ‘take the V3 through six roundabouts, and turn left just after H5’.

It all feels tremendously Orwellian.

On the other hand, enter ‘Wales’ into your search engine, and Google Maps hastens you to a location just north east of Aberystwyth – a lonely site in the middle of rolling Welsh fields, amid fierce greenery threaded with winding streams and, one assumes and ventures without prejudice, scattered with aimlessly wandering sheep. The whole place seems rather Welsh in character, rugged and weather beaten and fierce. Similarly, search for ‘Scotland’, and your map will whizz you up to a place called Loch Tay, deep in the heart of rural Scotland. Loch Tay is shouldered by a golf course at one end and somewhere called ‘Achmore’ at the other (try saying that in a Scottish accent – it sounds more like a Glaswegian elocution instructor’s command than a name for a town. You can almost hear William Wallace himself galloping a-steed over the moors, sword unsheathed and kilt flapping gaily).

But come back to England, and you’re back in Milton Keynes again – a city which was deliberately constructed in a location equidistant from London, Birmingham, Oxford and Cambridge. In fact, to be precise, you’re on a road called Silicon Court – a thrusting bosom of a crescent, filled with stickle brick houses and white vans. Welcome to England, world!

Upon first realising that Google Maps was suggesting that Milton Keynes was England – that were a foreigner to venture here saying ‘Where can I see England’, he or she should best be diverted with the instruction ‘Go to Milton Keynes’ (I wouldn’t even tell someone from Milton Keynes to go to Milton Keynes) – I have to admit, I was a little taken aback and not a little concerned. As much as we like to pretend England is ‘alright, I suppose’, with its relentless emphasis on understatement, its Club Card points and its well intended but alas flawed and dysfunctional M25, surely they could have put that little arrow somewhere else?

As a few suggestions: whats wrong with Durham cathedral? What’s wrong with pretty much anywhere in the Lake District? What’s wrong with the Liverpool waterfront, Stonehenge, Westminster Abbey, Stratford-upon-Avon or even, if you really want to go out on a stereotypical limb, Wembley Stadium?

Having mused on this for some considerable time, however, something clicked into place. I went back to have a look around Milton Keynes on Google Maps – a place I visited only as a young boy, visiting my Dad who used to lecture at a college down there (alas, he left at the first opportunity, choosing to lecture in St Helens instead) – and suddenly, something seemed to make sense.

You see, if nothing else, Milton Keynes is very… Well, its very organised. Built in the 1960s at the height of post-war planning, this is distinctly a place of common sense and good logic and the correct arrangement of things in their appropriate and most sensible order. Its a place designed to be neat and tidy, with carefully ordered rows of houses arranged discretely and symmetrically so as to not accidentally create anything too interesting. The town is like an elaborate filing system – you wouldn’t be at all surprised to turn up to find the place colour coded or arranged alphabetically. And, from the Google air at least, it really does seem remarkably polite. Nothing too brash, nothing to cause offence, nothing to divert one from the sturdy business of, in the words of Churchill, Keeping Buggering On.

Its just so conservatively put together. It just seems to lend itself to sober organisation and a complete disdain for the spectacular or ambitious. It just seems so… English!

I am at present reading Bill Bryson’s really quite wonderful book Notes From A Small Island, where the aforementioned spends seven weeks travelling from south to north through Britain. As he goes, he remarks on some of England’s peculiarities – the strange little idiosyncrasies that form our national identity. As I have gone through this book – and I hasten to add with great sadness that I have just two chapters remaining until I have to find something else to read (although I do have a good Paul Theroux lined up) – I have more than once been filled with a sense of remarkable pride at the nation we are. Understated, polite and terribly, terribly nice, granted. And yes, we don’t like to make a fuss, especially if things can be kept orderly and simple. But alas, we’re not a little determined and we do possess an instintive and delightfully stubborn ability to Keep Calm and Carry On  under all circumstances. This is the nation we are.

And in fact, something about Milton Keynes seems to sum that up rather well. Don’t you think?