The town shares something in common with me other than it simply being my home. This year, we both turned 50 and so to return with my camera in hand as a filmmaker felt a bit like getting in touch with an estranged twin. It was a chance to see which of us had turned out better. And to see who the years had been kinder to.

One thing I couldn’t possibly have known as a child was the high aspirations of those who took part in shaping the town. Norman Foster designed Beanhill, an estate of near notoriety blighted by design problems and subsequently social ones too.

During my research, I talked to the former chief executive of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation and he told me he fiercely objected to the idea of flat roofs but, apparently, the lead architect was a huge fan of Le Corbusier and couldn’t stand the idea of bricks.

For what seemed like several years, my father undertook his own huge construction project while the town grew around us. He would come in from the London train, swap his suit for jeans and return to the back-breaking monotony of laying the patio.

Painstakingly, my father created a pattern of pink and yellow flags across the length of the house and towards the end of the garden. I’m prepared to bet that for 1981 it was the closest thing to a terrace anywhere in town.

Milton Keynes was a government-funded new town and the masterplan was entirely socialist in its principles. The town planners aspired to a genuinely utopian vision – open spaces, bigger houses, central heating and a grid system of roads – built as an overspill to the terrible slum conditions of inner-city London.

The idealism behind this infrastructure attracted a mindset of tolerance. I remember the secondary school, Stantonbury Campus, felt like a permissive society to my 12-year-old self. There was no uniform, no detention and you called the teachers by their first names.