Around 200 players, fans, business leaders and councillors attended a ceremony held to mark the start of building work at the site of the MK Dons new football ground.  | | Pete Winkleman prepares to make a start |
The multi-million pound development at Denbeigh North will include an arena and a shopping centre, built alongside the 30,000 seat football ground. There's no firm date when the work will be finished, so in the meantime, the team will continue to play at the National Hockey Stadium. Delighted The MK Dons Chief Executive Pete Winkleman was delighted that work had actually started. "Normally I've got so many things to say haven't I but today I'm actually stuck a bit for words because it is the culmination of a dream" he said. "It's the beginning of the reality of it all and we're 18 months away from seeing what will be an iconic building on the Milton Keynes landscape. "It really is going to be a spectacular stadium and that's what I want people to get their heads round" he continued. | "They say it's a very big stadium but this is a very big city and I can't wait for the Dons to grow into it." | | Pete Winkleman |
"They say it's a very big stadium but this is a very big city and I can't wait for the Dons to grow into it." Odd Meanwhile, the Chief Executive of the Council, John Best, says the new city needs top flight football: "There's two or three things that Milton Keynes doesn't have that it ought to have" he said. "Another one is a university, but the idea of a city of the size that Milton Keynes is now, let alone the size we're going to be, without top flight professional football, it's really quite odd. "We've been trying to work on that over the past 30 years to sort it out" he continued. "It was in the original ideas to have football in Milton Keynes, but it's never happened. We've never managed to get the right mix together until now." Contentious But the issue of football in Milton Keynes is still contentious. Chair of the Football Supporters Federation Malcolm Clarke said that a place only deserves top flight football when its team has risen up through the ranks, not by stealing another team.  | | The digging begins |
"It's a great pity that the team that will be playing at the new stadium has been stolen from another community" he said. "We would have like to have seen the effort from the residents and the authorities that has been directed towards the MK Dons, to have been directed towards Milton Keynes City instead, so that they could have risen up the pyramid system as the former Wimbledon FC did and as AFC Wimbledon are now trying to do." See more pictures from the ceremony using the link on the right hand side. | 
