A very important anniversary falls this year. It’s not one you are going to hear an awful lot about. There won’t be any military parades up and down O’Connell Street, wreaths laid or lapel adornments worn. It will slip by unnoticed by all but the sad few, amongst whom I must include myself.
Ladies and gentlemen, Milton Keynes is fifty years old. Now take a moment, let that one sink in, steady yourself on the furniture if you need to. Yes, much maligned Milton Keynes, the watchword for soulless modernist urbanisation is fifty years old.
So, what’s the deal with this Milton Keynes you might ask. Well in the recent history of town planning and urban development, Milton Keynes is a big player.
We have spoken before of the pivotal place which is occupied by Levittown, New York as the first ever suburban town, planned thus to provide a home for the wave of returning American GIs after World War II. Levittown laid the template for the suburban landscape that we inhabit to this day.
Milton Keynes was planned as a new town in the late 1950s, the idea being to alleviate congestion in London, forty-five miles to its south east. It was formally designated in January 1967.
I have a mild obsession with the cultural concept known as received wisdom. Received wisdom refers to assertions which we, unquestioningly, just take to be true. Assertions that passively get passed from one generation to the next without ever being challenged as to their veracity. “Wings are rubbish, Yoko Ono broke up The Beatles, you’ll get stabbed in Limerick, the midlands is a cultural wasteland.” You know the type of thing.
Milton Keynes being a kip is another. In popular culture MK has become synonymous with soulless monolithic urban sterility but nothing, it seems, could be further from the truth. These Keynesian musings of mine were prompted by the recent and quite brilliant BBC4 (where else?) documentary programme on the town, Milton Keynes and Me by Richard Macer.
Macer grew up in Milton Keynes, left at 18 and returned to live in his parents’ house to make the programme and to try to establish what this planned town is like now, fifty years on from its creation.
A teenager is not going to notice all that much about the social and cultural significance of his or her home town so it takes the space created by the intervening thirty years to provide the proper perspective from which he can appraise the place.
What he finds is that far from being a laughing stock famous for its proliferation of roundabouts and concrete sculptures MK is one of the most successful experiments ever in ambitious social engineering. It has one of the fastest growing economies in the country and huge approval ratings from its residents.
The new city was a place of high ideals. People would live in a world that was green and spacious and where, according to the master plan, “no building would be taller than the tallest tree”. MK attracted some of the best architects of their day and it now boasts the only listed shopping centre in the country. That’s right, a listed shopping centre.
A drive through MK today shows just how the original promise has been delivered upon. The streetscapes are verdant and full, the town centre teems with people, the housing stock is arranged in a logical, intuitive way. In January 2015, it was announced that Milton Keynes had seen the highest growth in job numbers of the biggest 64 towns and cities in the UK during the preceding decade. Milton Keynes saw its number of jobs increase by 18.2 per cent between 2004 and 2013, followed by London on 17.1 per cent. And another nice statistic; between 1967 and 2006 the MK Development Corporation oversaw the planting of 20 million tress within its jurisdiction. 20 million trees.
It might not chime with the received narrative, but Milton Keynes, the planned town, is a roaring success and a great place to live.
Planning, eh? Managed development? Futureproofing? Down with that sort of thing.
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