a Member of Parliament elected and then collapsing in a cloud of disillusionment.
The airport should make people across Crawley feel a sense of camaraderie. For example, its presence means that no buildings in the town are allowed to be more than four storeys high. The Hawth Theatre boasts that it’s the tallest structure in town, so if al Qaeda choose to attack Crawley, it’s the theatre they’ll go for.
And maybe the fact that so many people are connected to one workplace has enabled a local football team to become implanted as part of the culture, in a way that’s taken place in few British towns since the 1920s, by which time the bases of most football clubs had become cemented. Crawley Town FC was helped along the way by the wealth of a character of the sort who, to stay legal, newspapers refer to as ‘colourful’, and who was suspended from football for corruption at his previous club in Boston. To get a sense of life at Crawley Town, here’s a report by a visiting fan of their match with Bath City: ‘Their manager, a rather large Steve Evans, spent the whole match pacing up and down the touchline, shouting abuse at the Bath players, the referee and everything else that holds existence on the planet. At half time an announcement was made that went, “There’s an old man that lives behind the stadium and has made a complaint. He says there’s too much noise and we need to quieten down. So let’s make the bastard even more annoyed and make some noise.”’
Now, the theory that all towns, however corporatised, retain an underlying soul, is stretched to the limit in Milton Keynes. There can be few places that try so hard to live up to their image. The first sign that something’s not healthy comes as you drift through the Buckinghamshire countryside towards the town, and pass the first roundabout, which has a grid number. So a sign will tell you this is H4 or V5 roundabout, as if you’re a Lilliputian moving through a giant game of Battleships.
What’s more disconcerting is that, apart from these grid numbers, the roundabouts all look identical. The view in every direction from each of them is of a highway with trees perfectly spaced on each side, and a giant rectangular warehouse behind the trees, so you’ve no idea if you’ve been past this bit already or not.
You’re entrapped in this grid with no way of working out what direction you’re going; although I haven’t tested this, I expect the town planners have fixed it so compasses don’t work here, they just spin violently the way they’re supposed to do if you’re in the Bermuda Triangle.
The most sinister warehouse belongs to River Island. It stretches the whole length of one grid section, a shiny oblong block with no apparent entrances, no bobbles or chimneys or bits sticking out, just a perfect smooth geometrical structure that’s far too big for River bloody Island. If all the clothes in all the world’s River Island stores were put in a pile, they would barely fill one corner of this complex, and if it emerges one day that it’s full of long corridors and solid steel doors that open only after a biometric sensor scans your iris and a sugary automated voice with an American accent says, ‘Identity confirmed – you may proceed to the excavation section,’ and where an army of ex-Death Row inmates are building a tunnel to China in preparation for an invasion, I shan’t be entirely surprised.
With no churches or pubs or graffiti or bridges or landmarks to plot your position you find yourself not only lost, as you can be in any town, but unsure where you are in relation to the rest of the world, as if you were in a rowing boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The grid numbers only make it more confusing, as you pull over and try to calculate that if you’ve just passed H5, and the one before that was V6, then H7 must be to the right, which, as H9 cancels out V3 over 5 divided by x, the angle of the line H2–V8 must be equal to the sum of V1 squared.
Milton Keynes is a town that must have been designed by a mathematician, one of those philosophical ones like Pythagoras who saw numbers as the only part of the universe that embody perfection. Even the one building you can see as you pass through the town on the train is a huge cube comprising hundreds of identical glass squares on all sides that looks like part of a puzzle for super-intelligent giants.
Outside the station all is chillingly symmetrical, with even the lamp posts having spherical tops so the pattern isn’t spoilt. I assume there must be bylaws to ensure that this picture is maintained, so that if you’re planning to walk down one side of highway H2, you have to get someone to walk down the other side at the same speed, to stop the place becoming lopsided. As an experiment, somebody should try something like leaving a kettle on the pavement to see whether an official would place one on the other side within minutes, maybe having emerged from a pipe that leads to the control room under River Island.
I took my son around Milton Keynes when he was twelve, and he found it bewildering, which I suppose was a good sign. Two years later I told him I was going back there to do a show and he said, ‘Oh no, you’ll be on stage and someone in the front row will slyly pass you a note that says “Please help us”.’
Defenders of the town point out that it’s a pleasant environment, with open spaces and lakes and a low crime rate and efficient schools and all sorts of activities, but the qualities advanced as positive aspects are all top-down, as if arranged by a happiness committee. They’ve been organised by the people who produce brochures that say: ‘And if ballooning is your preferred leisure activity, then it’s up, up and away with the Milton Keynes Hot Air Ballooning Association. Yes, whether it’s double word scores at the Indoor Scrabble Centre on H3 or artificial shark fishing at the hexagonal lake on the corner of V7 and H5, you’ll find all your desires are catered for here in Milton Keynes.’
Living there must feel as if you’re part of a social experiment, with cameras following you to monitor the effects of issues such as triangular shapes on the heart rate. It was born when a Labour housing minister, Richard Crossman, announced where it would be built in 1966. The chairman of the committee set up to oversee the building of the town told Crossman he wanted a ‘properly planned publicly owned town’, and there was clearly an idealism driving the project. Maybe the dream owed something to the dominant socialist view of the time, that aspired to create order from above, organised by the state, as practised by the Soviet Union. In which case, on top of the gulags and the pact with Hitler, we can blame Stalinism for Milton Keynes as well.
The result is a town that’s too clean and ordered. The state of mind of those most eager to defend the new town is shown in the book Milton Keynes: Image and Reality, which boasts: ‘By the mid-1980s we could aspire to be almost at the same level as Croydon.’
In some ways the place has been a success, like a mini-America, built on immigration and a promise of a stable community on a new frontier. If there’d been a properly funded public-relations department in Washington in the 1800s, they’d have probably made adverts saying ‘Come to America’ in which cowboy children ran across Kentucky holding red balloons.
But like the police officers who run the village in the film Hot Fuzz, who are so determined to keep their domain perfect that they arrange the murder of anyone who transgresses the etiquette of idyllic rural life, you feel the people who arrange Milton Keynes feel uneasy if anyone does anything to threaten the place’s controlled order of perfection.
It’s symbolic that in order to get a Football League team, Milton Keynes bypassed the route of developing a club within the community, and brought one in, the MK Dons, a team that had been Wimbledon in South London until its owners took it as a franchise and planted it in its new home.
What you feel the town needs is grubbiness. It needs a market with kids’ clothes tattily piled on a table next to a man with sideburns selling second-hand CDs by the Average White Band and Supertramp. It needs an area the rest of the town warns you not to go, a kebab shop that’s the subject of rumours about missing puppies and a pub that everyone claims to have been in on the night Mad Jimmy went berserk with a cattle prod.
Where the old socialist planners and modern
