of the city itself, and leaving the other side of town, the side that is not shopping mall, to rot. One upshot of this is the weekend violence along Above Bar, another is the continuing disintegration of St Mary’s. But service industry jobs were indeed duly created.
WestQuay does make an effort in certain respects, and this effort makes it all the more tragic. You can promenade around it, as you can along the city walls. Yet there’s a spectacular incoherence to it all. Each part seems disconnected to the other, aside from the wipe-clean white cladding, and it’s never pulled together through any design idea of any sort because it’s simply impossible to do so. You simply can’t make a building like this into something legible unless the architects are exceptionally talented and/or conscientious (apologies to all at BDP for the implication that they may be neither). We can see here how over the last decade a Modernism of a sort has continued, not as a coherent ideology, an aesthetic or a formal language which embraces and intensifies the experience of modernity, but via the element of it lamented by urbanists and sentimentalists since the 1920s. This is a landscape where the car is dominant, where the idea of streets, walking, any element of surprise, are comprehensively designed out. Conversely, the only way to rediscover some kind of element of excitement in these spaces is to walk around (not inside) them, precisely because the planning itself does not want you to. You see things. You don’t see people, but you see intriguing things, some sort of autonomous logic of commerce almost without leavening or prettification. (I say almost because some of the car parks are faced in brick, the vernacular of some language or other.) Like the Western docks, WestQuay is an inhuman space where capital no longer needs to present a human face, where it thinks nobody is looking.
Marchwood Incinerator
What is appropriate about WestQuay, though, is the way in which it joins onto the container port almost imperceptibly. The roads in the Western Docks are called First, Second and Third Avenue. Follow them and you might reach the Millbrook Superbowl, where you can play that most American and blue-collar of sports, ten-pin bowling. Go back the other way along the approach to the M27, and the containers become an organizing principle. Stacks of containers full of goods on one side, stacks of containers full of people buying goods on the other, each in the form of coloured or corrugated boxes. The elegance of the principle is perfect and some enterprising post-Fordist is bound to combine the two sooner or later, completing the circle by transporting people in those boxes too, using them for transportation, shopping and living all at once. Sure, there are no windows in these things, but put in a few branches of Costa and nobody will complain. Then, untouched by human hands, the containers could be dropped in Dubai or Shenzen, the cruise ships of the twenty-first century. Just across the water from this container city is a gigantic incinerator, designed by Jean-Robert Mazaud. A perfect dome, not Rogers’s deflated tent, silvery steel, not Teflon. It turns rubbish into electricity, and it shines with sinister optimism.
Chapter Two
Milton Keynes: Buckinghamshire Alphaville
Milton. Keynes. Surely it’s partly the name that explains why this is the most famous and/or notorious of the several New Towns designated and built by the Labour governments of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson. Combining John Milton, poet of the English Revolution and of Paradises Lost and Regained, with John Maynard Keynes, the reformist economist who helped prevent a second revolution, it marries epic national poetry with careful reformism: the perfect Old Labour combination. Alternatively, it conflates Keynes and Milton Friedman, respectively the economists of the postwar consensus and of the post-1979 apotheosis of capitalism now collapsing around our ears. This seems highly appropriate given that Milton Keynes, a pet project of the Harold Wilson administration, was largely realized under Margaret Thatcher and hence became known as Britain’s token ‘successful’ new town, its charms (principally, its shopping mall) advertised on television right through the 1980s. It’s a crushing disappointment to learn that the name just comes from one of the villages incorporated into this town—or rather this ‘non-place urban realm’, being the term (borrowed from the American sociologist Melvin J. Webber) that the planners used to describe the dispersed, indeterminate motorcity they were creating. In its privileging of the car and relative lack of council housing, with the government eventually laying out little more than the intricate, almost traffic-light-free roads, Milton Keynes is Non-Plan actualized, managing to keep elements both of its utopian promises and its bland, kitsch Thatcherite reality.
Milton Keynes Central Station
A New Career in a New Town
In 2007, perhaps not coincidentally the year that Milton Keynes celebrated its fortieth anniversary, Gordon Brown’s government announced that ten ‘eco-towns’ would be built on various sites across Britain. These towns were to have been sponsored by state largesse, but developed by institutions ranging from the Co-Operative Society to Tesco—PFI cities, if you will. Settlements of around 50,000 people, apparently designed to be self-sufficient and ‘carbon neutral’—nowhere near as ambitious as a Milton Keynes, but nonetheless a resurrection of an Old Labour idea that English middle-class common sense had dumped in the ‘failed’ category. Protests ensued almost immediately in practically all of the areas that were slated to have an eco-town next door, fronted by a motley selection of local celebrity leaders ranging from Judi Dench to Tim Henman’s dad. There’s little doubt that eco-towns were more about property speculation than they were a product of ecological enthusiasm, and there was much justified criticism that these were disguised commuter suburbs, with no infrastructure and no industry—just as Basildon or East Kilbride eventually were. Yet the opposition seemed driven more by hatred of the idea of city-dwellers ruining what Clive Aslet, ex-editor of Country Life, recently called (on the subject of Milton Keynes) ‘22,000 acres of formerly good hunting land’.21 As if on cue, at a protest in front of Parliament some held up placards declaring that these eco-towns were mere ‘New Towns’. Apparently, we all know what that means—towns full of ‘eyesores’, concrete cows and unsightly proletarians, bereft of the ‘heritage’ that so obsesses the British psyche. It became clear that these people hated the very idea of new towns, of any dispersal of people across what is, in terms of space, if not population, still an overwhelmingly green country.
A couple of years and a property crash combined with the part-nationalization of the banking system later, it’s all rather beside the point, as new housing that would have sold for absurd sums only six months ago now sits empty—and under the coalition government, it’s unlikely any of the eco-towns will be built. Even given the justifiable reasons for hostility to the eco-towns, there’s something rather sad about the opposition to them. In essence, the conviction is that any new town which stressed its ‘newness’ would necessarily be ‘soulless’, or ‘ugly’. It’s notable that the only major new town begun since the late 1960s is Prince Charles’s pet project, Poundbury, while the stealth new town of Cambourne in Cambridge’s ‘Silicon Fen’ is similarly retardataire. Poundbury’s planner, Leon Krier, is an apologist for the Nazi architect and politician Albert Speer, whose pompous classical edifices would, if Hitler had won the war, have transformed Berlin from a modern metropolis into the neoclassical showpiece ‘Germania’. Speer wanted to design new buildings that somehow didn’t look new, with their eventual ruinous state centuries hence factored into the design—a ‘theory of ruin value’ that has been embraced in Prince Charles’s new town, where buildings are apparently pre-distressed to give them an old, distinguished appearance, and where any technological innovation post-1780 is (at least officially) verboten.
There’s a long history
