century saw contrite industrialists plan ideal settlements like Saltaire or Bourneville; and between the 1900s and the 1920s Ebenezer Howard, a very late-Victorian combination of crank and pragmatist, pioneered the garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn. Yet when people talk about New Towns they don’t mean the garden cities, which, like precursors to Poundbury, used antiquated materials and winding street patterns in order to simulate historical accident. Rather, they mean the postwar new towns. They mean concrete precincts and cows, glass shopping centres, flat-roofed houses and roundabouts. They mean Cumbernauld, with its central shopping centre that was an architectural cause célèbre for a few years and an ‘eyesore’ for decades more; they mean Crawley or Stevenage, towns which were intended to be self-sufficient but became just another part of the commuter belt.
With regard to the years since 1997, however, Milton Keynes has taken on some new meanings. This ‘suburban city’ that has yet to receive city status (when it applied, it was absurdly passed over in favour of Brighton and Hove, a place with no meaningful independence from London) is on the one hand, the opposite of professed urban policy. Unashamedly diffuse, the original plan for a non-place urban realm is implacably alien to the ideas of urban renaissance. The idea that social life would occur in piazzas and on the street was anathema—Milton Keynes doesn’t have streets. Unlike the new areas of Southampton, there are real social spaces slotted into its relentless motorized grid. Yet with its acres of speculative housing and its economy of business, leisure and retail, Milton Keynes exemplifies the unspoken urban policy of expanding the suburbia of South-East England as whole acres of streets lie derelict further north. Plans for the town’s expansion and urbanization have, though, faced major opposition. Things which are pejorative outside of ‘MK’—suburbia, minimalism, underpasses, grids, motorways—are here defended trenchantly by various local campaign groups.
The first thing we (adoptive) Londoners noticed in Milton Keynes was space. Sheer, vast, windswept open space, which one could call desolate if that desolation wasn’t evidently so popular with its users. This is helped by the striking planned vista that hits you when leaving the train. The 1982 station square designed by the architects of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation (Stuart Mosscrop, Derek Walker and Christopher Woodward22) is one of the most remarkable Modernist set-pieces in Britain, a bracing landscaped plaza flanked by three perfectly detailed Miesian blocks, with the old British Rail logo prominent. This is Alphaville in Buckinghamshire, and it’s like a bucket of cold, fresh water in the face, initially shocking but sharply refreshing. Like the same architects’ nearby mall, the relentless grids plugged into another grid suggest the mock-utopian Continuous Monument of the leftist Italian architects Superstudio, the grid behind all planned towns elevated into an advancing object that consumes the whole world. If it does follow in Superstudio’s footsteps then it does it quietly, with skateboarding teenagers in the middle of it.
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