Milton Keynes Study Trip
Agenda 19 October 2013
10.13
Meet group at Milton Keynes Central Station concourse.
10.30
Proceed to Arts Central for informal introduction.
10.45
Begin morning session. Walking tour of Central Milton Keynes.
11.45
Campbell Park, Labyrinth, Belvedere, Canal Broad walk, Newlands, Willen Lakeside, Tree Cathedral.
12.30
Lunchtime break at the Parks Trust Pavilion. Talks by Neil Higson, John Best and Stuart Turner.
14.15
Begin afternoon session. Walking tour of residential NE district area.
17.00
Return to Central Milton Keynes and Milton Keynes Central Station.
Aerial drawing of Milton Keynes, Helmut Jacoby @MKGallery
The Centrality of Milton Keynes ROLAND JEFFERY ‘A SCHEME FOR PLANNED AFFLUENCE’ 1 The site of Milton Keynes was designated by an Order in Council on 11 January 1967. It was made for a site significantly larger than the initial proposal a year previously, covering 34 square miles almost in the dead centre of England. It aspired to an initial population of 150,000 (a target soon increased). Such a large site was intended to allow low densities of twelve dwellings to the acre {thirty to the hectare). Because of its ambitious scale Milton Keynes was already being called a new city rather than a new town and comfortably outstripped its predecessor as the largest as well as the last of the United Kingdom’s post-war new town programme. Milton Keynes has, in its first forty years, avoided the doldrums experienced by many other British new towns and is still growing fast. But in its first decade, Milton Keynes represents a microcosm of much that was going on in architecture, urbanism and planning, and embodies the tensions and debates of the 1970s. Developed largely square by square, its chequerboard is a living museum of the successes and failures of that period. It may not be so for much longer, however, as some of the squares are in need of renewal and some are scheduled for wholesale redevelopment, while the centre of the new city is already conservation showdown: should it change fundamentally, or develop its distinctive sense of place?2 Milton Keynes is becoming a conservation case, and as the social historian Mark Clapson remarks, ‘this city is of infant heritage, but its heritage is rich enough to provide an understanding ... of the social evolution of England since the 1960s’. 3 ‘LITTLE LOS ANGELES IN BUCKS’ 4 Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forrestier-Walker and Bor were appointed master-planners and their Interim Report of 1968 settled on a 1km road grid of dual carriageways as the distinguishing feature of the new city. It was to be a radical break from the conventional concentric city plan. The report had a distinctly populist ring, claiming that ‘no committee or experts should try to dictate the future pattern of life in the city. This is not a new idea, but it is new to take it seriously’. 5 Llewelyn-Davles’s master plan of 1970 took forward this populism, with an emphasis on choice and dedication to a decentralised layout; but it was very different from the plans of its new town predecessors in its refusal to specify how the new city would look. Gone were the architectural sketches and even descriptions of what sort of place it was to be. As a perplexed Reyner Banham wrote: ‘the Plan for the New City of Milton Keynes tries to shy away completely from planning.’ 6 Walter Bor - the partner in charge of the Milton Keynes plan - emphasised that this was to be the first ‘open’ new town. 7 Anyone
could move there. Unlike all previous new towns, where people moved with their jobs or through large-scale nomination and overspill agreements with city housing authorities, the core business of the new Development Corporation was to attract citizens and businesses of their own free will. The master plan specified a hierarchical road grid as a prime determinant of the new city, a completely new morphology for the United Kingdom; a new Central Area (not a ‘city centre’), displacing Bletchley; a decentralisation of employment and retail across the city; consumer choice through a variety of housing, schools and leisure spaces; very extensive open spaces and a notably low overall density. The road grid and its landscapes give Milton Keynes its distinctive sense of place. Many grid roads were built well in advance of buildings - in defiance of usual practice- as a statement of intent to irrevocably establish the grid plan while central government money was still flowing. The Development Corporation feared that it might be abandoned if not built early and many surreal photos of Milton Keynes in the 1970s show unused dual carriageways linked by roundabouts marching across agricultural land. The author of the road grid was the landscape architect Peter Youngman, consultant to Llevvelyn-Davies and a 1937 graduate of the pioneering pre-war course in Civic Design at the Architectural Association. He walked the site with colleagues and persuaded them to abandon their initial vision of a geometric grid for a curvaceous one. 8 As he later recalled: the Master Plan predicated that the road pattern would be the main determinant of the city’s form and that the treatment of the land bordering the roads as crucial to its image. Therefore reservations 50-100m wide were recommended. The latter were for housing frontages: dwellings need a screen from traffic; motorists need a screen from the small-scale medley of house forms and material, garages, fences and gardens. 9 So if the city was to have a radical variety and low density it was to be tied together visually by its lavishly landscaped roads.The curvaceous grid was not only more picturesque, but practical: it enabled intersections to be roundabouts at grade. Underpasses and cuttings were to be avoided wherever possible and this is one of the great successes of Milton Keynes. It is indeed still a city which can be traversed rapidly from side to side because of the use of the roundabout rather than traffic lights as the junction device. Though first making an appearance in city centres, roundabouts have become essentially suburban and out-
of-town features. 10 At Milton Keynes they were selected to integrate into the sylvan landscapes and operate as self-regulating mechanisms for traffic volume, requiring fewer lanes at fast moving junctions, so that more of the road perimeter can be devoted to green landscaping and less to tarmac. Only today are some Milton Keynes junctions being given traffic lights and, consequentially, much wider carriageways with more traffic lanes, by a council whose traffic engineers appear to inadequately appreciate the special nature of this landscape.
ber’s precept of economically and sociologically serviced planning, and was indeed ‘design-free’. Webber argued that flexibility and choice should underlie the built forms, summarised in his phrase ‘proximity without propinquity’, rather than traditional urban design values or a sociological sense of community. Derek Walker, Chief Architect to the Development Corporation from 1970 to 1974 and Chief Executive for Central Milton Keynes from 1974 to 1976, described Webber as ‘the father of Milton Keynes’ and his ideas were powerful in the minds of the master planners. Webber visited Milton Keynes in the early ‘NON-PLACE URBAN REALM’ years, and attended celebrated Monday evening semiThe ideas of the Californian urban theorist Melvyn Web- nars for the assembled MKDC staff. He had close links ber are especially pertinent to Milton Keynes. Webber with the Centre for Environmental Studies in London, (1920-2006) argued that traditional city forms could not of which Llewelyn-Davies was the very hands-on Chairserve the lifestyles of an affluent society based around man ofTrustees. Similar ideas were already developing in the car and telecommunications. In a ground-breaking the United Kingdom and at a CES seminar in 1968 the essay in 1964 he argued for the ‘Non-Place Urban Realm’: celebrated British planner F. J. C. Amos proclaimed that ‘increasingly, interaction transcends the places where ‘England is witnessing a transition from an urban socipeople live ... urban communities having spatial forms ety based on local and industrial communities to a new that are vastly more dispersed than we have been ready urban-associational society’. 13 to recognise’. 11 The Milton Keynes master plan, with its non-prescriptive, Later he argued that the practice of urban planning non-directive tone could stand as an exemplar of Webshould be more akin to economic enablement, rather ber’s view that a new attitude to cities ‘might encourage than creating putative ideal communities as was still then us to see urbanity - the essence of urbanism - not as often the fashion. ‘City planning has not yet adopted buildings, not as land use patterns, not as large, dense, either the planning idea or the planning method. It has and heterogeneous population aggregations, but as qualiinstead internalised the concepts and methods of design ty and a diversity of life’. 14 12 from civil engineering and architecture’. For all that it came from a prominent firm of architects Los Angeles is also present as a more general influence the Llewelyn-Davies plan for Milton Keynes fits Webat Milton Keynes. Then the largest urban agglomeration in the developed world to have a grid plan, its high-level grid - the Freeway network - was brutally retro-fitted on to the sprawling unplanned city in the 1950s when the metropolis had become unmanageably large. Long seen as the antithesis of good architecture and urban design practice and the triumph of unfettered capitalist growth, in the 1970s it began to receive a serious re-appraisal for its organic if sometimes chaotic vitality. Reyner Banham’s influential I971 meditation on the city put in architectural and townscape terms the equivalent of Webber’s planning argument that Los Angeles comprised four ‘ecologies’ that overlapped, intermeshed and contested with each other as the dynamic of the city. 15 Making a related argument based on the equally un-planned Las Vegas in 1972, Robert Venturi sought a way of creating a new vernacular architecture from the ugly and the Ordinary a challenge that Frank Gehry’s early Los Angeles buildings of the 1970s took up with great zest. 16
Mel Weber by Lucinda Rogers
Milton Keynes stands out in the United Kingdom for its embodiment of Webber’s ideas. The market-led ethos of the master plan, notwithstanding its intellectual home as a Labour-sponsored think tank, adapted very well to
the changed political climate in Britain promoted by the Conservative Government of Margaret Thatcher elected in 1979. Webber’s approach to urbanism has also stood up well in the age of the internet, home working and video conferencing, inventions which have amplified the tendencies to mobility and complex networking matrices. In the Milton Keynes master plan, however, these ideas were grafted on to a layered landscape strategy that owed more to the home-grown English garden city ideals, with the road grid treated as a huge but designed public urban landscape. This is now in the custodianship of a third sector non-profit trust, again a throw-back to the earliest English garden cities and suburbs and their communitarian values. Milton Keynes was to be a hybrid: the geometry of a Californian freewheeling city married to the English love of public green area in urban places. These and other tensions were set out with concision and wit by Tim Mars. 17 ‘A ClTY SET IN A FOREST’ 18 If Harlow had been the first new town to take landscape really seriously when having ‘a landscape department at all was an innovation’, at Milton Keynes it was clearly centre-stage. 19 Unlike the earlier new towns, it was to be more important to place-making at Milton Keynes than the buildings. Youngman originally determined that each city zone (some comprising several grid squares) would have one forest tree, one small tree and one shrub as the distinguishing species, comprising seventy per cent of all planting. The modernist ideal of unmediated ‘natural’ landscape running as fingers through cities had been tried at Harlow and derives ultimately from Le Corbusier. Among his few large-scale realised landscapes is that of the Indian city of Chandigarh (1950 onwards) and Milton Keynes’s grid and landscape policy owes a major debt to this design. At Harlow, Sylvia Crowe deployed a neo-Platonist design approach based on archetypes of the sublime. Youngman himself was a leader of this school and his work at Cumbernauld and Milton Keynes uses a ‘compositional approach ... to reconcile major new developments’, while always leaving ‘wild landscape’ as the main green setting of the city. 20 In the 1970s many architects still delighted in what David Jacques has characterised as the modernist landscape, in which buildings are set in ‘untouched’ surroundings, without an obviously cultivated appearance with its suburban connotations. 21 Christopher Tunnard, a leader of this view, had looked forward to seeing ‘the surroundings of our homes and workplaces, not as fixed units, fenced in and exclusively enjoyed, but as part of the ordered development of the countryside. The garden of tomorrow will not be the hedged, personal, half-acre of today, but a unit
of the broad green landscape itself’. 22 The landscapes of some early grid squares at Milton Keynes adopted this strategy: an early montage by John Donat shows the importance of wide ‘natural landscapes’ around a very schematic impression of housing at Netherfield. It captures well the idealism, impatience with detail and the ultimate inhumanity of this approach. Today, as Jan Woudstra comments, this seems ‘simplistic and obsessively directed towards the control of the living environment ... Whilst [Le Corbusier] immortalised the “machine for living”, he did not understand the concept of a landscape for living. 23 But the very extent of the lavish landscaping as promoted under Derek Walker also came in for early criticism. Steen Eiler Rasmussen, visiting Milton Keynes for a Monday evening seminar in 1974, felt that ‘it was a great step forward from the New Towns, with their artificial naturalness. But I was disappointed when, some years later, I saw how the first grid roads had been implemented. Those roads which should set the standard of the whole scheme were wiggling and winding through the landscape, so that you could not see from the one crossing to the other, and after a short drive lost all orientation’. 24 By 1977 the Milton Keynes Development Corporation had come to share Rasmussen’s view that the landscape plan required revisiting. Neil Higson, manager of the newly centralised Landscape Unit, was asked to re-orientate the Youngman landscape chequerboard of mini-ecologies by then seen as too cerebral. His team modified the landscape precepts into the rich and detailed design that has matured today. 25 Higson later wrote that ‘planting broad tree belts along roads as acoustic and visual barriers was feeble in achieving effective growth rates and alienated the city from its vital corridors of movement’. 26 Higson’s review introduced selective thinning of planting on the grid roads to create ‘windows’ precisely so that the traffic could see the settlements and vice versa, ‘responding to the needs of both’. He also developed the ‘three-species strategy’: Specific tree and shrub combinations for six different sectors oft he city was less than successful in many situations ... In 1976/77 its landscape, already weak and uncoordinated, was hit by drought and Dutch Elm Disease, with devastating results. This City of Trees claim had a very hollow ring to it. It was essential that a new landscape policy be developed - one which placed major emphasis on a landscape relevant to city life, growth and function over time. 27 The grid road margins were reduced for new buildings from 100m to 80m, still generous but not so large that the settlements were out of sight from each other. There
were enrichments which were particularly effective, including in introducing conifers for winter colour and ‘emphasising moods and atmospheres in different parts of the city, in some cases on a much smaller scale’. 28 Reminiscing, Derek Walker wrote that ‘the grid roads could be the most enjoyable part of the city - our Venice canals, our Paris boulevards, our London Squares’. 29 Today, the landscapes of Milton Keynes have matured and are well maintained. Navigating the grid roads, one of the largest urban planned landscapes of the 1970s anywhere, is a pleasure in all seasons. The Milton Keynes Park Trust took over the grid road margins and parks - twenty per cent of the city and totalling 1,830 hectares - on the winding up of the Development Corporation in 1992 and it is to be hoped that pressures to encroach on this landscape, especially for traffic management, will be vigorously resisted. A very English third sector model, not so far from Ebenezer Howard’s ideas of an entity to control Garden City land, is thus charged with greening England’s mini-Los Angeles. SETTINGS, STRINGS AND BEADS Milton Keynes also has an unusually extensive park system. Added to the grid road margins, an astonishing forty per cent of the city’s area is soft landscaping, flood plains or water. The main parks follow the flood plains of the Rivers Ouse and Ouzel and areas beside the Grand
Neterfield, MK @ Iqbal Aalam
Union canal, whilst extensive brick clay pits created in the days of local brick manufacture were adopted as ready-made lakes. Derek Walker claimed that ‘[we will] produce a city “softer” than the surrounding countryside, a city enveloped in green, a city set in a forest. A soft city sitting in bare open countryside is a clear, powerful and attractive image’. 30 Referring at once to the grid plan and the extent of green space Lionel Esher wryly observed that ‘having subscribed enthusiastically to the philosophy that “the city is not a tree’; the Corporation proceeded to make it into a forest’. 31 Importantly, the parks policy of creating ‘settings, strings and beads’ was introduced to articulate the lengthy stretches of landscape, thereby creating variety in response to existing and planned buildings. This strategy is in a line of succession from F. L. Olmstead’s ‘Green Necklace’ in greater Boston. Under this policy the linear parks encompass inflected landscapes (‘strings’), through-designed ones such as cricket greens, historic graveyards, etc. (‘beads’) and provide ‘settings’ where appropriate to clusters of village buildings. 32 Various willow species widely specified along the linear parks emphasise their riparian nature, even where the watercourses are not visible. A good example is the Ouzel Valley Park,
Perrygrove, MK @ Iqbal Aalam
Neterfield, MK @ Iqbal Aalam
which forms a ‘setting’ for the 1840s church at Great Woolstone and is a ‘string’ joining two ‘beads’, namely Woolstone and Peartree Bridge Marina. This spot is close to the dead centre of Milton Keynes, and is managed as pasture. Campbell Park, named after the first Chairman of the Development Corporation, was to be the landscape set piece. This was a lesson learned from Harlow, where Sylvia Crowe designed green fingers reaching from the town centre to the periphery. Campbell Park was to perform a similar function, leading from the central Shopping Building to the M1 Motorway on the city boundary. But whereas Crowe’s Harlow Town Park is conceived as virgin country penetrating the town centre, in the high modern tradition, Campbell Park was to be highly wrought, with earth modelling, planting in a mix of geometrical and informal styles, public sculpture and leisure facilities. A THROUGH-DESIGNED CITY The challenge of making a grid city format legible to residents and visitors was followed through to the creation of a new vernacular, a challenge the Development Corporation and its architects took seriously. The vertical grid roads were numbered V1 to V11 and the horizontal ones H to H1 to H10. They were later given names too, in a response to what was seen as an unfriendly American numbering system. The red tarmac used for the pedestrian and cycle ways that ran parallel to most grid roads (‘redways’) were marked as they crossed paths and roads by thousands of pairs of jaunty yellow pillars, denoting caution. The bus stops were specially designed and followed a hierarchy of three types for minor, distributor and grid roads; a similar hierarchy of street lighting design gave a subliminal message about the status of a road. The Milton Keynes seat was designed in 1974 by Brian Milne, a Corporation architect. So successful was it that from 1977 it was marketed by the makers as a production item. Its subsequent commercial success across the UK eclipsed the original intent of giving a distinct identity to Central MK but was a tribute to its comfortable, anti vandal design. An ambitious range of leisure facilities was built, and meeting places rather like village halls in each grid square soon followed, as did cricket pitches (there are more than a dozen across the city). An ambitious public art programme was launched, rapidly developing two strands. In the commercial areas were large-scale abstract works, especially a series by Bernard Shottlander. Best of the abstract works was Circle of Light in the Shopping Building, a subtlety kinetic work that is a magnificent enhancement to the white painted Miesian architecture of its setting. In the residential areas and parks the public art programme
mostly favoured figurative works, sometimes by established artists. Most celebrated of all, however, was Cows, a group of Friesians simply modelled by local residents in mass concrete scrounged from nearby building sites and painted in gloss paint, also scrounged, under the direction of Artist in Residence Liz Leah. When Cows was moved from the housing estate to a water meadow beside the mainline railway, from which they were clearly visible, they almost overnight became the unofficial mascot of Milton Keynes. Nor were the original settlements ignored. Eleven of the villages to be embraced by the new city were surveyed and conservation statements prepared for them, alongside thoughtful Village Plans. Conservation Areas were declared or extended to protect most of the old centres (the boundaries carefully avoid all new-build sites). Conservative restoration was carried out, with new uses introduced; one redundant medieval church became a nursery and a farm within the remains of Bradwell Abbey emerged as the City Discovery Centre. Contextually aware new architecture - mostly housing and small workspaces - with ‘beads’ and ‘settings’ under the landscape strategy - all helped to ensure that the older villages were among the pleasures of the new city. They are far more successfully integrated than the aboriginal settlements hosting the older new towns, which tended to get swamped or even annihilated. INDUSTRY The initial strategy of encouraging employers to relocate to the infant Milton Keynes had, in the earliest days, two strands. The Development Corporation developed the Advanced Factory Units in 1971, with distinctive ‘Type 1’ cladding. They bring together two important ideas that were current at the time of their construction: techniques of dry-assembly borrowed from industry and in particular the automotive industry; and flexibility of internal arrangement, enabled by a steel frame that meant walls and mezzanine floors could be shifted so that occupiers could customise the spaces within. The 1 x 2 metre ‘Stelvetite’ PVC - coated steel cladding panels were fixed on to the steel under frames and sealed with neoprene gaskets. John Winter, in a contemporary commentary, said that ‘they could have come off the presses at Vauxhall, just down the M1’. 33 However these eye-catching units were not repeated elsewhere and later versions went out of their way to look like offices rather than workshops. British planning had a rigid distinction between industrial and office space and Milton Keynes was in the vanguard of creating ‘commercial’ accommodation in which these distinctions were blurred, an early realisation that service industries were
Milton Kings, Central, MKDC Architects Fishermead Flickr @ Iqbal Aalam
to be the future of its economy. 34 At later advance units at Stacey Bushes it was claimed that ‘no industrialist need be ashamed to invite his most prestigious client to visit these factories’. 35 The second strand of the strategy was the System Building for Industry (SBI), the prototype of which was at Wavendon Tower, demolished in 2005. It was a svelte upmarket version of the Type 1 units by architects Barry Clayton, Surya Pawar and Derek Walker for the Corporation, and was capable of being an office or a manufacturing plant. It was in fact first occupied by the Development Corporation’s architects, who decked it out with green and yellow carpets. With its elegant Miesian cladding and spacious landscape setting, it was one of the most potent images of early Milton Keynes and featured in much of the publicity advertising it as a good place to live and work. Later advance units were much more consciously aimed at prestige office space. The large Butte Knit and Steinberg distribution centre was designed by the Development Corporation but was bespoke for a large
employer relocating to Milton Keynes. This building was widely published, being used as the cover illustration to a contemporary review of new towns, and was described by the Buildings of England as ‘among the best industrial buildings in MK’. 36 However, in spite of ultra-flexible planning deriving from the space-frame roof, exposed as a feature of the elevations, it has fallen out of use, is currently derelict and at risk of demolition. When asked to name the buildings of which he was most proud, Derek Walker cited the Shopping Building and Cotton Valley Sewage Works. The latter (by Trevor Denton and Derek Walker for the Development Corporation) is immaculately designed and indicative of the depth of the design culture in the I970s at Milton Keynes, so Walker’s choice is not flippant. It boasts elegant Miesian boxes for the offices and plant: the offices bronze glazed and the plant white clad. Alas, security, safety, and dense perimeter planting mean the site is unseen by all but staff. COMMUNITY WITHOUT PROPINQUITY The Milton Keynes Master Plan scarcely uttered the word ‘neighbourhood’. 37 This was in line with the func-
tional emphasis on ease of mobility and the decentralised nature of the city. Melvyn Webber’s emphasis on community without propinquity - voluntary choice-based associations of near and far relationships - and not on ‘neighbourliness’ also play a part. So, the local scale facilities of most grid squares was to be a local centre comprising shops, a ‘meeting place’ in the form of a small village hall, plus in most a pub or recreational facility. The Master Plan intended these local centres to be adjacent to the grid roads where they would have had a visual presence, articulating the low-density city to passers by. Most of the centres have in fact been buried deeper within their grid squares, a decision arising from the change of the main road junction device from crossroads and flyovers to roundabouts. The local centres would have required separate slip roads. The change has, however, robbed them of their function as navigational ‘flags’ on the grid roads and done considerable damage to the commercial viability of many, as they are unable to attract passing trade. One of the few local centres located on a grid road is that at Neath Hill, from 1973 (project architects Wayland Tunley and Dudley Alison). This enables it to serve two adjacent grid squares. Other
local centres have struggled to adapt to modern retailing. Perhaps the most successful retail development of early Milton Keynes is Cofferidge Close by Wayland Tunley for the Development Corporation, from 1970. Ironically, this was an insertion into the existing historic market town of Stoney Stratford, with Italian Rationalist facades and flexed contextual planning. Long thriving on a grid road, albeit the Roman Watling Street almost two millennia old, and occupying its site remarkably well, in 2012 Cotteridge Close faces radical changes and partial demolition. MILTON KEYNES HOUSING Milton Keynes offers an object lesson in the evolution of housing architecture and policy during the 1970s. It started in the new town tradition with large-scale housing for rent, a collective design ethos; a creation of dirigiste control from Whitehall. It ended with the very different assumptions and structures of the Thatcher period from 1979: home ownership, Right-to-Buy, the architecture of easy-to-mortgage units and individualist aesthetics. One can see these changes rapidly assuming an architectural expression in three main forms: the Heroic, Contextual and the Radical Eclectic. 38
The Heroic Period is typified by long terraces deriving from the rigour of severe government cost constraints; terraces are cheaper to build. The Development Corporation’s desire for a green city at low density is achieved by arranging these essentially urban forms in extensive communal parkland; conveniently the landscaping was not subject to the housing cost yardstick, and anyway, it was at first mostly plain grass. It is easy today to underestimate the stringency of Whitehall cost yardsticks. The UK economy of the early 1970s was in prolonged crisis, and budgets for housing schemes were often reduced further after schemes commenced. The terraced form arrived at Fullers Slade in I97I and several much larger developments immediately followed: Conniburrow (1975) Fishermead (1972-3), Beanhill (1973-7), Coffee Hall (1974 onwards) and Netherfield (1972-7). They were designed in house by the Development Corporation’s architects, while consultant architect Norman Foster contributed houses to a High Tech industrial aesthetic that were flawed by technical failures and are now radically altered. 39 The response to cost constraints, inflation, shortages of materials and labour difficulties was to convert the construction methods of several schemes to timber framed construction. Invisible to the untrained eye, this was the first large-scale public-sector project to generally adopt timber framed construction, based on prefabricated units imported from Canada; such techniques had not yet become the norm for private house builders. Of the heroic schemes Netherfield is the grandest in conception and was at the time widely admired and initially popular with tenants. 40 The grid square is filled with long terraces with the dramatic device of a roofline that stays at the same datum above sea level whilst the undulating ground allows terraces to vary from one to four storeys as the land rises and falls; an architectural gesture that is at once empirical and grand. The financial difficulties of central government meant public housing starts reduced from their 1972 peak of 2,874 units to 1,489 in 1977. This coincided with criticism of the command economy management style of large public housing bodies that saw housing associations and public-private finance schemes steadily moving centre stage. The Contextual Period of Milton Keynes housing design saw a return to the Master Plan, which had stated that ‘there should be no large-scale separation of different kinds of people’. 41Instead of one design being rolled out over a whole kilometre grid square, both tenure and housing types became more variegated; some of the best UK housing of the period was the result. Richard MacCormac - with Martin Richardson the most prolific private architect to be commissioned at Milton
Keynes in the 1970s - designed several schemes that sought to address the anti-industrial prejudices of the British home-owner. 42 Citing Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class, MacCormac argued that the domestic environment with which people surround themselves comprises signals of social status in which an industrial aesthetic is highly problematic precisely because it is potentially cheap and reproducible. 43 MacCormac sees this as the reason why the Modern Movement in the United Kingdom in the 1930s attracted only a handful of wealthy, often expatriate, bohemians. The dilemma is particularly acute in public sector housing, because of the success of Modernism during the post-war reconstruction of Britain from the 1940s to the 1970s. MacCormac observed that ‘rented housing and modern architecture are almost synonymous in the public mind with the aesthetic of economy ... which signifies public tenancy with all its associations.’ 44 This is why tenants, exercising their statutory Right-to-Buy, immediately disassociated their new tenure from Modernism and adorned their houses with such symbols of their aspirations as coach lamps on modernist facades and stone cladding over what is seen as ‘cheap’ industrial brick. Other commentators were aware of a tension between what was popular and what the housing system was producing. Writing about ‘Beautiful Tudor’, Duncan Simpson attributed its popularity to comfortable recognisable aspects, especially in housing, and a yearning for the pre-industrial. 45 Some schemes from this Contextual Period, especially several by Martin Richardson, owe a clear debt to the neo-vernacular movement given impetus by the 1973 Essex Design Guide, with references to Victorian ‘Butterfield’ brickwork among other gestures. 46 Others eschew overt historicism, but are increasingly sensitive to their settings and residents’ needs. Among these is the work of Henning Larsen at Heelands, with Danish vernacular elements which the architect subsequently failed to credit, perhaps because only a small section of the planned scheme was realised. Schemes with a thoroughly mixed tenure by consultant architects include Eaglestone, Great Linford and Bradwell Common. Others respond to the existing settlements, under the guidance of the Development Corporation’s careful Village Plans. These include Aldington Craig and Collinge’s scheme at Woolstone village and John Winter’s canted terraces at Woughton on the Green. Phippen Randall and Parkes’s Simpson scheme (one of several by the firm) responds to the canalside landscape by tightly stacking terraces back to back so all have a park view. All of these developments were commissioned by housing associations, are relatively small-scale and are among the many of this period that bear examination.
The third period of Milton Keynes housing, the Radical Eclectic, was ushered in by the construction in 1980 of houses at Shenley End by mass house-builder Bovis. Non-structural half-timbering and a real thatched roof were applied to a timber framed house where the actual structure was entirely hidden. Started at the end of the 1970s, Radical Eclecticism flourishes to this day. The resulting supermarket of architectural styles from neo-Tudor to urban-modernist chic can be seen as the apogee of the precept of ‘freedom of choice’ that the Milton Keynes Master Plan prophesised would be taken seriously. CENTRAL MILTON KEYNES (CMK) The name Central Milton Keynes consciously avoided the communitarian connotations of ‘town centre’, although it occupies the highest point in the city and was to be mostly devoted to shopping and office use. It was as a consequence developed only when there was a critical mass of population in the city to support it. Derek Walker ceded his post as Chief Architect to become the Executive Director of CMK in 1974-6, and was its lead designer. The grid here was made rigidly rectangular to announce a more formal urban space; there was much more generous pedestrian-friendly circulation than elsewhere, in long boulevards; parking for 6,500 cars was distributed closely around buildings, reducing the need for extensive remote car parks. Again lavish landscaping was the most important element of the townscape, which in CMK features quadruple avenues of trees on the main cross roads, buffering parking and pedestrian walkways. The rigour of the grid was explained by Stuart Mosscrop as being in line with the Master Plan’s prohibition on tall buildings. Walker even bravely announced that ‘the quality of the road system and tree planing ... would be of more importance to the quality of Milton Keynes than the elevations of the buildings.’ 47 In 1974 Walker’s CMK plans were published, with none of Llewelyn-Davies’s reticence in defining how the central areas would look. Among the images was Helmut Jacoby’s rendering of CMK seen from a helicopter - one of the most celebrated impressions of the city. The rectangular blocks, majestic boulevards and green avenues are all meticulously drawn. As realised, the pedestrian-friendly approach was a pleasure to walk around, augmented by a series of Miesian porte-cocheres to indicate crossing points, so numerous and obvious to both walkers and motorists that there was no need for the usual city centre clutter of railings or traffic lights. Underpasses were finished in polished granite to give urban sophistication and were wide, well lit and with gentle slopes so that they were positively appealing to use - unlike those in almost every other UK city from the 1970s. Regarded at the time as American in feel for its rigid grid, CMK is
far more rigorous in its building controls, with a greater public sector involvement in its ethos and landscape, than the average US ‘strip’ and far more spacious than most European city centres; it is a remarkable and truly original townscape. The crown of CMK, and the best building in the new city of Milton Keynes is the listed Shopping Building, now re-branded the ‘centre:mk’. Designed by Stuart Mosscrop and Christopher Woodward and built in 1973-9, it was then the UK’s largest shopping centre, at over one million square feet. Not only the best, and largest, building in the city, it is significant for what it is not. Brent Cross, completed just three years earlier (in 1976), was the previous largest in the UK and many Arndale centres were appearing in provincial cities at the time; none had the design clarity of the Shopping Building and none made a serious attempt to emulate traditional European public city spaces. Most were distinguished by nondescript architecture, ‘noisy’ internal design, bulky windowless exteriors and were seriously lacking a sense of place. Often using the US-derived out of town model, even where they were located in town centres, UK shopping centres were one of the least attractive introductions to British life in the 1970s. Milton Keynes’s Shopping Building was different. It comprised two parallel enclosed avenues, 650 metres long. However, in spite of the impressive scale, the building is outstanding for its humanism and legibility. The straightforwardness of the plan enables visitors to locate themselves and access is by any of eighteen entrances, all on the level. The lofty avenues are day-lit along their length and fully glazed, and were originally planted with 47 beds of temperate and semi tropical plants, many the size of trees. The building can be approached on foot from all sides since the servicing by large vehicles is by a rooftop road. The effect of this is to avoid the claustrophobic interiors of most shopping centres. The retail signage is contained within strictly defined fascias, reducing the visual clutter and the frank expression of the huge steel frame of the structure and its thoughtfully proportioned glazing provides a calm social space, finished with Carrara marble within and blue mirrored glass without. Two ‘market squares’ within the building’s grid - one indoors and one outdoors - add social space. Walker referenced Mies van der Rohe’s unbuilt Mannheim Theatre, the Crystal Palace and the large Italian covered arcades as inspirations. The Shopping Building is, in truth, a truly original synthesis, sadly little emulated. Inside the building the planting has been reduced in scale and ambition, and in many places replaced with pseudo historical ‘market stalls’; proposals for huge changes and over-cladding prompted a successful listing application in 2008-10. 48
CONCLUSION Milton Keynes rapidly became ‘one of the world’s most famous and successful New Towns’. 49 Its creators cultivated its high profile with, as Bendixson and Platt commented, ‘a design publicity blitzkrieg that carried the name of Milton Keynes to architects, town planners and landscape architects at the far ends of the earth’. 50 The city faces a huge population expansion in 2010, compelled by a central government that eyes the low density of the city and large tracts of publicly owned land as opportunities for development. Meanwhile, CMK is suffering from encroachment on its boulevards and pedestrian walkways, enabled by government agencies that seek to normalise the townscape of this remarkable place.
Transcript from The Seventies: Rediscovering a Lost Decade of British Architecture, Twentieth Century Architecture
Endnotes 1. Milton Keynes was so characterised by Stephen V. Ward, Plurming and Urban Change, London, Paul Chapman, p.18. 2· Thesc themes more fully explored in a special issue of Urban Design, no. l04, October 2007, pp.I0-43 3· Mark Clapson, A Social History of Milton Keynes: Middle England/Edge City, London, Portland, 2004. p.22. 4. Tim Mars, ‘Little Los Angeles in Bucks’, Architects’ Journal, vol. 195, no.15 April11992, pp. 22-6 5. LLewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forrestier, Walker and Bor, Interim Report, Milton Keynes Development Corporation, 1968, p.12 6. Reyner Banham, Paul Baker, Peter Hall and Cedric Price, ‘Non Plan: and Experiment in Freedom’ New Society, vol. 13, no. 338, 20 March 1969, pp.435-43 7. ‘The Witness Seminar’, reproduced in Mark Clapson, Melvyn Dobbin and Peter Waterman, The Best Laid Plans, Milton Keynes since 1967 Luton, University of Luton Press, 1998 8. Obituary of Peter Youngman by Tom Turner, The Guardian, no. 49383, 17 June 2005, p.29 9. Landscaoe Design, no. 120, November 1977, pp 9-27, Milton Keynes special issue 10. The first roundabouts were at the Place de l’Etoile (now Place de Gaulle) Paris (1901-6) and Columbus Circle New York (1904). The first UK roundabout was at Letchworth Garden City in a suburban setting. 11. Melvyn M. Webber, ‘Urban Place and Nonplace Urban Realm’,1963, reprinted in M. Webber et al, eds. Explorations into Urban Structure, Pennsylvania, University of Pennsylvania, 1964, p.81. 12. Melvyn M. Webber, ‘Planning in an Environment of Change, part II: Permissive Planning’, in Beyond the Industrial Age, London, Centre for Environmental Studies, 1968, reprinted in Town Planning Review, vol.39, no.1, January 1969, p.278. 13. CES Confen:nce, ‘The Future of the City Region’, Glasgow, 6-7 July 1968, unpublished, CES archive, London School of Economics. 14. Webber, ‘Urban Place’, op.cit., p.89. 15. Rayner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, Hannondsworth, Penguin, 1971. 16. Hobert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown and Stephen lzenour, Learning From Las Vegas, Cambridge, MIT Press, 1972 17. Mats, op.cit. 18. Derek Walker, The Architecture and Planning of MIilton Keynes, London, Architectural Press, 1982, p.12
19. Frederick Gibberd, Ben Hyde Harvey, Len White, Harlow: The Story of A New Town, Stevenage, Publications for Companies, 1980, p.69.
generally very positive towards the scheme, see summary Diagram 5, p.54. See also Geraint Franklin’s article in this journal.
20. Guardian, op.cit.
41. The Plan for Milton Keynes, vol.1, Milton Keynes, 1970, p.I5
21. David Jacques, ‘Modern Needs, Art and Instincts: Modernist l.andscape Theory; in Jan Woudstra and Christiano Ratti (eds.), Garden History, vol. 28, no.1, Reviewing the Twentieth Century Landscape, 2000.
42. Colin Whitmore, Exploring Milton Keynes, Milton Keynes, MK Discovery Centre, 1990, pp. 87-92.
22 . Christopher Tunnard, Gardens in the Modem Landscape, London, Architectural Press, 1938, p.137 23. Jan Woudstra, ‘The Corbusian Landscape: Arcadia or No Man’s Land’, Garden History, op. cit., p.150 24. Architectural Review, vol.168, no.1003, September 1980, pp.141 3. 25. The team included John Czaky, Brian Milne, Terry Jenkins, Brian Saulter, Andrew Mahaddie and Tony Southard. 26. Neil Higson, Landscape Design, no.168, August 1987, p.26. 27. ibid., p.26. 28. ibid., p.26. 29. VValker, op. cit , p.30 30. ibid., p.2. 31. Lionel Esher, A Broken Wave, London, Allen Lane, 1981, p.263, with a reference to Christopher Alexander’s essay ‘A City is not a Tree’ in Architectural Forum, vol.122, no.1, April1965, pp.58-62 - a plea for cities to be made on triangular lattice grids, rather than more ‘natural’ configurations. 32. Neil Higson, ‘Milton Keynes: City of Trees’, Landscape Design, no.168, August 1987, p.26. 33. Architects’ Journal, vol. 164, no. 51, 22 December 1976, p.1172 34. The clear distinction was finally abandoned in 1987 by the Use Class Order 35. Asbestos Cement Quarterly, vol. 26, no. 4, (104), October 1981, p.10 36. Frederick Osborn and Arnold Whittick, New Totems: Their Origins, Achievements and progress, London, Leonard Hill, 1977 p.533 37. Mark Clapson, Suburban Century, Social Change and Urban Growth in England and the USA. Oxford, Berg, 2003 38. Jeff Bishop, commissioned by MKDC, divides the early housing into early ‘rationalist’ and later ‘vernacular’ phases.’ Heroic’ and ‘Contextual’ are preferred here. Jeff Bishop, Milton Keynes, the Best of Both Worlds? Public and Professional Views of a New City, University of Bristol, 1986, p.121. 39. On Netherfield, see also Kenneth Powell’s article in this journaL 40. Bishop, op.cit. Bishop’s findings are complex, but he found tenants
43. Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, New York, 1902; Richard MacConnac, RIBA Lecture, published as ‘Housing and the Dilemma of Style’, Architectural Review, vol.163, April 1978, pp.203-6 44. MacCormac, ibid., p.205 45. Duncan Simpson, ‘History of Taste 3: Beautiful Tudor; Architectural Review, vol. 162, no.695, July 1977, pp.29-36. 46. Essex County Council, A Design Guide for Residential Areas, Tiptree, Anchor Press, 1973 47. Quoted in Terence Bendixson and John Platt, Milton Keynes: Image and Reality, Granta, 1992 48. See articles on the proposed redevelopment of the Shopping Building in Building Design 8 may 1998 49. Neil Higgson, op. cit., p.24 50. Bendixson and Platt, op. cit.
City design: what went wrong at Milton Keynes? MICHAEL EDWARDS Few plans are implemented exactly as they are conceived. service centres to use, and Often this is a mercy, as Michael Hebbert has so thor• to contribute to pedestrian safety by ensuring that all oughly argued for the long history of London (1998). roads were either clearly for car priority (the grid) or for pedestrian priority (the local roads). This was based Professional navel-gazing about what happens between on research showing that pedestrians were most at risk plan and actuality is always salutary and ought to be a on intermediate kinds of roads - then known as ‘local normal part of our practice - just as we expect the medi- distributor roads’ - which were therefore to be avoided cal profession to analyse the outcomes of its procedures. (Levin and Bruce, 1968).  This note argues that the new city of Milton Keynes was Two other factors were on the agenda. One was the largely developed in ways which produced a much worse team leaders’ determination to bury an earlier plan built environment than had been envisioned by the initial by Bucks County planner Fred Pooley, a design with design team, of which the author was a member. It ends 4 monorail loops connecting living areas as beads on up by reflecting on whether we could have written or strings with a central work and service zone: a plan drawn the initial plan in ways which could have led to prioritising public transport and subordinating cars. Mr a better outcome or whether the plan was a victim of Pooley was a member of the Board of the Corporation social and economic forces which could not realistically and his ideas thus had to be circumvented in a diplomathave been foreseen, vanquished or moulded. Because the ic way.4 An early proposal from Nathaniel Lichfield and account is essentially personal, it is written partly in the myself for a systematic cost benefit study comparing the first person, which I hope the reader will accept. 1 two approaches met a frosty response within the team and was probably never put to the Board. But this is a The new city of Milton Keynes was designated by the digression. Minister of Housing and Local Government, Richard Crossman, in 1967. A consultant planning team was The other tension in the master planning was about appointed at once by the newly-constituted Developshopping. Whereas the logic of the plan was to distribment Corporation in order that a master plan could be ute all services widely over the urban area, every verdeveloped while the Corporation built up its own staff sion of the master plan showed one dominant centre. capacity to implement the plan. The firm of Llewelyn Though very much aware of the tendency of retailing Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Walker and Bor was appointed to over-concentrate, we considered that a strong set of with numerous sub-contractors, notably North American comparison goods retailers could only be attracted to transport engineers Pete Marwick Kates and Co and the town if they and their customers had the benefit of economists Nathaniel Lichfield and Associates in which I this agglomeration. The Board members considered ‘a was working at the time. Richard Llewelyn Davies headed centre’ as essential to the image and identity of the town. his firm, Walter Bor was partner in charge and John de So in it went, without controversy but with a number of Monchaux was full-time team leader.2 The story is well problems in its wake, as we shall see. known. A distinctive approach to how the city would grow on its The macro-structure of the master plan was a grid of grid was a part of the planning from the outset. A numroads at roughly 1000m spacing, with land uses widely ber of team meetings considered the policies, technical distributed in a coarse zoning plan across the entire des- standards and design possibilities for the articulation of ignated area. This plan purported to be ‘deduced’ from a localities: housing form, density and tenure, shopping, series of abstract policy ‘goals’ put to the Board and apschools, libraries and social services, clinics, pedestrian, proved at the outset - an approach regarded at the time cycle, car and bus movement, emergency access, open 3 as quite an advanced way of working. The grid structure space and so on. At a crucial stage one team member was designed ... was asked to take everything away and integrate it over • to be easily comprehensible and navigable, the weekend. That team member was the young Francis • to permit unconstrained use of the motor car, Tibbalds and he produced such a triumph of synthesis, • to avoid the inefficiencies and costs of tidal flows with diagrams, charts and sketches illustrating a lucid, between home and work which arise where jobs are in a elegant, hand-written text that it was xeroxed as it stood single work area, for the Board, without typing.5 • to offer residents a choice between private and public transport, The resulting guidelines for the development of localities • by mixing homes with workplaces, shopping, education- were, in my view, highly innovative and are summarised al and other services, to create at least the potentiality below. This is a 1999 summary, not a contemporary one.6 for people to make short trips, and to have a choice of I have tried to avoid bias as far as I can but am intention-
ally emphasising features which seem more important in hindsight than they appeared at the time. (i) The grid of main roads would have speed limits of 30mph (50 km/h), traffic light control at main cross-roads and synchronisation to permit most cohorts of traffic to flow through successive lights on green. (ii) With these vehicle speeds, it would be safe and feasible to have side-turnings every few hundred metres — 3, 4 or even 5 turnings in the typical 1000m stretch between cross-roads— and traffic flows on each turning would be reduced to safe levels. (iii) Drivers would thus be able to pull off the road for shopping, school and other business. (iv) Buses could safely stop beside the main roads, both at cross-roads (for interchange) and at intermediate points where they would typically connect with footpath systems. (v) Densities of development, for housing and other activities, would be highest along these grid roads, especially between the cross-roads, and would fall off to the lowest densities in the centre of each grid square where buildings with big gardens, allotments, playing fields and parks would mostly be found. (vi) The positions on main roads, mid-way between the cross-roads, would be the nodes for services with various combinations of schools, shops, libraries, clinics, workplaces and so on. (vii) This strategy seemed a robust way of trying to sustain good local shopping in the face of the concentration and centralisation trends evident in modern retailing. It was explicitly envisaged that shops could draw on passing trade as well as on local pedestrians and that, where a local convenience store folded, the premises could attract other viable retail or non-retail use. (This was a conscious rejection of the practice common in earlier new town and local planning of clumping development in distinct ‘neighbourhoods’ and planning a ‘centre’ tucked away within each.) (viii) Residents would thus be able to choose between at least 4 such service centres within 1000m and between a much larger number using cycle, car or bus. (ix) Traffic noise on such a grid road system would be modest, so adjoining buildings would enjoy reasonable peace and quiet. Only at main cross-roads would noise levels justify any separation of buildings from the grid. Moving through Milton Keynes would thus be an experience very similar to moving though a typical European town, built with little formal planning over the last centuries: commerce and services on main roads, housing and employment clustered around the most accessible points and lines, density falling away behind.Your nearest service cluster is close. If you want a different food shop, a different school or a squash court you may need to carry on to the next one. Although the macro-grid does not
lend itself very well to public transport, the combined effect of these local design principles did as much as could be done in that context to make the bus network direct (by staying on the main roads) and well patronised (through the bunching of densities along the routes). The wide range of local building densities from multi-storey flats and offices through to very low densities around golf courses, lakes and allotments had both an aesthetic and a social intent: it was part of a strong rejection of the notorious uniformity of 2-storey houses in earlier new towns and part of a strategy to attract not just the newly-forming households of skilled workers but a more diverse range of age groups, social class and ethnicity. This was an attempt to engineer a way round a another perceived failing of earlier new towns. These development principles and intentions were embedded in the master plan handed over to the Development Corporation, and its new professional staff, in 1970. A number of major changes were soon made to the plan, and others took effect during the implementation process. The most important changes flowed from the Corporation’s immediate re-thinking of the road system. They decided to re-design the main grid to operate without an urban speed limit - thus at speeds of 60-70 mph (95-110 km/h). This brought many design changes: (a) Traffic lights were replaced with roundabouts, British style, at most crossroads, and usually with a slight rotation so each road would kink slightly on entering and leaving. (b) Very few side turnings could safely be permitted: only 1 or at the most 2 in a 1000m stretch. (c) Neither cars nor buses could safely be allowed to pull to the side of the main roads and stop: instead they would have to leave by slip roads and stop within the grid-squares. Bus routes thus became longer and circuitous. (d) Land reservations for main roads were greatly enlarged to fit the acceleration and deceleration lanes and to separate built-up areas from the—now much noisier—roads. (e) As a further measure against noise, a great deal of earth mounding and massive planting was added along the grid roads.
220,000 PEOPLE LIVE IN MK - CROSSING THE CITY BY CAR TAKES LESS THAN 15 MINUTES - 50% OF ALL COMMUTERS TRAVEL LESS THAN 3 MILES TO WORK 4,000 ACRES OF PARK AND 20M TREES - 50 MILES TO LONDON, 80 TO BIRMINGHAM,50TO OXFORD/CAMBRIDGE
100 TRAINS / DAY BETWEEN MK AND EUSTON STATION - OVER 20% OF THE LAND IN MK IS PUBLIC OPEN SPACE - 31 MILLION PEOPLE SHOP AT THE MK SHOPPING CENTRE EVERY YEAR - UNEMPLOYMENT IS 2% - 1,600 NEW HOUSES BUILT EVERYYEAR SINCE 1998
The effect of these transport changes was reinforced by a complete change in the parcelling, design and naming of development sites. (f) The intention had been that the normal unit for design and for development operations would be centred on the main grid road at the mid-point between crossroads: (g) Local shopping and service centres were pushed away from the grid road frontages, becoming embedded in the edges—or occasionally in the middle—of the development parcels. Retailers could thus no longer expect significant passing trade, and few even enjoyed visibility from the main roads. (h) The interior of the grid square thus became the typical design unit; most squares had just one design team, one developer, one name (and one post code). The practical and conceptual building block of the city was thus not the bead on the string but the lozenge lying within the high-speed grid of roads. Further damage flowed from features of the housing development process, public and private. Whereas the earlier new town corporations had built (and retained ownership of) most of their housing, by 1969 the Labour government—under pressure from the IMF—was already calling for the involvement of private capital and the reduction of state expenditure. They had also been advised that a mix of tenures in new towns was desirable in a report commissioned from J B Cullingworth and V A Karn (1968). This pressure was reflected in Corporation policy, so private developers were invited to bid for the development of a lot of the housing. Despite pressure from the Corporation, these developers resisted calls to build at a range of local densities, citing their judgements of marketability. Most of the private housing estates were thus built at very homogeneous suburban densities. Some blocks of flats were built, but usually as separate projects on separate sites. Some relatively low-density housing was also produced - but also as separate projects in what became quite luxurious grid squares, separated from the main middle-market developments. A very similar fate befell the social housing. We had persuaded the Corporation that they would only have a chance of meeting their social mix objectives if about half the housing were built as social housing. Here the density problem flowed not from marketing considerations but from the extreme rigidity with which the DoE enforced the density-based cost controls used across the country to control council house building, the Housing Cost Yardstick (DoE 1971). This instrument effectively forbade the production of housing
at low local densities or (except in established cities) at high local densities. We argued strongly that this rule system was (a) not based on real evidence of actual costs and (b) not relevant in the MK context because the Corporation had so much flexibility in how it could account for (and recoup) its general development expenses of land servicing and infrastructure. DoE would not budge, however, so the social housing at MK was mostly designed and built within much the same narrow range of local densities as in the rest of the UK.7 One other unexpected factor contributed to this catalogue of problems: the rapid development of MK’s main shopping centre. The master plan had called for the rather gradual development of this centre in order that sub-centres and local shops could have the best chance of becoming established. In the event the Corporation formed a partnership with the Post Office Staffs Superannuation Fund, then Britain’s largest pension scheme, to develop the central shopping building and completed about 100,000 m2 in a single phase. The building is a superb Miesian structure, designed by David Walker, Chris Woodward and others in the MKDC office. It integrates shops (though no other uses), parking and servicing in a supremely elegant and light design which was, and has remained, a great success. It rapidly became — in effect — the regional mall for a wide area, drawing customers from Northampton, Oxford, Bedford and beyond, even bus tours from London. This gratified the Board, happy to see Milton Keynes quickly ‘on the map’, and meant that the citizens quickly came to enjoy superb comparison shopping, much better than the early residents of the first new towns. The downside, however, was quite adverse conditions for planners and retailers to create and sustain strong sub- centres and local shopping. The battle to resist retail over-concentration was effectively lost. For all these reasons I submit that Milton Keynes is not the place it might have been. The view from the road— the experience of getting around—is in fact what you see when speeding along expressways, lined with fine planting, with occasional slip-roads off to named, but invisible, neighbourhoods, workplaces and services. Buses follow circuitous routes and are thinly patronised. Most local shopping centres struggle to maintain viability, tucked away and dependent on their designed ‘catchment areas’. Pedestrian routes are often segregated from the roads and the typical resident may have quite a long walk to the bus, often through woodland which can be dripping and rather scary. Travel is overwhelmingly by car (especially for men) with buses tending to carry women and children. The segregated cycle paths work well, however, and redeem the situation for many people, especially older children and young adults.
How do we attribute responsibility for this very poor outcome—this disaster, in my judgement? Part of the blame is quite clearly ours for the way we wrote and drew the master plan. It was much less forceful, less clear and less passionate than it could and should have been. Memory tells me that we tried to write more firmly but the text was watered down, on the principle that the plan should be more flexible, less prescriptive. Walter Bor has since told me that it was Richard Llewelyn Davies who finally insisted on this flexible presentation. The initial planning team—and especially myself—should take responsibility for two failures to anticipate and work around market forces. We should have realised how reluctant Britain’s notoriously conservative volume housebuilding firms would be to vary their densities and we should have devised land policies and pricing strategies along with tough design briefs to enforce compliance. Equally, although we foresaw the risks of weak local retailing, we should have created much stronger instruments and tenure arrangements to fight the trend. A further failing was in the drawing. The key drawing in the master plan is almost ambiguous—certainly not very explicit—about the interdependent design principles listed (at i-ix) above. This aggravated the weakness of the prose. Some of the responsibility lies with the structural relationship of consultant and client. For one group to prepare a plan and hand it over to another group for implementation is a recipe for trouble (though there may be benefits as well). The transformation of the road designs and of the land parcelling were part of a process whereby the professionals in MKDC—some newly appointed and none in post more than 2 years—were making the plan their own. As the initial planning team we were consulted about the road changes and we responded very critically indeed, but evidently to no effect. Finally some responsibility lies with the DoE and its new towns division - so much weaker than its French counterpart. The Department could and should have relaxed the stranglehold of the Housing Cost Yardstick over housing density. Its officers could also have acted to keep the adopted plan on track and resist the catastrophic changes described here.  ‘Flexibility’ is one of the many dangerous nostrums in planning and is usually deployed very selectively. The planning team and the Corporation were naive to adopt a plan so ‘flexible’ in these respects. It contrasts with the Board’s alacrity in building a single gigantic sewage works
to ensure that MK would always have ‘spare capacity’ and thus to avert the risk that its expansion would be prematurely stopped, as it could have been with the more ‘flexible’ sewage disposal options which the Board rejected. Can we turn the clock back? Clearly not for Milton Keynes, even if there were support for my point of view. Some elements of the criticisms made here have been taken on board in the planning of later stages of the City (Bendixson and Platt, 1993, 177) but to limited effect. Perhaps, though, there is scope for trying out the full original version in new areas as the city continues to grow under the millennial imperative of the government’s thrust to expand housing supply. Perhaps there is also scope to ‘retro-fit’ some of the lost elements. We could try... • replacing roundabouts with lights, • straightening out the junctions to improve orientation, • reducing speeds to 30 mph on the grid, • re-cycling some of the green areas along the main roads (space which David Pritchard has named SLOAP8) for dense development with lay-bys, service bays, shops and so on. The combination of tough design briefs, the relatively mature local property market and the slightly more creative outlook of today’s private and social developers might make it financially and technically feasible. Much would depend on who now owns the SLOAP since the privatisation of New Town assets. These are reflections by someone who was involved at the outset but not since then (save as an embarrassed and disoriented visitor). If other participants, residents or historians can identify errors of fact or interpretation I hope they will do so. But if I am right then we need to reflect the conclusions in the practice and the teaching of planning and design. To me, the most significant lessons are 1. We need to spell out the logic of design arguments with maximum clarity and rigour in plans, briefs and guidance. Keep ‘flexibility’ in its place, echoing the Quakers’ bossy motto ‘In essentials unity, in non-essentials freedom’. 2. Avoid relying on lofty and empty abstractions (choice, flexibility, diversity in the 1970s, sustainability today). These words may have to be used in building consensus but unless they are elaborated into precise desiderata they are dangerous hostages to fortune. In modern jargon MK could be considered a success in terms of an ill-defined ‘sustainability’: certainly there is a great deal of biomass and urban wildlife. Cycling facilities are superb. On the other hand the design as built does not ‘sustain’
local shops or other services nearly as well as it should, it works against the use of public transport, helping to ‘sustain’ a car-dependent way of life and gender-inequalities in mobility. And if the original prognosis was right, it will have generated avoidable pedestrian accidents. Finally the long distances between housing of different densities, tenures and prices will not have ‘sustained’ the local social mixing which the initial plan rightly sought.
Transcript from Edwards, M (2001) ‘City design: what went wrong at Milton Keynes?’ Journal of Urban Design 6(1): 73-82
3. We need to be much more skilled in anticipating how the private property development process will operate under a variety of foreseeable scenarios and planning rule-systems. There is now a lot of theoretical and empirical work which can enable us to do this well and there is no excuse for us getting it wrong.
Endnotes
References
1 I am grateful to John de Monchaux, now at MIT, for suggesting I should write this lecture down. His, and others’, versions of events are recorded in Clapson et al (1998).
Bendixson, T and J Platt (1992) Milton Keynes: image and reality Cambridge, Granta Editions
2 Richard Llewelyn Davies died in 1981; Walter Bor in 1999 while I was writing this and before I could send a copy for his comments. 3 These goals were (i) opportunity and freedom of choice (ii) easy movement and access and good communications (iii) balance and variety (iv) an attractive city (v) public awareness and participation and (vi) efficient and imaginative use of resources. The allegedly deductive approach as part of rational comprehensive planning was criticised at the time as a sham (Gutch, 1970). 4 This story is told by Bendixson and Platt (1992) who had access to the Board’s minutes, and is the subject of critical comment by Colin Ward (1993). 5 I cannot track down a copy of this document. Any reader who can find one should make sure it reaches a safe archive. 6 The contemporary version, with strong input from Mike Macrae, is in the master plan (MKDC 1970, Vol1 and Llewelyn-Davies et al 1970, Vol2 ). 7 We later learned that the DoE was at that time withholding publication of research they had commissioned from Prof P A Stone, a sequel to his Urban Development in Britain, Vol 1, which would apparently have added strong support to our argument. 8 An interesting model is the re-planning of Ballymun in Dublin by McCormack, Jamieson and Pritchard, building new frontage development on the green bits of land beside roads which David Pritchard (2000) calls SLOAP - the Space Left Over After Planning.
Clapson, M, M Dobbin and P Waterman, Eds. (1998) The Best Laid Plans, Milton Keynes since 1967 Luton, University of Luton Press Cullingworth, J B, and V A Karn (1968) The Ownership and Management of Housing in the New Towns London, HMSO DoE (1971) Housing Cost yardstick, Circular 18/71 (annual) Gutch, R E (1970) Goal Formulation, Thesis, MPhil, University of London UCL Hebbert, M (1998) London: more by fortune than design Chichester, Wiley Levin, P H, and A J Bruce (1968) The location of Primary Schools, Building Research Station, referred to in Llywelyn-Davies et al 1970 Vol 2 p 303 Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks. Forestier-Walker and Bor (1970) The Plan for Milton Keynes, Vol 2, London, LLDWFWB Milton Keynes Development Corporation (1970) The Plan for Milton Keynes, Vol 1, Milton Keynes. MKDC Pritchard, D (2000) ‘On the edge: regenerating a Dublin suburb’ CITY 4 (1): 65-80 Stone, P A (1970) Urban Development in Britain: standards, costs and resources 1964-2004.Volume 1 Population Trends and Housing Cambridge, CUP Ward, C (1993) New Town, Home Town: the lessons of experience London, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation
Milton Keynes Shopping Building @BD Online
This brochure is a compilation of informative materials gathered by the Young Urbanists at the Academy of Urbanism in preparation to a study trip on 19 October 2013. Whenever possible, authors or publishers of texts and visual materials have been notified and sources are quoted. This brochure is not aimed for a general publication and its use is restricted to a private distribution for educational purposes only.