On The Road with Vicky Lamburn

August 2009

IN recent months I have not made it up to Milton Keynes. In fact it was heading towards 3 months away from the city. In part, this was due to walking the North Downs Way for 2 weeks in June and also in part due to my car being broken into on my last visit to MK which soured my stay and the resulting expense meant that I could not afford to visit for a few months. Seeing some friends in Oxfordshire one Saturday solved this drought of activity by having all of Sunday free to get up to MK and make amends for a cut short visit almost 3 months earlier.

There are few places in when I am travelling in the car that I start to feel a little bit excited, bizarrely Milton Keynes is one of them for me. The reasons are many but seeing as the city is so different from anywhere else in the UK, the originality and scale of it is impressive; not least the way the city is structured and how over the years it has blossomed.

You can still see hints of those early days in the ‘70s and early ‘80s with the south-western flank of Central Milton Keynes (between Grafton Gate (V6) – Witan Gate and Avebury Blvd and Childs Way (H6)) where is is summarily undeveloped bar a few earthen mounds; Tattenhoe Park in the western and Oakgrove in the eastern end of the city (where an old gravel works existed until the 1980s) are the only examples in the original designated area that are undeveloped (give or take the odd spot of industry designated land perched on the corner of mostly developed industrial space.) When you look at those spots, and ignore the development around, it’s fairly easy to see how some people failed to ‘get’ how MK would look in 30 years time. In the 70s and 80s, MK was literally one massive dusty and fairly dirty in parts due to construction building site. Milton Keynes Development Corporation (MKDC) carried out household surveys and one of the biggest gripes in those early ‘pioneer’ days was the dust and dirt. No wonder the average person failed to see the garden city or the city of trees that MK was meant to be.

Fast forward to 2009 and even the most maligned of grid squares is softened by the presence and predominance of green. It is never my intention to ‘talk down’ people’s homes but to suggest that MK is some kind of utopian paradise is not true. Grid squares like Beanhill and Netherfield have weathered less well than some grid squares and despite this problem, the overall landscaping of the city softens these big problems. (This is also an incredibly negative thing as it does hide the social problems that exist.) More on that in a moment.

However, walking around there is for me the feeling that MK is in many ways the modern expression of what someone like Capability Brown did, seeing with a massive amount of vision, how to landscape the natural environment to an aesthetic pleasing to the human eye. Maybe this is why I find in MK the photographs fall into my lap as they do out in the wilds is because in many ways a human eye has seen the imperfection at design stage and worked out how to sculpt those details into something much more pleasing through careful landscaping, situation of buildings and diligent planting. There is also always so much to look at, not just architecturally but features such as the woodlands, the meadows, bridges, rivers, valleys, parklands, churches, old village centres, lakes and more. MK when you get out of the car (and that means off the grid roads) really begins to show its true beauty and its largely mellowing pretty well with age.

It might seem a throwaway statement, but much of MK feels like where Middle England saw it, looked the like of it, and it came to stay. It’s unashamedly largely suburban, the entire city is a suburb of itself with abundant and a very American sense of plenty. That is something I miss about MK that is not in other UK cities so readily (and indeed American cities too by and large) is that sense of choice, and freedom. Ironically, it took a left of centre government (Labour) in the 1960s to start what is arguably the most prominent example of right-leaning development in the country.

Though this weekend, someone did say to me that MK was the most ugly city in the world. And that’s fair enough, it’s an opinion I don’t agree with but therein lays an inconvenient truth and daresay a fly in the ointment…

The Fly and The Ointment

MK was kickstarted in the 1970s, a time in Britain’s history of social unrest, economic downturn and upheaval and a great deal of political wavering. Due to economic and social issues at the time, many industries were on strike and something as innocuous as brickworks were also on strike. The upshot – what do you build new houses with if there are no bricks.

And so the likes of Beanhill and Netherfield were born.

Neither are intrinsically bad and in many ways but for a few things, both could find a renaissance and celebration of their oddity. I’ll go into the details about them in a moment. It is sad in many ways to note that Netherfield for example is viewed as one of the less successful grid squares, due to its unique design but largely due to the materials the houses had to be constructed of. Netherfield is in many ways an impractical design, it’s essentially terraced houses. Nothing wrong in that. However, the roof-line never changes, no matter the undulations of the land. Some of the houses are therefore bungalows, even though they might be connected to a house next door, which further down the road becomes a three story house with the garage on the ground floor. It’s incredibly unique, architecturally interesting and aesthetically somewhat challenging on the eye.

It’s this ambivalence that begins to peel away at the surface of MK (which would appear to be very superficial at a casual glance) where decisions made in the 1970s have for some time been causing problems even from the point after estates like Beanhill and Netherfield were constructed. What constitutes good design architecturally does not run parallel with what people want a like. In fact it was Netherfield that put my parents off of living in Milton Keynes with “its avenues of terraced houses running for long stretches.” Of course not every area of Milton Keynes is like this (most aren’t) but Netherfield in keeping with Coffee Hall and Fullers Slade was one of the early areas to be developed and as conscious decision was made at MKDC in the mid-seventies to move away from the more experimental leftfield to a more standard type of housing that started to appear in areas like Eaglestone and Neath Hill in the late seventies.

Ignoring these areas in this study in effect to make out that MK is a place without problems and has been a compete success and the negative opinions being all completely wrong would in itself be wrong. The housing in some of these experimental estates remains interesting but for how much longer it remains standing; that is yet to be seen. If anything, capturing the truth of Milton Keynes as it stands now is important. It is going to change and to a large extent I don’t like the plans so any changes that are made will sweep away some of the less successful aspects of the new city in the years to come.

Of course, much could be done by the residents to tidy their front yards but it would seem there is little interest in doing so. It’s a shame because surrounding Netherfield is a generous amount of green space (whereas Beanhill does have some proximity to the A5) which is very verdant and very appealing. For many years this masked some of the problems facing the inner grid squares of Milton Keynes.

I have met some nice people in both grid-squares too on my travels (without a camera) and I am well aware that problems exist in some of the most respectable grid-squares so this should not denigrate the areas entirely. It is important with this to be honest. It’s easy to turn a blind eye to satisfy the outcome you anticipate and perhaps want to carry away with you, but the truth is that parts of Beanhill remind me of trailer parks in the States and for an architect as celebrated as Norman Foster, his Beanhill design isn’t such a fitting epitaph.

Conclusion

I have more musings to share on this visit and they’re positive but I feel that they deserve their own piece.

I came away again feeling that Milton Keynes is a special place as ever, and thankfully this time I hadn’t been the victim of crime which certainly soured my previous visit.