The unwritten postlude?
The thing with any project of this scope is that it is clear I have a bias.
One that is largely positive towards Milton Keynes.
The whole reason I am doing this is because the oft-maligned place deserves a break from its critics who have almost always never visited the city and those that spout second-hand comments. This is the whole reason it is an impression.
So I have tussled over the foreword, and cut it down considerably (essentially removing the history that is available everywhere including cursory glances on the Internet and removing the personal opinion.) The foreword is now a straight 2 sides of paper introduction that does set out the viewpoint I am coming from (i.e. the largely positive bias) but I am even considering removing this.
Why?
This is my impression, not necessarily yours or theirs but mine. I feel adding my opinion is taking away some of the purity of the project, I want the photos to speak for themselves. I’m feeling now that the foreword will simply be a bullet list almost of Milton Keynes: new city in England. Built from 1970 onwards. Concrete Cows. Concrete Jungle. Soulless. Boring. Banal:
The foreword? Setting up the conceit…
…Turn the page and…
Photo Copyright ©2009 Victoria J K Lamburn
And leave it at that. They turn the page and wham they get one of the photos of Campbell Park. The perfect conceit? Or is the perfect conceit going to be Richard Rogers’ Oxley Park on one page, followed by Tinkers Bridge on the next page?
That instantly sets up the confrontation, it sets up the things people may have in their preconceptions (and many largely do.) It spells out it is a new city of the latter twentieth-century. It doesn’t pour over what part of the new town programme it found itself in, or wallop you with success stories, it just states a fact. And the rest is up to the viewer.
And so the postlude?
It’s unwritten except here. Like the foreword of which there will be one, but goodness knows how it will eventually turn out.
One side of me wants to spend the last pages of the book literally laying into the critics but being brash and upfront about the problems that face the city too. The place is one of juxtapositions and for me the positives outweigh the negative hugely. There’s also the fact that no amount of photos will prove to someone who doesn’t like the place that they should in fact like it. The project is just one to tear into some of Milton Keynes’ “folklore” and myths and bring to attention that much was done so well here that we are in danger of not learning from the city through sheer bloody-minded ignorance and the ability to spout off a quick witty remark that meets with greater adulation than the well reasoned viewpoint.
But there again I’m not trying to change the world, I’m not trying to state a hidden subliminal message, I’m just stating what is, and what is isn’t even the truth as it’s all subjective.
This hasn’t been an easy project and it’s not over, for a place I really do love, facing up to the failings of the place is hard to do but I have done that by walking through every area of the city and photographing the things that really shatter the red-ballooned dream in North Buckinghamshire: on the one hand there are billboards with a 2.4 family in front of a new grid-square development looking entirely content and happy, and the next photo is the back alleys of Netherfield with abandoned rubbish, graffiti covering garages no longer used and a pink child’s bicycle with no wheels laying strewn in the alley… There’s the smiling faces in the open air market, and the beautiful parklands of the Ouzel valley and Grand Union Canal; and then the fortresses in Coffee Hall or the decaying facias of the pre-fabricated Tinker’s Bridge, the delights of the canal wending its way through the outskirts of Simpson with reflected autumnal Poplar’s and the boarded up commercial premises in Peartree Bridge at Milton Keynes Marina… It pains me to see these negative parts but I need to be honest to this place to be true to it.
The great thing is though is that I have largely dismantled the concrete jungle myth, dismantled the roundabout issue (where’s the rush hour traffic jams… Ok don’t say J13 M1, because I know that’s a nightmare but there are many reasons for that, all beginning in 1959 when J13 served a couple of villages, but now serves a city of 230,000.), maybe I have dismantled the banal issue, I may also have seen to the soul-less issue too and definitely crushed the Little Los Angeles myth which is so bone-headed it’s not true (I’ve been to both MK and LA.)
What Milton Keynes is like is not in isolation to the rest of the UK. It is shamelessly middle class and it is perhaps why it is unpalatable, not gritty enough for the workers and not vulgar enough for the upper classes. It is the embodiment of middle class suburban dreams: 3 bedrooms, semi-detached and exterior garage. Its grid-squares (nee estates) may not be thronged with life but I ask anybody to look at any 1970s onwards suburban development and show me one thronged with people day and night (and not in an anti-social sense.) The city centre is quiet in almost all parts except the shopping centre compared to any other city of its size, but the size of Central Milton Keynes is absolutely huge (2.5km long by about 1.5km.) Even larger if you include Campbell Park which technically is part of CMK (it contains two of CMK-proper’s boulevards and the same street furniture) – the scale is enormous (See page 2 of this http://www.investmiltonkeynes.co.uk/dfiles/Business_First_Feature.pdf) and it is no wonder it feels a bit quiet. It may even feel soul-less because it bears no relation to anything in the UK, indeed anywhere, it is one of the biggest and most well recognised modernist city centres, if anything was un-English it is the clinical, exacting and slightly obsessively compulsive nature of modernism, and that is CMK. But I like modernism, in fact I love its purity, it excites me.
But as Impression Milton Keynes will show, the city is more than just CMK and the shopping centre that most people who have visited know, and it’s these attributes away from the thrum of reflective glass and orthogonal grids that both raise up the place, but also in parts bring it back down.
The greatest irony of all though is Milton Keynes still isn’t even a city more than forty years after conception. It is not for everyone, but it is its differences that give it its strengths and from anecdotal conversations held, its residents are fiercely proud of the place.
