Concretopia

by Grindrod, John

  2 Letter from Pottinger to Poulson in Martin Tompkinson and Michael Gillard, Nothing to Declare, John Calder, 1980, p33

  3 Martin Tompkinson and Michael Gillard, Nothing to Declare, John Calder, 1980, p17

  4 T. Dan Smith in You (Mail on Sunday), 10/5/87, p82

  5 Poulson in Chris Foote Wood, T. Dan Smith, Northern Writers, 2010, p109

  6 Evening Chronicle, 10/5/77, p6

  7 Guardian, 9/7/71, p11

  8 Guardian, 24/9/65, p2

  9 Miles Glendinning, Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block, Yale University Press, 1994, p215

  10 Guardian, 25/4/74, p15

  11 Alan Maudsley in Building Design, 5/11/71, p10

  12 Building Design, 5/11/71, p11

  13 Miles Glendinning, Stefan Muthesius, Tower Block, Yale University Press, 1994, p251

  14 Journal, 30/9/70

  15 Poulson, in Dominic Sandbrook, State of Emergency, p512

  i Sadly her dream remained unrealised, and the people of East Grinstead have had to manage without a ballet theatre.

  4. ‘A Little Bit of Exclusivity’

  MILTON KEYNES, THE LAST NEW TOWN (1967–1979)

  In the midst of a decade riven by corruption, protest and financial collapse, one huge postwar project kept the flag flying for progressive modernisation – even if it did seem at odds with much of what had been achieved since 1945. It was to be a new city, larger than any of the new towns so far conceived. It turned its back on the high-rise, favoured houses over flats and stuck two fingers up to the ‘all in it together’ idealism of earlier projects. Instead its mantra was freedom of choice. ‘Milton Keynes sounds like Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire,’ went the editorial in The Times, on 17 March 1970. ‘If Milton Keynes can reproduce what people favour in the Los Angeles environment while avoiding its acute inconveniences there is much to be said for the resemblance.’1

  An older generation of architects and planners may have hated the thought of Los Angeles in California, let alone in Buckinghamshire, but since the sixties the city had begun to fascinate some of the more rebellious factions in Britain. Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, for example, was an eye-popping 1972 BBC documentary, following the middle-aged, bearded English hipster around the city as he marvelled at its epic suburbia, vast freeways, golden beaches and seedy strip clubs. What comes across most is his wonder at the freedom of it all – how people were living the lives they wanted, rather than kowtowing to the do-gooders faced by British estate-dwellers. In Los Angeles there was none of the Presbyterian sensibility of Lord Reith, that arch-patrician who’d shaped Britain’s new town movement as he had the BBC a generation before. Instead the city demonstrated a free and easy attitude to planning, perfect for California dreaming. Here people had the space and privacy to live their lives how they wanted. So what if everything was a car-ride away? At least the roads were wide and the city centre wasn’t jammed. After all, as an incongruously bow-tied Reyner told his students at one point in the film, ‘you can build a city any shape you like as long as it works.’ And in Milton Keynes, that little LA in the heart of England, this idea was tested to the max.

  Yet at first it didn’t feel very Californian – in fact, it felt very much like any other new town. That much was clear from talking to Peter Barry, one of the pioneers, who moved into his home in the estate of Galley Hill in Milton Keynes in 1972, at about the same time Reyner Banham was tripping around LA. His house, a groovy Scandinavian-style red-brick semi with a steep-pitched roof, faced onto a square, where a simple climbing frame on a grassy courtyard acted as the centrepiece for 20 or so houses. A big, silver-haired man in his seventies, Peter welcomed me into his home with a huge smile. He had been recently widowed, and his front room was full of pictures of his wife Gillian and their children and grandchildren. With the mildest of Welsh accents, this natural raconteur seemed to relish the opportunity to talk about how he and his wife had ended up in the new city. Like the Harlow pioneers I’d spoken to, whose fathers had all been builders, Peter was exactly the kind of person this embryonic new city must have needed: he worked in management for Mixed Concrete, one of the few companies supplying the grey stuff to construction sites all over the UK. And Mixed Concrete wanted him to work in Milton Keynes.

  ‘I came over and wandered through the neighbouring court and met the Milton Keynes Development Corporation lady in the show house,’ he recalled of his first visit to the few half-built homes that constituted the start of a new city. ‘And she said: “If you want to come here you can have one of these houses within a month.” And I said: “Oh!” And she said: “It’ll be like this one, four bedroom.” I said: “Okay. Are you here on the weekends?” She said: “Yes.” So I said: “I’ll bring my wife over because she won’t believe me.” We knew that if we went on the housing list in Abingdon or Oxford we’d be on there for three years.’ As Peter had predicted, Gillian was initially reluctant, as they’d already had to move several times for work. ‘I said: “It’s your decision, but I want you to come to this new place, Milton Keynes, with me. There’s a lady I want you talk to.” I brought her over, and I said: “This is the lady. Now tell her what you told me, and I’m going outside!” I took the kids out for a run round the court, and she came out with this dazed look on her face.’

  Peter and Gillian Barry and family, photographed in 1972 on arrival at the estate of Galley Hill.

  Some 41 years later here I was sitting in the living room of the house they’d bought. The couple had felt guilty at first, moving into such a nice new house when there was a housing shortage locally. ‘It was very unjust that all these houses were not made available to the local people, which caused a lot of ill feeling. There were a lot of young couples in Stony Stratford’ – one of the small towns swallowed up in the new city – ‘who could not get one of these houses. We were coming in from all over the place and just walking in.’ Not that he was complaining. ‘When they were built these places were called ugly because of the monopitched roofs. Well, they are utilitarian to look at, but the estate has matured with all the trees and everything and it’s lovely. You come through here in the summertime when all the trees are in leaf and I love it.’

  If the homes, at least to start with, were classic new town social housing, it was the roads that suggested Los Angeles wish-fulfilment. Instead of the increasingly ubiquitous tangle of orbital motorways, urban flyovers and clogged streets, the Milton Keynes plan had specified that the whole city would be based around a formal grid of horizontal and vertical dual carriageways. These formed kilometre-square blocks, into which estates such as Galley Hill fell. The car is king here.

  Jim Griffiths, the retired planner I’d met in Cardiff, had studied in the sixties under Richard Llewelyn-Davies, who helped provide the initial master plan for Milton Keynes development corporation. We pored over a map of Buckinghamshire before Milton Keynes had been built, showing the old villages and towns contained within it. The planners’ map showed a grid of roads superimposed onto the area, and this grid would form the basic layout of the town. Existing villages and towns would be contained within this strict road network. Jim traced the lines of the plan excitedly. ‘If I invited you to draw a grid on that which didn’t hit anything, you’d be quite a long time and you wouldn’t end up with something far away from that.’ I could see what he meant – it was remarkably neat, helped by the fact that, unlike Cumbernauld, this part of Buckinghamshire was very flat. He called the ideas behind this road network ‘The Los Angeles Model’. ‘Los Angeles is the grid with no centre at all,’ he explained. ‘You just have McDonalds at every junction and away you go.’

  At Peter’s house in Galley Hill we got to talking about his career, which helped to give a sense of scale to the work required to turn these roads from concept to concrete. Having left Mixed Concrete to work on the sites, which at the time were ‘a license to print money’, as he put it, he built roads like the A5 dual carriageway.

  The ravine for the A5 had already been cut when they first arrived,
but he recalled having ‘to be careful driving along there because suddenly the road ended and there was a 30 foot drop! No barriers or anything, because you weren’t meant to be on there, because they were private roads.’ Pretty soon Jim found himself working to finish this major A-road himself. ‘I was the foreman of the site batching plant which supplied all the concrete for all the bridges from the bottom of the A5,’ he explained. It was incredibly hard work for the young family man. ‘To be honest, for two years I didn’t really see the family. The uprights for the bridges, they were all done on what they called a “controlled pour”. Because it was shuttered, the concrete was only allowed to rise at a certain rate because the weight would burst the shuttering. A 200 cubic metre pour would take all day. You’d get in at five o’clock and they wouldn’t be ready. You’d be pissing about till lunchtime.’ It wasn’t until 2 pm that they’d be ready to start pouring the concrete, and once that process had started they couldn’t stop. Working past midnight was not uncommon. ‘You’d come home get something to eat, fall asleep and be back there at five the next day. And this went on for two years, seven days a week!’ Building railway bridges was, if anything, even more demanding, and he wouldn’t go home at all over those weekends. ‘You slept on the job.’

  For a while these grid roads were simply known by their horizontal or vertical number, such as the V5 or the H7, but in more recent years they have all been given more traditional names. The V4, the section of the A5 that passes through Milton Keynes has now reverted to Watling Street, after the pre-Roman track that led from Dover to Holyhead. I asked Peter how he felt about the grid system once it was finished.

  ‘Love it,’ he said without hesitation. ‘I can’t understand why people complain about not knowing how to find their way around, because it’s so easy. Being involved in the building of it I still know all the roads by their V and H designations. Half of the roads I don’t know the names of.’ More famous even than the city’s grid system became the nodes that held the grid together: the roundabouts. Milton Keynes has 130 roundabouts, by some way the most per square mile of any city in the UK. They keep the speedy dual carriageway traffic flowing, even though they do lopsidedly wear out car tyres on one side. In a place where all the buildings are screened from the roads by thick layers of trees, the roundabouts act as useful landmarks, especially now that each is clearly named. Bottledump and Pagoda, Yeomans and Fenny Lock, Furzton and Cricket Green: these are the roundabouts of Milton Keynes, with their brick-built arrows and tall evergreen trees. These days you can even sponsor them, which gives you an idea of the kind of town Milton Keynes has become.

  This LA-like dependence on the car went completely against the original concept for the city. Milton Keynes was first mooted by Fred Pooley, an ambitious local Buckinghamshire planner, back in the early sixties as an overspill town for the overcrowded south-east. His proposed city was designed not around a grid road for cars, but around a monorail. ‘All shops – except “corner shops” in the housing areas – would be built in the city centre, as well as all the civil, cultural and public buildings,’ reported the Guardian in 1964. ‘There would be multi-level separation of pedestrians and traffic, and car parking would be provided below the pedestrian deck.’2 Pooley’s plan was essentially an even more space age Cumbernauld – complete with a monorail. ‘Cars were not rejected, since it was accepted that everyone living in the new town would own one. On the other hand, by providing a monorail service of great convenience and excellent aesthetic quality it was planned to take a considerable load off the roads.’3 It was not to be. A year later the government performed a land grab, stealing the site Pooley had selected, between the Buckinghamshire towns of Bletchley, Stony Stratford and Wolverton, and tearing up his plan. The only thing they kept was his projected capacity for the city: a quarter of a million people, far more than had been attempted in any of the other new towns. Harlow, for example, houses about a third of that.

  Milton Keynes was to differ from Harlow and its ilk in many other respects too. From the outset, at least half of the houses would be for private ownership. ‘In Galley Hill they wanted 60 percent home ownership and 40 percent rental,’ recalled Peter. And that was just for starters. ‘Those of us that had moved in as tenants were almost immediately offered mortgages arranged through the development corporation, which we took advantage of, obviously. And because of that, it always had a little bit of exclusivity.’ The development corporation hoped to encourage private developers to build many of these private houses. ‘The city is designed to encourage variety by the mixing of land uses and densities, housing types and tenure, building forms and development over time,’ went the super-flexible plan drawn up by Richard Llewelyn-Davies and team for the development corporation, and published in 1970.4

  The thinking behind the city was set out in bold, if rather vague terms: ‘The purpose of our future cities, for which Milton Keynes could be the prototype, must be to provide a setting for learning, for the development of imagination, and for the exchange of information.’5 The plans met with a luke-warm reception from the media, who were still obsessed with the ghost of the long-scrapped monorail.

  As they built up momentum, Richard Llewelyn-Davies and his planning team junked more and more of their new town baggage. Gone was the emphasis on neighbourhood and community: communication, freedom and public consultation were the new watchwords. ‘There is an increasing demand for participation in public decision making,’ wrote Llewelyn-Davies.6 Derek Walker, the dynamic and artistic young planner who was brought in by the development corporation to flesh out the initial ideas, expressed in 1980 his sense of the need for a new kind of urban configuration: ‘A village or a neighbourhood in a city had a social relevance at a time when physical nearness was the only possible basis for social contact [but] in the light of this new view of the way that society now organises itself, the attempts by British planners in the fifties and sixties to structure social groups by physical arrangement seem a misstatement of the problem, and their failure is explained.’7 He went on: ‘You cannot get a village by pushing a few houses together, or a neighbourhood by isolating a critical number of dwellings.’8 Walker was planning a town for a different age, when the television, the phone and the car were transforming family life across the country. Milton Keynes was his ‘vision of a city which is an open matrix for selection, by the individual, of opportunities for social contact, recreation, education and the rest.’

  I’ve spent a great deal of time in Milton Keynes. My partner lives there, in a district that encapsulated the spirit of innovation the plan had sought to foster. When it was built in the early eighties its name was Energy World, but it has been renamed Shenley Lodge in a classic example of how the futuristic optimism of the plans gradually became domesticated and suburbanised. All the original Energy World houses were built with features such as solar panels and experimental gas and electric systems, including a wind turbine (which never quite worked) and the streets are all named after famous scientists. As far back as the newly environmentally conscious late sixties, the potential to experiment with energy had led people to speculate that Milton Keynes might even have become ‘the world’s first totally electric city’ but this, like many other ideas, never came to pass.9

  ‘Compromise is not really a word that should describe the design and construction of a new city,’ mused Derek Walker, ‘but in the end that unfortunately is what it’s all about.’10 Not that they’d junked all of the idealism of the original plan, but that it had been tempered, both by the pressure from the government to build this city at three times the speed of previous new towns, and by the unfortunate timing of the recession. Back in the early seventies a younger Derek had been more hopeful: ‘Its prime quality,’ he said of the city plan he’d inherited, ‘is ambiguity and one could make it up as one went along.’ This was in spite of ‘the more sinister aspects of economic pressure, the dilemma of the British cultural climate, and the constant “lemming charge” to mediocrity’. Milton Keyn
es, he said, ‘offered hope in a morass of greyness’.11 That hope lay with the people he’d worked with to design and create the city. Time and again Walker is on record claiming his primary achievement in Milton Keynes was employing so many talented and challenging people – even if their independence did occasionally create problems. ‘In teasing out people to actually produce varied design solutions,’ he told Architectural Design in 1973, ‘one invariably went outside one’s own personal taste.’ Despite the tensions, he was fiercely loyal to his young team: ‘It’s surprising how incredibly attached you do become to people who are with you on the project, and it’s equally surprising what lengths you will go to protect and support them.’12

  As one might have expected from such a vast and complex project, there were failures. Some of the early estates – Netherfield, Coffee Hall and Beanhill in particular – suffered from problems beyond the corporation’s control. Before the crash of 1973, the construction boom was putting huge pressure on building material supplies, and the shortage was compounded by a national brick-makers’ strike. Fred Lloyd Roche, building manager for the development corporation described their predicament succinctly: ‘We were trying to build a thousand houses per annum and the materials and labour just weren’t available.’13 Government funding relied on them hitting targets, so the corporation found itself squeezed between the need to build the new city, and fast, while lacking the desirable materials or workers to do so.

  These early estates can come as a bit of a shock, even to other Milton Keynes residents. With the hedgerows, trees and planting all along the H and V roads, Milton Keynes residents simply never glimpse many of the housing areas in their city, even from a distance. One cold and rainy winter’s day, my partner Adam took me on a tour of these districts. We were both somewhat surprised by what we saw. At the estate of Coffee Hall, breeze blocks had been used in place of brick in the construction of the long terraces of small bungalows and houses. Later estates favoured curved cul-de-sacs and irregular clusters of houses, while here in Coffee Hall the roads were straight and long – and the tall oak paling fences erected in front of low bungalows meant that you couldn’t really see any of the houses. The lack of human activity in evidence gives Coffee Hall the atmosphere of an abandoned prefab estate, almost a shanty town.