Beanhill, the neighbouring estate, had fared little better. Here, rising star Norman Foster had designed long streets of bungalows with pitched roofs, but the lack of brick and tile meant they were largely constructed with corrugated metal and wood. Netherfield, not to be confused with Mr Bingley’s estate in Pride and Prejudice, had been originally designed for brick construction, but instead continued the corrugated metal theme. Terraces of three-storey town houses, all built for rental, stand divided by sturdy concrete pillars, their walls formed from ridged aluminium and timber. Even the original flat roofs had been aluminium. These days, paint peels from colourful frontages on some of the streets, while others are as grey as any of the harled homes in Cumbernauld.
Caught between impossible cost issues, a lack of materials and the pressure to build at super-speed, it’s a wonder that Derek Walker’s team ever got beyond these early disasters to build a whole city, let alone a successful one. ‘By ingenuity and a little rule bending,’ Walker recalled, they ‘tried to produce the best possible housing with lower cost allocations. In the early years this meant disappointments.’ Fred Lloyd Roche was still in defensive mode a decade later when he said that ‘if you look at the quality of houses from 1975 onwards when the situation became much easier, on the whole we’ve achieved a quality of housing as good as, if not better than, any other community throughout the world in the last 30 years.’14 This was great for the later residents, but tough on the people who had to put up with the leaks, the condensation and the cracks in the three early estates. The buildings now come with an urban myth attached: that they were only ever temporary houses erected for the builders.
It wasn’t long before success stories began to outweigh these early failures. Simpson, one of many villages swallowed up by the new city, had been a hamlet of a handful of beautiful thatched cottages. With the arrival of the city, these cottages were joined by clusters of super-modernist blond brick houses with big picture windows. While the atmosphere of the sleepy village where everyone knew your name – and your business – was clearly obliterated, the result was something unique and rather brilliant: a sort of mash-up of St Mary Mead and New Ash Green. Then there was Peartree Bridge, built along the Grand Union Canal, whose sharply modern three-storey town houses overlooked the water. Yes, it’s a bit run down these days, but, with ducks waddling about in front gardens, canal boats drifting by beyond the weeping willows and a hippy art triceratops guarding the estate, it remains an idyllic little haven of modernism, even if it does need a little TLC. It reminded me of Newcastle’s amazing Byker estate of the same vintage, with its long walls of flats and houses, unapologetically modern balconies, detailing and sense of friendliness.
Ralph Erskine, Byker’s architect, did in fact contribute to Milton Keynes. His estate, Eaglestone, brings many ideas from Sweden’s welfare state and the Byker Wall, with its emphasis on green space, an abundance of communal street furniture, and an almost total separation of housing and cars. By the time Energy World was being built in the eighties, that era of creative welfare state architecture was all but dead in Britain. It hadn’t taken long for the privately owned red-brick pitched-roof houses I’d seen in the Bovis areas in New Ash Green to become the norm across the country for new builds. Milton Keynes came to epitomise the Thatcher era boom in estates by developers such as Wimpey, whose off-the-shelf designs were so wickedly satirised by Hilary Mantel in her novel Beyond Black, with its catalogue of house types, named ‘the Belvedere’ and ‘the Trafalgar’.
When I interviewed ex-planner Jo Meredith, she’d helped put the house building of the seventies, before the arrival of those Belvederes and Trafalgars, into context.
‘My parents grew up in a little terraced house on a colliery housing estate. After my father retired they got old persons sheltered housing – a brand new bungalow. This is early seventies. I remember going to see this with my parents after they got the key, and me with my sniffy architect’s eyes, looking at it and thinking: Oh my god, this has been designed by the local building department, and it’s no more got any sense of design about it than fly. And I remembered standing there with my mother in this bungalow and the sun was coming through these huge windows, and the sun was on the far wall. And I remember my mother standing there and saying: “Just look at that,” and looking at the sun shining on the wall. And me suddenly realising it was the first time she’d had a house in all her life where the sun came through the window! Because she’d lived all her life in small terraced houses with hardly any light. And for her to be in a house with a huge picture window with the sun blazing through was an absolute delight. And I just felt so humble. I just thought, forget your sniffy attitudes about design, this, for her, is wonderful. That it was light and it was airy. It was just an example of what people got from living somewhere like that.’
Milton Keynes was casting a similar spell on its new residents, if press reports from the time were anything to go by. An Observer journalist, visiting in 1974 reported that ‘nobody I met was other than pleased and excited to be part of what’s happening. Statistics say a mere three percent of residents think they’d like to leave.’15
Peter’s wife Gillian had been a mother helper in a playgroup in Abingdon, and when they moved to Milton Keynes she and a like-minded neighbour formed the Galley Hill Playgroup. ‘She ended up playgroup leader,’ he said proudly. ‘Her progression in Milton Keynes was fantastic! It was the best thing that happened to us as a family.’ Peter’s memories of the early days reminded me of the other new town pioneers I’d met, in Harlow, Cwmban and Cumbernauld. ‘When we first came here there was nothing, there were no shops, there was no community centre. So everyone made their own entertainment. We would have a house party and it was all of us getting together. Young couples in their early thirties, and all the kids were put to bed in their own beds when the time came, and then every 20 minutes two of the guys would walk out on “chalet patrol”. And if they heard a disturbance, one guy would stay put and the other would come over here and get mum.’ He paused. ‘Hence we got the reputation of being a wife-swapping community – but that was rubbish. There was nothing happening!’ Swinging or not, there was precious little in Galley Hill to keep the new residents amused. ‘There was no cinema, no theatre, no pubs, apart from going into Stony.’
Milton Keynes Development Corporation was aiming higher than simply providing a few decent houses for the residents. They were selling a vision of the future too. As befitted the home of Alan Turing and the Bletchley Park brainiacs, Milton Keynes was all for embracing the latest in science and technology. The original development plan from 1970 paid the usual lip service to ‘changes in office work as a result of the use of computers’ but then went further: ‘The video-phone is already in use experimentally in the United States of America and could well be in use in Milton Keynes in the 1980s.’16 Much excitement was generated by the development corporation’s idea of installing cable into every home: a 1972 edition of The Times featured ‘Mrs 1990’ dialling ‘her shopkeeper on her audio-visual telephone’ or ‘using her two-way TV’ – as well as possessing ‘her own lightweight electric car for shopping’.17
Channel 40, the town’s own cable station, was launched 1976. After a couple of years the channel had built an audience of 13,000; it consisted mainly of live phone-ins, educational programmes and news shows focussing on community affairs. ‘Channel 40 was a breakthrough for local broadcasting in this country,’ said one of the programme makers, Dusty Rhodes, ‘although it’s been happening in America for a long time. We did all kinds of things: election specials where we’d courier video tapes about on motorbikes so we could go out almost live. We did a rock show once from a youth club which was a real riot.’18 By the early eighties this ground-breaking experiment had fizzled out, becoming a local radio station instead. Like Croydon, Milton Keynes has taken more than its fair share of Crap Towns ire and bad stand-up gags. Peter Barry was convinced that the flak was caused by jealousy. After all, this city was not only th
e birthplace of computing and the home of cable television; it could also boast Britain’s first recycling plant, and its first multiplex, The Point, which hosted the UK premiere of that quintessential 1985 sci-fi blockbuster Back to the Future. Perhaps most excitingly for me was the discovery that by Furzton Lake, a few hundred yards from Adam’s house, there lies that most quintessentially modern symbol of all: a real-life helipad. After all of the promises in plans the country over, at long last I had found one. Not that it is ever used.
Yet Milton Keynes embodied a vision of the future that went far beyond domestic technology and high-tech amenities. The 1970 plan had cited among the major reforms and innovations of the postwar era the ‘vast expansion in education, particularly further education’.19 It was in the sphere of adult education where the new city broke all of the rules. Harold Wilson had conceived of a remote-access university, the University of the Air, back in the early sixties. A decade later the Open University, as it became known, was putting down some very terrestrial roots in Milton Keynes. The initial outcrop of buildings were designed by the studio of married couple Maxwell Fry and Jane Drew, the eminent prewar modernists who had worked with everyone from Le Corbusier to Walter Gropius. This complex in the east of the city housed all the administrative and planning facilities for the experiment, including the studios from which BBC television broadcast their lectures.
The new university was an immediate hit. By 1973 it already had more students than any other UK university. Yet at first the city did not embrace the new arrival with great enthusiasm. ‘They don’t like us much in Milton Keynes,’ remarked Clive Fewins, editor of the staff’s in-house magazine in 1975. ‘They think we don’t do anything.’20 Perhaps this was an inevitable problem given the lack of students on campus. Yet pretty soon Milton Keynesians were warming to these bright young academics and unconventional thinkers – especially once the university had become the largest employer in the city. ‘The university does attract energetic and able young people,’ said Ray Thomas, head of the OU’s own new towns study unit, keen to point out how the staff were making a difference at a local level in community groups, ‘so in that respect Milton Keynes is better off than other new towns.’21
The Point, once the city’s futuristic cinema multiplex, now threatened with demolition.
Milton Keynes’ booming economy wasn’t all down to state investment in education and building. Pretty soon the development corporation, as in so many new towns before it, was going out of its way to attract all sorts of companies to the area. One such was VAG, the Volkswagen and Audi specialists. Jerry Latham, the company’s relocation project manager, explained his decision to move the business. ‘To us, Milton Keynes was ideally located. We found a site of the right size with enough room for expansion.’ Not only that: when VAG put an advert for staff in the Milton Keynes Gazette in 1977, they were overwhelmed by the response. ‘By six o’clock there was a queue half a mile long…. The quality of people applying was far higher than we might have anticipated too.’ Like those at the OU, Jerry put this down to the town’s pioneering spirit. ‘They were people who wanted to become involved, wanted to get stuck in.’22
Factories of all shapes and sizes were springing up in the city. Unlike in the early new towns, efforts were made to place factory estates and business parks regularly throughout the plan rather than in isolated specialist areas. At Kiln Farm, the factory units were made from brightly coloured plastic-coated steel panels. ‘The factories may be colourful,’ The Times reported in 1972, ‘but in style overall the architecture is not trendy bravura. Critics might call it negative, or anti-style. It is certainly against the new brutalism.’23
Early Milton Keynes was full of these glossy, curvy, modular structures – forms that were starting to be described as a new architectural style: high tech. Even the less showy buildings looked cleaner, sharper, less reliant on traditional materials such as brick or concrete to maintain their shape. The offices surrounding the railway station and the town centre shopping mall, for example, reminded me of the Smithsons’ school in Hunstanton, designed back in the forties, with their sheer glass walls and long low profiles – yet without the school’s tough yellow brick and blokeish factory chic. High tech was glossy, flawless and expensive-looking: shiny disco glitterballs to brutalism’s down and dirty Marshall stacks.
The Mies van der Rohe-inspired train station (pictured) and shopping centre adhered to the principal that no buildings in the city should be above the height of a mature tree.
Work started on the town centre in the late seventies. ‘Critics who had already denounced the new town as being over-committed to the private car and private choice will no doubt take the designs for the centre as further proof that the city will effectively become a middle-class ghetto,’ reported The Times in 1975.24 Yet despite the shopping centre’s size (it was the largest in Europe when it opened) there was a curious modesty about it. This was due to Derek Walker’s insistence sistence that it should remain relatively low rise. ‘It is expected that the mature plane trees will eventually be higher than most buildings and that the pedestrian scale will predominate,’ he wrote in Architectural Design magazine.25 A decade on from his christening of the flyovers of Birmingham for the film Take Me High, Cliff Richard was back at the vanguard of modernist Britain, recording the rollerskates and walkman-themed video for his 1981 hit Wired for Sound in the new shopping centre by some palm trees outside John Lewis.
One element of the town centre that has continued to fascinate me are the ‘porte-cochères’ – small porches, painted black, placed next to roads to delineate pedestrian crossings, and forming the entrances to many of the buildings. Together with the rows of identikit trees, gleaming glass surfaces and wide boulevards that wouldn’t be out of place in Welwyn Garden City, these polite little black porches suggest a civilised, sensible life for the citizens of Milton Keynes – the life intended by the planners back in the late sixties.
‘Porte-cochères’ – positioned at crossings and entrances in the town centre.
What could be more civilised than the green spaces plotted in a ‘linear park’ running throughout the city? In Milton Keynes, £5 million worth of trees were planted during its first 20 years. Not that existing residents in the old villages were impressed when the city moved in. ‘Everything is spoilt around here now,’ one resident near the OU grumbled in the mid-seventies. ‘You used to be able to go for miles on lovely walks, but now the birds are disappearing, the road has been widened and we might as well be living on the M1.’26 Of course the new towns took up land, as any development must, but here an effort has been made to plant things in an attractive and exciting way. At first each district even had its own distinct flora, although this exotic plant zoning was gradually phased out as the city grew. And the great H and V roads are screened from the estates by the most dense and dramatic planting, spectacular in spring with kilometre-long walls of flowering shrubs, and then again in the autumn, as the leaves burst into vibrant reds, yellows and browns.
Perhaps the most impressive feats of landscaping I’d seen in any of the new towns were the many large lakes built in Milton Keynes. Not all were created solely for aesthetic or recreational purposes: some were needed to balance the water levels of the Great Ouse, the river that flows from the Midlands all the way to the North Sea. An enormous effort and cost was involved in excavating these areas, filling them with water, and planting them to look and act naturally. ‘The great lakes and engineering structures, the large scale housing and employment areas now have a rawness that grates,’ wrote Derek Walker in the early eighties. ‘They await the patina of the second-hand, the lived-in look.’27 These days it’s beginning to happen: the tall reeds provide homes for coots and moorhen; lichen and moss decorate mono-pitched roofs and concrete weirs; shrubs and trees provide secluded walks and a peaceful sense of place. A couple of decades later Milton Keynes’ lakes are populated not only with windsurfers and fishermen, but with grebes, heron, swans, ducks, geese and
the like.
One of the more beloved leisure facilities in the new town, Calverton End Adventure Playground – known as ‘The Boat’ – has vanished. Built in the early seventies, it was designed by those arch-pranksters of sixties architecture, Archigram. By the time they received their commission from Derek Walker, this loose collective of young architects with their trippy newsletters had been bugging the terribly serious postwar British architecture scene for over a decade. For the most part their ideas were outrageously impractical: cities that walked, or could be thrown away, or moved and plugged into a grid. Their architectural drawings look more like the covers of prog-rock albums than serious proposals for actual, physical buildings: somewhere between Philip K. Dick and Monty Python. Yet Archigram did build two things in Britain: the playground in Milton Keynes and a swimming pool for Rod Stewart. The playground was part DeLorean car, part cruiseliner. A half-sunk concrete building formed an indoor activity area, its entire front and back formed from giant garage doors that swung up and over. The structure was topped by a couple of funnels and some low railings, a throwback to thirties modernism’s most ubiquitous reference point, the ocean liner. It was knocked down by the council in 1988 and replaced by a more conventional playground, but is still fondly remembered as the most eccentric and exciting playground by all who sailed in her.
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