A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain. Owen Hatherley

      Milton Keynes Central Station

       A New Career in a New Town

      In 2007, perhaps not coincidentally the year that Milton Keynes celebrated its fortieth anniversary, Gordon Brown’s government announced that ten ‘eco-towns’ would be built on various sites across Britain. These towns were to have been sponsored by state largesse, but developed by institutions ranging from the Co-Operative Society to Tesco—PFI cities, if you will. Settlements of around 50,000 people, apparently designed to be self-sufficient and ‘carbon neutral’—nowhere near as ambitious as a Milton Keynes, but nonetheless a resurrection of an Old Labour idea that English middle-class common sense had dumped in the ‘failed’ category. Protests ensued almost immediately in practically all of the areas that were slated to have an eco-town next door, fronted by a motley selection of local celebrity leaders ranging from Judi Dench to Tim Henman’s dad. There’s little doubt that eco-towns were more about property speculation than they were a product of ecological enthusiasm, and there was much justified criticism that these were disguised commuter suburbs, with no infrastructure and no industry—just as Basildon or East Kilbride eventually were. Yet the opposition seemed driven more by hatred of the idea of city-dwellers ruining what Clive Aslet, ex-editor of Country Life, recently called (on the subject of Milton Keynes) ‘22,000 acres of formerly good hunting land’.²¹ As if on cue, at a protest in front of Parliament some held up placards declaring that these eco-towns were mere ‘New Towns’. Apparently, we all know what that means—towns full of ‘eyesores’, concrete cows and unsightly proletarians, bereft of the ‘heritage’ that so obsesses the British psyche. It became clear that these people hated the very idea of new towns, of any dispersal of people across what is, in terms of space, if not population, still an overwhelmingly green country.

      A couple of years and a property crash combined with the part-nationalization of the banking system later, it’s all rather beside the point, as new housing that would have sold for absurd sums only six months ago now sits empty—and under the coalition government, it’s unlikely any of the eco-towns will be built. Even given the justifiable reasons for hostility to the eco-towns, there’s something rather sad about the opposition to them. In essence, the conviction is that any new town which stressed its ‘newness’ would necessarily be ‘soulless’, or ‘ugly’. It’s notable that the only major new town begun since the late 1960s is Prince Charles’s pet project, Poundbury, while the stealth new town of Cambourne in Cambridge’s ‘Silicon Fen’ is similarly retardataire. Poundbury’s planner, Leon Krier, is an apologist for the Nazi architect and politician Albert Speer, whose pompous classical edifices would, if Hitler had won the war, have transformed Berlin from a modern metropolis into the neoclassical showpiece ‘Germania’. Speer wanted to design new buildings that somehow didn’t look new, with their eventual ruinous state centuries hence factored into the design—a ‘theory of ruin value’ that has been embraced in Prince Charles’s new town, where buildings are apparently pre-distressed to give them an old, distinguished appearance, and where any technological innovation post-1780 is (at least officially) verboten.

      There’s a long history of these places, of course. The eighteenth century produced model towns as diverse as Tunbridge Wells and Bath, all based on vistas, clean lines and an urban representation of scientific and mathematical concepts. Yet most were new towns for the rich, those who could afford the new spaces’ light, air and openness. The late nineteenth century saw contrite industrialists plan ideal settlements like Saltaire or Bourneville; and between the 1900s and the 1920s Ebenezer Howard, a very late-Victorian combination of crank and pragmatist, pioneered the garden cities of Letchworth and Welwyn. Yet when people talk about New Towns they don’t mean the garden cities, which, like precursors to Poundbury, used antiquated materials and winding street patterns in order to simulate historical accident. Rather, they mean the postwar new towns. They mean concrete precincts and cows, glass shopping centres, flat-roofed houses and roundabouts. They mean Cumbernauld, with its central shopping centre that was an architectural cause célèbre for a few years and an ‘eyesore’ for decades more; they mean Crawley or Stevenage, towns which were intended to be self-sufficient but became just another part of the commuter belt.

      With regard to the years since 1997, however, Milton Keynes has taken on some new meanings. This ‘suburban city’ that has yet to receive city status (when it applied, it was absurdly passed over in favour of Brighton and Hove, a place with no meaningful independence from London) is on the one hand, the opposite of professed urban policy. Unashamedly diffuse, the original plan for a non-place urban realm is implacably alien to the ideas of urban renaissance. The idea that social life would occur in piazzas and on the street was anathema—Milton Keynes doesn’t have streets. Unlike the new areas of Southampton, there are real social spaces slotted into its relentless motorized grid. Yet with its acres of speculative housing and its economy of business, leisure and retail, Milton Keynes exemplifies the unspoken urban policy of expanding the suburbia of South-East England as whole acres of streets lie derelict further north. Plans for the town’s expansion and urbanization have, though, faced major opposition. Things which are pejorative outside of ‘MK’—suburbia, minimalism, underpasses, grids, motorways—are here defended trenchantly by various local campaign groups.

      The first thing we (adoptive) Londoners noticed in Milton Keynes was space. Sheer, vast, windswept open space, which one could call desolate if that desolation wasn’t evidently so popular with its users. This is helped by the striking planned vista that hits you when leaving the train. The 1982 station square designed by the architects of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation (Stuart Mosscrop, Derek Walker and Christopher Woodward²²) is one of the most remarkable Modernist set-pieces in Britain, a bracing landscaped plaza flanked by three perfectly detailed Miesian blocks, with the old British Rail logo prominent. This is Alphaville in Buckinghamshire, and it’s like a bucket of cold, fresh water in the face, initially shocking but sharply refreshing. Like the same architects’ nearby mall, the relentless grids plugged into another grid suggest the mock-utopian Continuous Monument of the leftist Italian architects Superstudio, the grid behind all planned towns elevated into an advancing object that consumes the whole world. If it does follow in Superstudio’s footsteps then it does it quietly, with skateboarding teenagers in the middle of it.