by Nick Corble
My mind was made up by then. I’d seen a village shop a few doors away, maybe they still had some sandwiches for sale, and there was always the emergency pork pie I carried (and regularly replenished) in my rucksack. I’d be okay.
As it turned out, the chips looked rather good, and some kindly soul bought five portions for sharing. By then though, I was full to the brim with what we call at home ‘yellow food’, my own purchases combined with the crisps laid out by the pub. As such, I was content to pass on this communal activity, although I was happy joining in with everyone else in celebrating a 91st minute winner, a choice encouraged by several pints of Phipps IPA, which I’d acquired rather a taste for.
The next morning I’d left myself a short walk into Newport Pagnell, these days regarded as more or less a northern suburb of Milton Keynes (although I doubt many of the residents would thank me for that observation). I reached the town via some field walking, enlivened by a glimpse of Gayhurst House, a late-Elizabethan mansion whose sheep grazed alongside the footpath, albeit in a thankfully benign mood. Although the house has the usual illustrious history, along with the practically obligatory Capability Brown landscape, forty years ago it was converted into fourteen flats.
I approached Newport Pagnell itself across Bury Field Common. On first sight, this huge expanse of open land is just a large moorland, but on deeper inspection reveals itself as a historical time capsule, offering a mini-history of England, for it is a rare example of a medieval ‘open field’. This was an area originally made available by the local Lord of the Manor to his tenants for farming. Initially ploughed using the ridge and furrow system, by the twelfth century it was used mainly for grazing, with cattle branded so everyone knew whose cow was whose. By the eighteenth century, although cattle still grazed parts of the land, it was also being used for horse racing.
Plans to break the land down into smaller plots during the following century were prevented by public protests, which in turn led to that most English of things, a committee, set up to safeguard the public’s rights and privileges. Shortly after, though, parts of it were dug up as preparations for a railway, which never happened, and during the Second World War it became part of the ‘Dig for Victory’ efforts. Finally, in 1969, the local council bought the land off the then Lord, who still technically owned it, providing him with a nice little £30,000 windfall.
It was a fitting end to this leg of the walk. Despite my concerns at the start, things had gone well. The rain had, more or less, stayed away, and the walking had been strenuous but very doable. I’d also achieved a couple of significant milestones, including reaching the centre of England, an enterprise which could have gone either way, and, perhaps as significantly, reaching my own milestone: halfway through the walk. I’d initially thought this was going to be at Newport Pagnell, but later calculations suggested it could have been closer to Long Buckby. By these calculations, for I was sad enough to record the count daily, I’d also completed over half a million steps, getting on for 250 miles.
As I still had a bit of time on my hands, I opted to explore Newport Pagnell a bit. There were a couple of things to see, including Tickford Bridge, which has the distinction of being the oldest iron bridge in the world still taking traffic, although when I later posted a picture of it on Facebook with this claim, someone pointed out that I’d omitted to include any traffic. Newport Pagnell is also the spiritual home to Aston Martin and the company still has a small workshop and showroom on the edge of town. Finally, it’s the location of the country’s last surviving vellum producer, vellum being the dried calf or goat skin that preceded paper as the medium of choice for writing (the Magna Carta is written on it), and remains the material every new Act of Parliament is recorded on. In fact, an attempt to go all modern and use paper in order to save money led to a rare move when the Cabinet Office offered sufficient funds from its own budget for the practice to continue.
I was on my way to see what I could of these works (the answer was very little, it’s all around the back, and all you can see is what looks like a very ordinary front door of a grand detached Victorian house) when I bumped into Barry, or more accurately Barry’s mum, Madge. I’d been walking down Caldecot Street when I spotted a kangaroo on the loose. Well, it was tied down with wires, but it was definitely a kangaroo, about three feet high and made out of straw, secured to the top of a recently re-thatched half-timbered cottage, partially hidden by scaffolding. There was straw scattered everywhere on the ground (the thatchers had only recently completed their work) and Madge, a woman who I guessed was probably in her eighties, but sprightly and taking no nonsense from the three large dogs that were scaring the bejesus out of me, wasn’t happy.
What did cheer her up was the fact that I found the kangaroo amusing and had paused to take a photo of it. It seemed it had become something of a local talking point. Madge’s son, Barry, had spent most of his life in Australia and it was a homage to this portion of his life. A shouted conversation with Barry followed. Wearing shorts and perched on top of the scaffolding while he treated the higher timbers on his house, he waved a friendly paintbrush. It turned out the kangaroo might not be long for this world, apparently the council wasn’t keen. When I asked why, Barry was unable to come up with a rationale beyond not having permission. In other words, they were taking umbrage at not being consulted first. His grown-up children had started a social media campaign to save it, and I offered to further his cause on Instagram. I explained what I was about and Madge asked if Barry would get a free copy of the book if he featured in it. There were no flies on her, but the answer was no.
Before leaving, I had one more task to fulfil before going home for a rest and to plan the next stage. Just over thirty years before, I’d been part of a syndicate that had built a house for an exhibition run by the Milton Keynes Development Corporation called Energy World, highlighting innovations in energy efficiency in homebuilding.
This was the sort of thing the Development Corporation used to do, trying stuff out almost for the sake of it. They were great to us, a bunch of idealistic twenty-somethings armed with nothing except a plan. That plan was to showcase a building system pioneered by the German architect Walter Segal, with the aim of showing that anyone could build a house, and to provide the basis for a business which we would go on to run. We were given weekend access to a rambling old house on the edge of town due for demolition, for we were only going to build at weekends. Indeed, our proposition was that it was possible to build our house in only twelve weekends, so, naturally, we only started to build it twelve weekends before the start of the exhibition. In our defence, we were young.
We recruited a gang of architecture students prepared to commit to twelve weekends of on-site practical training and got going. My role was to help drum up the sponsorship needed to get free stuff, of which, I recall, we got a fair bit, largely due to my partner-in-crime’s persuasive telephone skills. When I first drew my diagonal line through England, it had passed through a number of places significant in my life. I’d already visited my old alma mater at Keele, and this was another of those places. I wanted to see how the house had got on. I knew it was still there because I could see it on Google Maps, and had even tracked down its address and written to the current occupiers, who in turn had agreed to meet with me, which proved that Royal Mail still served some parts of the country.
I’d originally thought I’d just take a bus from Newport Pagnell, as Milton Keynes itself was off my route by around five miles, outside the informal two-to-three-mile buffer zone I’d set myself either side of the line. Heavy rucksack notwithstanding, though, I could see that there was a way to walk it, taking in not just a stretch of the Grand Union Canal, but also a walk through a park, then on through the centre of the city and then some of its housing. It would be a chance to revisit the grand experiment of Milton Keynes (still a town, but trying to become a city, watch out Northampton) and also walk a stretch of the towpath beside a canal that had
been part of my original route nearly twenty years before.
I set off, not quite knowing what I’d discover. Milton Keynes might not technically be on my diagonal line, but this excursion was in the overall spirit of the walk. The towpath was fairly busy, mainly with dog walkers, while the water itself enjoyed a steady flow of both hire boats and retired people in their own craft, most of whom were accompanied by dogs. Dogs were a big thing, and it was one of these that next caught my attention.
The water wasn’t only home to boats, but also a family of swans, including an important-looking and, it turned out, belligerent cob, or Daddy Swan. I’d noticed them gliding by, the cob on the lookout, and also clocked a lone walker with his dog joining the towpath from a sloping track to the left. I was about fifty yards on, when suddenly there was an explosion of noise, water splashing, swans honking, a dog barking madly. Maybe the dog had gone for one of the cygnets? Looking around, I could see it was the opposite, the cob had gone for the dog, much to the latter’s general surprise, for he’d just gone for a curious look. It was a case of an incident of the curious dog on the towpath.
The dog retreated, presumably in shock, while the cob smugly rejoined his family, mission accomplished. I shouted something out along of the lines of ‘That showed him!’ to the dog’s owner, and he came over. It was time for an encounter. The dog owner was called Martin. The dog was called Jessie, but don’t expect me to tell you the breed, I know as much about types of dogs as I do types of cars. I get lost after Aston Martins. My new friend had lived in Milton Keynes for thirty-four years, so old he predated Energy World, which he remembered.
I asked him what he thought about the town. He started by getting the concrete cows out of the way. These objects d’art had for ages been the first point of reference for most of the population when the name of the town came up. They were now housed in the town’s museum (don’t ask, it was closed), although I had earlier seen an homage in someone’s back garden: a set of concrete sheep. That done, I asked him what kept him there.
‘This,’ he replied, spreading an arm over the canal, ‘the open spaces, the quiet.’
I pointed out the irony that what kept him in arguably the country’s most innovative, forward-thinking town, was the bit getting on for 200 years old.
He acknowledged this, but went on to eulogise the cycleways that still criss-crossed the town and the parks, one of which, Campbell Park, I was about to walk through. In Martin’s view, the town had almost become a victim of its own success, building in ever greater concentrations, resulting in narrower roads, especially in the centre, where parking was now a problem. I wondered if this wasn’t true everywhere, and we agreed that in this respect, maybe Milton Keynes had ‘joined the club’, become just another town. I asked him whether there was a sense of community, but he didn’t think so. He was ambivalent, although his wife was from the Philippines, and one of the reasons they’d stayed was because there was a strong Filipino community.
I left the canal and entered the park, which rose up above the water offering views of the surrounding area, and was peppered with regular artworks. As I climbed, I began to regret my decision to forego the bus, but at the same time I didn’t, as the walking both cleared my mind and gave me space to think. Milton Keynes had, remarkably (something that had shocked both Martin and me) recently celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its founding. It had always been an optimistic place where almost anything went, on the basis that if you don’t try, you won’t find out – at least to my perception, anyway. I remembered going there on a Geography field trip from school in the mid-1970s, when the town was an experiment in action, a live Sim City, although, of course, computer games didn’t exist then – computers still ran off perforated ribbons of paper.
I remembered thinking then that what the place needed was a football club to help pull it together, give a sense of shared community. Well it had one now, although in a very Milton Keynes way it had co-opted one from someone else, Wimbledon, and renamed the club the Milton Keynes Dons. It also benefitted from great transport links, the railway into London providing many with access to their workplace, not just from the town but from the surrounding area, as I’d discovered on my walk. It also had its ‘H’ and ‘V’ road grid system, the ‘H’ standing for Horizontal and the ‘V’, you’ve got it, for Vertical. This was great when it worked, but the endless subdivisions within it could also convert what was, on the surface at least, the highly logical, into the highly infuriating, resulting in a number of ‘roads to nowhere’. Ah well, you win a few, you lose a few. Very Milton Keynes.
Was a lot of the housing relentlessly the same? In parts yes, but often not. Again, they’d experimented, and as with all experiments involving the aesthetic, some of it worked, some of it didn’t. Milton Keynes was very much a glass half full or empty sort of place. Views on it were often a reflection of the view-holder as much as an assessment of the town. Crucially, it had provided a place for hundreds of thousands to live, many of its early settlers people desperately in need of somewhere better to live. It had also taken some of the strain off the London suburbs.
It had vision, something sorely lacking in more modern times, times crying out for a visionary approach to a huge problem: housing. Whilst in other parts of the world, notably China, whole cities were being constructed with the future in mind, connected cities which recognised that the future of work probably didn’t involve commuting to an office every day, we were adding new estates onto old villages, apologising as we went. And for those who say we don’t have the space to do this, I advise a diagonal walk through England. If we have space for wind farms spread over miles, we have space for new towns.
What is lacking nowadays, and maybe existed to a greater degree in the 1960s and 70s, is a belief in the future, something the conversations I’d had suggested was in short supply. We need a bit less looking back to a golden past – one actually cluttered with global conflicts, food rationing, digging for victory and one industry towns providing jobs for life but at subsistence wages. If England is to progress as a country, surely it needs to look forward, to adopt just some of the vision Milton Keynes once offered, and to some extent still does. The town could very easily have become a modern slum. It hadn’t, and this was to its credit. It believed the future was a good place to be, and had done its part in helping create it.
My mental meanderings were brought to an abrupt halt on entering the town centre. Perhaps it was another sign of Milton Keynes maturing, but like most of the other reasonably sized places I’d been, it had its problem with the homeless. A tent city, okay, more of a small hamlet, was pitched under an underpass. People were also panhandling just a few tens of yards from the shiny shopping centre, which was slightly less shiny than I’d remembered it. The decline of retail had hit here too.
In fact, the centre gave off a sense of being slightly shabby. Grass was growing through cracks in parts of the pavement, signs proclaiming the optimism of ‘Midsummer Boulevard’ (a boulevard! In England!) had gone wonky and showed signs of rust. The Point, a red girder pyramid construction, the apogee of nightlife and a cinema complex when we were building our house over thirty years before, was now a little seedy, home to a casino. I read later that there were plans to demolish it and start again. The once new had become old and needed refreshing. Even new towns have a lifecycle.
One thing did remain, however: the good walking and cycling routes. I was able to walk out from the centre down to the area of Shenley Church End, where the Energy World was staged. The housing estates had bedded in. Children were cycling around and playing in the various parks on what was a balmy early summer’s evening. It felt safe, as clean as any suburb can hope to be and ordered. It was also easy to find my destination, partly because I started to remember where I was, partly because of the logic of the road system. All the roads where the exhibition used to be were named after famous scientists.
‘Our’ house was now occupied by Da
vid and his wife Mayumi, along with their teenage son, and they were extremely welcoming, keen to learn more about the house’s genesis. Coincidently, they’d moved there from Northampton, and had regarded the move as a definite upgrade. We chatted over coffee and they gave me a tour of the house and its garden. It had changed, of course it had. Previous owners had altered some of what my erstwhile architect colleague might regard as its purity, but we had built a house for an exhibition, whereas for subsequent owners it was their home.
Certain key features remained, including some of the exposed beams of the timber frame construction and a stained-glass window we’d commissioned from a local artist. Some of the rooms had been knocked together into one, but that was fair enough. I’d probably have done the same. A garage had been added (being very eco, we’d looked down on the notion of a car) and some dormer windows added to make the, admittedly small, bedrooms a bit bigger. The house itself was still recognisable, however, and visiting it had been well worthwhile.
I asked David and Mayumi what they liked about living there, and they referred to a sense of it being safe for their son to cycle around in, as well as the access to green space. They also appreciated the quiet, waking up to birdsong. What did they think about Milton Keynes in general? They loved it. Again, the access to places to go, to exist as a family, appealed. In many ways they echoed many of the points that Martin raised on the towpath. Mayumi was of Japanese origin and worked in one of the Japanese companies that had located there. For her there was the benefit of a strong Japanese community for them to lock into. I knew that the site had been developed around a central grass area with a courtyard intended to act as a communal gathering spot. It turned out this had been only a partial success. Maybe it didn’t matter what you did to the English, they would only mingle and talk to their neighbours if they absolutely had to, or in times of extreme adversity.
