by Andy Beckett
But the monorail Milton Keynes did not take account of how Britons were increasingly living, and of one development in particular. During the sixties, car ownership doubled. ‘There’s no way in life you’re going to get rid of the car,’ Derek Walker, who became chief architect of Milton Keynes in 1970, told me. ‘I thought the monorail city was terribly flawed. Linear cities become a kind of corridor, and I was never sold on high blocks.’ So, instead of this vision of Milton Keynes, Walker and a decisive number of the new city’s planners argued for another, partly based on what they saw as the key social trends in Britain, and partly on how things were done in a distant but charismatic foreign city that many British architects, journalists and consumers in the sixties and seventies saw as the society of the future: Los Angeles.
‘I doubt whether any part of the world … has ever packed such an extraordinary emotional punch, a feeling of a place that was leading the world in technology, in economic achievement, in the forging of a new and different lifestyle,’ wrote the influential British city planner Peter Hall about sixties and seventies California a quarter of a century later. ‘The Los Angeles experience had profound effects … on an entire generation of us.’ Derek Walker was one of a stream of young British architects and city theorists who visited southern California in the sixties and fell in love with the freeways and the spaciousness and the uninhibited buildings, with the apparent ease of movement and the consumer riches. Walker had grown up in a Yorkshire village in the forties and fifties. ‘This is a tight-arsed country,’ he said with typical directness. ‘I saw the sixties as a time of aspiration, dissolving class structures. People were getting wealthier. They’d started seeing American kitchens. The whole system of consumerism was being born, big time … In Milton Keynes, we did a continuous household survey, asking people what they wanted, and their horizons were rising, rising, rising.’
By 1971, the new city’s first few hundred homes were finally being built and the concept of Milton Keynes had been transformed. It was now to be a great, spread-out, American-style grid of streets, with each ‘grid square’ containing a residential, recreational or business district, screened off from the traffic and from neighbouring districts by landscaping and thick belts of trees. Within this dispersed, suburban, consumer-driven city – a shopping centre was scheduled for completion before a hospital or a railway station – it was hoped, nevertheless, that the left-leaning ideals of the post-war New Town programme would be maintained. Jock Campbell, the first chairman of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation, was a Labour lord and ‘a real socialist’, Walker told me. Walker himself was a Guardian reader who saw no contradiction between consumerism and egalitarianism. ‘I was about thirty-five in 1971,’ he said with a knowing laugh. ‘You bloody well think you can do anything.’
In 2006, he was still living in Milton Keynes, as he had done throughout the seventies. But, like many modernist architects, his faith in the new had its limits. His house was a medieval rectory in Great Linford, one of several villages which had been absorbed into Milton Keynes. Great Linford remained a mixture of old Buckinghamshire dwellings and large seventies houses, and was one of the city’s most sought-after districts.
We sat at a table surrounded by delicate, slightly faded architectural illustrations and models. ‘Linear Parks, Milton Keynes 1970’ was the label on one dusty, utopian assemblage of cardboard and green netting propped against a wall. Walker leaned back in his purple shirt and swirly tie and told the story of Milton Keynes in the seventies with infectious enthusiasm and amused eyes.
‘As a north countryman, I always thought it was a bloody dull area, flat as a bathboard,’ he began. ‘Never built on because of flooding. Poor farming land.’ In addition, in its first years, the construction was hampered by a local labour shortage: ‘You needed something like 30,000 building operatives to build 3,000 houses a year. We had 600 building operatives in this area.’ During the early seventies, the property bubble inflated by the Heath government made this labour shortage worse. In 1972, there was a national builders’ strike. Meanwhile, inflation was high and rising and building materials were scarce: ‘There was a period when we couldn’t get bricks.’ Then the mid-seventies brought the three-day week and deteriorating government finances, which reduced the money available for Milton Keynes. Walker and his colleagues learned to be frugal. ‘You get more for your money out of landscaping than anything else, hence the emphasis on that.’ Then came the drought of 1976 and Dutch elm disease. Milton Keynes’s newly planted shrubs and trees died in their tens of thousands.
In July 1974, the conservative journalist Christopher Booker joined the multitude of British and foreign reporters, architects, planners, social scientists and curiosity-seekers visiting the partly built city. ‘These are bleak days for the … “prestige projects” which were such a disastrous legacy of the overblown fantasies of the sixties,’ he wrote. ‘The dinosaurs of Maplin and the Channel Tunnel seem on the edge of extinction.’ At Milton Keynes, he found
… rolling farmland criss-crossed with mile upon mile of half-finished roads, labelled V8 or H7 … On nearby hilltops stand the first housing estates … Not the sprawling, leafy, affluent suburbia of a Los Angeles, but hundreds of grim little misshapen boxes, in brick or corrugated metal … In the present economic climate … the chances must be that over the next decade Milton Keynes will simply become a pathetic national joke, falling ever further behind its ambitious schedule, and finally grinding to a stop in a sea of mud and rusting contractors’ equipment, unsold houses and half-finished factories … Such a horrible mistake must never be made again.
Building sites can be lowering places for life’s pessimists – or for those who have to live on them. Histories of Milton Keynes call the city’s seventies inhabitants ‘pioneers’. Their ‘reservations’ about the housing they moved into ‘appear to have surfaced quite quickly’, writes Mark Clapson in A Social History of Milton Keynes:
The absence of windows in bathrooms was disliked … Many dwellings [were] not found to be well designed for warmth … Another common complaint was that noise insulation … was often poor … External features of housing produced some strong reactions. People were generally conservative in their tastes, expressing … a marked dislike of such materials as cedar boarding or aluminium.
Milton Keynes was muddy in the winter and dusty in the summer. Unlike previous New Towns, anyone could go and live there – it was not being built as an overspill settlement for a specific city or town – but in the early years almost half the pioneers came from London. They came to find work. Milton Keynes’s good road connections and position near to both the capital and Birmingham made it appealing for offices and light industry. It also attracted the headquarters of the Open University – ‘a nest of Marxists’, as Margaret Thatcher described it, half-jokingly, to the development corporation chairman Jock Campbell. Between 1971 and 1981, more jobs were created in Milton Keynes than in any British city apart from the oil-boom town of Aberdeen. Yet other pioneers came for bleaker reasons: hoping ‘to solve family problems by a change of residence’, as the development corporation’s annual report put it in 1975, or to get away from overcrowded, apparently deteriorating parts of inner London, with their tight grey-brown streets and clogged council-housing waiting lists. Many incomers were ‘disadvantaged’, said the 1977 annual report. Incomes in Milton Keynes were lower than in the capital and other parts of the south-east. ‘Too many new residents’, thought the corporation, ‘have difficulty making ends meet.’
Milton Keynes promoted itself vividly and innovatively. An exhibition in London used Astroturf and architectural models to suggest both an energetic new city and a bucolic retreat. There were beckoning ad man’s slogans – ‘Come to Milton Keynes’ – seductively designed brochures and a magazine, New City, which showed a world of clean-lined houses and greenery, of ‘integral carports’ and ‘safety for children’. But some incomers arrived with no furniture and no friends to find a largely unfinished cit
y with few amenities – the shopping centre did not open until 1979 – and, where the work was done, a completely new kind of urban landscape for Britain. Disorientation, loneliness and the break-up of marriages are frequent features in the accounts of the pioneers. ‘People travelling through the city complain that it seems to be deserted,’ recorded the development corporation’s annual report in 1978. ‘The citizens, when driving about, lose their sense of place.’
Netherfield, half a dozen miles south of Derek Walker’s rectory in Great Linford, was one of the first and least popular grid squares of housing. I went there the week before I met him. In the taxi I asked the driver, who had been taking fares in Milton Keynes since 1971 and knew his local history, what he thought of the estate. ‘It was built with alternative materials because of the builders’ strike and the brick shortage,’ he said. ‘It was built as a slum.’ And what was its reputation now? ‘Sink,’ he said.
For several more minutes we continued along the dual carriageway with only the odd roof visible above the high grass verges and treetops – the usual backdrop to journeys between different parts of Milton Keynes. Then we turned off, passed through the curtain of trees and drew up next to a set of buildings that looked like a cross between a moon colony and an army encampment. In long, absolutely parallel lines, terraced houses with identical flat fronts and flat roofs, side-by-side grey shoeboxes of wood and corrugated aluminium, marched into the near distance. The land they stood on rose and fell quite sharply – Milton Keynes was not as flat as Derek Walker said it was – but the continuous roof line of each row of terraces remained exactly horizontal, so that, seemingly at random, some houses were one storey, some two and some three. The rows of terraces were quite far apart, further apart than in a London street, with strips of green in between and lots of sky to see; and the endlessly repeating facades, catching the March sunshine, had a certain geometric beauty. But a more unyielding piece of city planning was hard to imagine. And it had not aged well. There was rubbish in many of the front gardens, some of the garages under the houses were disintegrating, and on one house the aluminium panels were coming away, showing nothing but wood and nails beneath. In the middle of the estate was the ‘local centre’, to use the jargon of the Milton Keynes planners: some dispiriting shops, a few pedestrians and a pub with a warning on its blackboard: ‘No Travellers’.
Walker confessed he was disappointed with Netherfield. ‘It really was a lovely plan and should have worked,’ he said. ‘But it hasn’t. It had the poorest builders who worked in the city. It had problems – the local housing officers, if they didn’t like somewhere in the city, they would put all the trouble there.’ It did not exactly add up to an admission of responsibility, yet he and the other architects of Milton Keynes learned from Netherfield and the other barrack-like estates they built in the city in the early seventies. The obligation to consult and respond to residents was, unusually for a large public-housing development in post-war Britain, a central element of the Milton Keynes project, and the city’s household survey found that people wanted privacy and individuality in their houses, and a villagey, ‘traditional’ feel to their streets – not a place in some monumental modernist scheme. Walker and his colleagues listened, and Milton Keynes began to change again.
After we had talked about Netherfield, Walker suggested I visit Heelands, another local council estate which had been built later in the seventies. It was close to his house, and Milton Keynes is full of footpaths – in the seventies, Walker knew about environmentalism as well as consumerism, and made provision for walkers and cyclists as well as drivers – so after the interview I set off on foot. It was a sleety afternoon with a bitter headwind, but within a few minutes I had almost forgotten about the cold. First, on all sides, there were small white houses, arranged in squares among the trees. Each house had a built-in garden shed, a terracotta roof and a faintly Mediterranean air. Then there were more English streets of updated half-timbered houses, each with a slightly different front and a different steeply pitched roof. There were areas of benches and landscaping, like the houses carefully placed and well-preserved. Everything was on an intimate scale; there was almost no graffiti and no vandalism. Heelands was not southern California – assuming LA was a city model still worth following – but unlike a lot of public-and private-housing developments from late-twentieth-century and early-twentyfirst-century Britain it felt solid and cared for and unshowily modern.
On a similar estate nearby I talked to an elderly woman who was approaching her front gate with a bag of shopping. ‘I moved here from Wimbledon in 1980,’ she told me. ‘For more space, for my kids – I had four of them. I started in a council property. It was beautiful. Fields all around. No road signs. Everybody took pride. The original ones of us still do.’
Despite the unfamiliarity and unfinished quality of the city in the seventies, and the scorn of commentators like Christopher Booker, most incomers came to like the early Milton Keynes. In 1975, a development-corporation survey of five estates found that ‘between 83 and 95 per cent of residents were pleased with life in Milton Keynes, and only four families out of the 290 covered wanted to return to wherever they had come from’. In some ways the blank-slate feel of Milton Keynes, which the likes of Booker found so alienating, was actually a strength: in Britain in the seventies, traditional cities, despite the beginnings of gentrification in parts of inner London, were losing popularity and population. ‘The public’, said Walker, ‘voted with their feet.’
And then there was Milton Keynes’s improving housing. ‘By the mid-seventies, the quality of the public housing was very good,’ Walker continued. ‘Good spaces. Extremely good landscaping.’ His busy eyes became still and sober for a moment. ‘All your socialist principles tell you that public housing is very important.’ The Milton Keynes architects and planners also learned how to squeeze the maximum funding out of the period’s cash-strapped governments. ‘We used to take the big schemes to central government on Christmas Eve,’ Walker recalled, his cheeky glint returning. ‘The civil servants were so anxious to get off to their kids, their mulled wine, we got the schemes through with a minimum of fuss.’
However, the ‘socialist principles’ which underlay Milton Keynes were increasingly of the Gavyn Davies rather than the Arthur Scargill variety. ‘We were trying to build the public housing as being available for purchase,’ Walker told me. This was a major change of philosophy. In the late sixties, there had been tensions between the development corporation and the Wilson government over the ratio of public to private housing in Milton Keynes: the government wanted a 50:50 split, to save money and promote property ownership; the left-wing development corporation wanted more council dwellings. But, as the seventies went on, Jock Campbell and Derek Walker steadily adjusted their ideas about what socialism meant, and the distinction between public and private housing in Milton Keynes became increasingly blurred. The city ‘must become more responsive to home ownership’, Campbell said in 1977.
Yet, at the same time, he and Walker wanted to avoid the ‘total commercialism’, in Walker’s words, that they saw filling other British cities up with shoddy, overpriced properties. Walker tried to insist on high standards of construction and design, and the development corporation sought to make the house prices fit the city’s demographics. ‘Ways of providing low cost housing for sale to people in the lower income groups are being explored,’ recorded the corporation’s annual report as early as 1972. Like the more modern-minded members of the Wilson and Callaghan governments, such as Davies, Donoughue and Tony Crosland, the planners of Milton Keynes were searching for a political holy grail: a way of combining freedom of choice and consumer satisfaction with social justice. In 1975, the development corporation declared that it wanted the city to have more property owners and to accommodate more of Britain’s poor.
This vision of property-owning socialism was only partly realized. The decade’s frequent recessions, high interest rates and government restrictions on council-house
sales held it back. In 1972, there were 8,000 owner-occupied homes in Milton Keynes; by 1979, the total had grown only modestly to 13,000.
The real take-off in local home ownership would have to wait for a new political era. ‘In our housing surveys in the eighties, we would ask, “Why did you buy your council house?”’ Walker remembered. ‘And people would say, “Because everything in the house has been done for me. It’s got a nice garden. It’s safe.”’ He gave a world-weary chuckle. ‘When Margaret Thatcher sold off council estates, our houses went like bloody hot cakes!’
In late 1978, despite Callaghan’s recovery in the polls, the development corporation began reluctantly to acknowledge that it might soon be dealing with a Conservative government. A weekend brainstorming session produced a paper on the corporation’s future strategy. It was called ‘Here comes Maggie!’. During the last months of the Callaghan administration, the corporation started to put more emphasis on the building of private homes in Milton Keynes and less on the building of council ones, whether they were going to be sold off ultimately or not.
