Milton Keynes is used to being insulted, but this week the jokes sounded more than usual. Then the city came into the spotlight EastEnders had a storyline about Bianca Jackson, played by Patsy Palmer, who lived on a council estate in Milton Keynes.
The city is seen in a less positive light. A drug-dealing teenage girl is seen scavenging for food in trash cans. Bianca throws a rock through a window. Oikse’s young people lurk menacingly. Walford looks like Henley-on-Thames in comparison.
It’s safe to say that Milton Keynesians were not very pleased. Residents said their home town was being portrayed as a “slum” and local MP for Milton Keynes North, Ben Everitt, complained the town looked “run down and ugly”. Locals were quick to point out that the scenes weren’t even shot in Milton Keynes; the council estate is actually 45 miles away in Barnet, North London.
The disparagement of Milton Keynes is nothing new. Play the word association game with the next person you see and “Milton Keynes” will almost certainly come across: “roundabouts”, “shopping” or – if you’re lucky – “that indoor ski slope”. Does it deserve better? I went there to see if I could find traces of culture and community among the convenience and concrete.
A utopian vision of society
Founded in 1967, Milton Keynes was part of England’s second wave of new towns, intended to rid London of its ever-increasing population. They followed a utopian vision of how people could live in a way that was not one above the other: ‘community without propinquity’, as the American urban planner Melvin Webber put it. If London’s population were spread out in this way, it would cover the whole of East Anglia.
But in contrast to the thatched fencing and mown lawn aesthetic of earlier projects, such as Welwyn Garden City (1920), Milton Keynes was designed in a bolder pragmatic way: a unique grid pattern of roads, at 1km intervals, oriented around a shopping center . center that was once the longest in the universe.
After parking, I struggled to get any sense of the city’s geography, so I decided to get some altitude. Two years ago this would have been impossible, but the opening of a new ‘skyscraper’ has changed that.
By all accounts, the Fourteen Skyline Bar and Restaurant on the top floor of La Tour Hotel should not exist. Milton Keynes’ early city planners envisioned a city hidden among trees (today there are 22 million of them), and they stipulated that no building should be taller than the tallest tree. However, citing the need for new investments and landmark buildings, the City Council appears to have relaxed this rule (or perhaps just changed the rule to include redwoods).
“When we built it and came here, we said, ‘Oh my god, the view is amazing,’” says Mark Stuart, general manager of La Tour. Even during my foggy visit I was able to get a sense of the panorama. In the west, the Milton Keynes blueprint comes into view. I saw toy cars driving sensibly along the tree-lined boulevards (center streets are labeled H for Horizontal or V for Vertical). You’ll see why self-driving car companies and robot delivery companies are testing their products in Milton Keynes.
To the east – the view overlooked by the white tablecloth tables – the gray is replaced by a shock of green across Campbell Park, to Gulliver’s World, Willen Lake and beyond. On a clear day you can see up to 30 miles.
In the foreground I saw a sculpture, the Pyramid of Light, which in its sparse green surroundings looks as if it could be a Soviet monument in a provincial town in, say, Uzbekistan. But it is in fact a sculpture that marks the city’s unlikely connection to the cosmos. The main road, Midsummer Boulevard, on which the statue is aligned, is designed so that during the summer solstice the sun rises on one side and sets on the other. To this day, the city attracts druids and leyline hunters. Some (but none I’ve met) have gone so far as to call Milton Keynes ‘A modern temple to the sun’.
La Tour is primarily a business hotel, but Stuart says the restaurant and cocktail bar are very popular with locals, with tables fully booked for the next four weekends. The verdict? Two ladies I met in the lift on the way out said they were stopping by for a cup of tea.
“It was a lot of fun,” says one. It was her first visit. Where did they go next, I asked? “Shop.”
A gallery worthy of Zone One
I also planned to go around the mall, but first through a concrete underpass to the MK Gallery.
If there’s a cultural district in Milton Keynes, it’s here. On the same plot there is a cinema (a joint venture with Curzon) and an adjacent theater hosting West End shows. During my visit, the gallery had an excellent exhibition on the photographer Saul Leiter, but the building itself is just as fascinating. The architecture, held up by beams painted yellow and red, is modeled after the original architectural department building in which the city was designed. Those who call Milton Keynes ‘boring’ may not realize that the young Norman Foster and Terence Conran were both involved in the city’s early development.
“We are here to remind you that Milton Keynes’s heyday was very progressive and international in scope,” I was told by Anthony Spira, gallery director, who pointed out that the city emerged from the same thinking that created the Pompidou. Center in Paris. It was only due to budget cuts, he said, that many of Milton Keynes’ grand plans were in jeopardy.
He believes this is one of the reasons why Milton Keynes has developed its reputation. But there may be another reason.
“I think in general the British are quite afraid of the modern,” he said. “We prefer medieval villages with cobbled streets and messy market towns. It is too rational for the British mind.”
A very long shopping center
Something strikingly un-British about Milton Keynes is the absence of a discernible ‘main street’. The closest is actually the shopping center itself, which was recorded in the Guinness Book of Records in 1997 as the longest in the world at 720 meters (today it is small compared to the behemoths of the Middle East and China).
Even an avid anti-shopper like me must admit that the building has aged remarkably well, with its naturally lit main path, punctuated by palm trees and chill-out areas with comfortable chairs. It has the feel of a functioning airport terminal, but instead of flying on to Hong Kong, passengers try to find the nearest H&M. There is also history in it. Blue plaques on the wall show off the mall’s claims to fame, including the fact that the video for Cliff Richard’s 1981 song, Wired for soundwas filmed here.
Outside the shopping center I found the market (open Tuesday and Thursday to Sunday). Jason, who runs Wok Express with his father, has had a stall here for 22 years. Is there much community, I asked? “It’s OK. Otherwise we wouldn’t be here so long,” he said, although he pointed out that rising rents were a challenge. The market was busy enough for a Thursday, with the fruit and vegetable stall proving more popular than one empty toy stall, where I saw an AK47 (suitable for 8 years and older) for sale.
Milton Keynes wanted me to buy things, but all I really wanted at that moment was good coffee. After much searching, in a part of town called The Hub, I found just that at the independent Bogota Coffee Company.
“The turning point was when my garden shed left in Berkhamsted High Street,” says Carl Meek, who opened Bogota with a friend in 2012. “We chose Milton Keynes because we felt it was up and coming and there was a lot happening here. .” They also host late-night sessions with DJs and live music, and he said they get a broad mix of customers in addition to commuters and business people.
“It is currently one of the fastest growing cities in Europe, we have a very diverse international audience here. In summer we get tons of customers from Dubai, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia. They all have second homes in Milton Keynes and they love it,” he said.
I can see why. Milton Keynes has a touch of the Middle East as it is set around a huge shopping center and out-of-this-world attractions like the SnoZone. But it also reminded me of Los Angeles, in the way it requires visitors to do their research to find the good stuff, and how it is so boldly and unapologetically built around the car.
The verdict? If EastEnders wanted to make fun of Milton Keynes, but that missed the mark. But to joke about the roundabouts or the soullessness of the city is to ignore that original, strange utopian vision behind the city. Milton Keynes is a paradox, a puzzle, a national oddity, and it is Anthony Spira of the MK Gallery who sums it up best.
“It’s very, very un-British,” he said. “And that makes it remarkable.”