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Book

Milton Keynes in British Culture

Book

Milton Keynes in British Culture

DOI link for Milton Keynes in British Culture

Milton Keynes in British Culture book

Imagining England

Milton Keynes in British Culture

DOI link for Milton Keynes in British Culture

Milton Keynes in British Culture book

Imagining England
ByLauren Pikó
Edition 1st Edition
First Published 2019
eBook Published 11 February 2019
Pub. Location London
Imprint Routledge
DOI https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429444807
Pages 230
eBook ISBN 9780429444807
Subjects Built Environment, Humanities
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Pikó, L. (2019). Milton Keynes in British Culture: Imagining England (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429444807

ABSTRACT

The new town of Milton Keynes was designated in 1967 with a bold, flexible social vision to impose "no fixed conception of how people ought to live." Despite this progressive social vision, and its low density, flexible, green urban design, the town has been consistently represented in British media, political rhetoric and popular culture negatively. as a fundamentally sterile, paternalistic, concrete imposition on the landscape, as a "joke", and even as "Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire". How did these meanings develop at such odds from residents' and planners' experiences? Why have these meanings proved so resilient?

 

Milton Keynes in British Culture traces the representations of Milton Keynes in British national media, political rhetoric and popular culture in detail from 1967 to 1992, demonstrating how the town's founding principles came to be understood as symbolic of the worst excesses of a postwar state planning system which was falling from favour. Combining approaches from urban planning history, cultural history and cultural studies, political economy and heritage studies, the book maps the ways in which Milton Keynes' newness formed an existential challenge to ideals of English landscapes as receptacles of tradition and closed, fixed national identities. Far from being a marginal, "foreign" and atypical town, the book demonstrates how the changing political fortunes of state urban planned spaces were a key site of conflict around ideas of how the British state should function, how its landscapes should look, and who they should be for.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

chapter 1|24 pages

Landscape value in modern Britain

chapter 2|28 pages

The Plan for Milton Keynes, 1967–1972

chapter 3|19 pages

The post-tower-block city? 1972–1975

chapter 4|19 pages

Mirroring England, mirroring decline, 1976–1978

chapter 5|15 pages

The Concrete Cows, 1978–1979

chapter 6|24 pages

“You’ve never seen anything like it”

The aspirational turn, 1979–1986

chapter 7|18 pages

Milton Keynes and “the middle”, c. 1980–1989

chapter 8|18 pages

The wind-up, c. 1986–1992

chapter |11 pages

Conclusion

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