ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the history of the most prominent symbols of Milton Keynes in British media and popular culture: the concrete public sculptures by Elizabeth Leyh who have become known as the “Concrete Cows”. These sculptures were products of Milton Keynes’ artist in residence programme, and reflect the participatory community art culture which MKDC had sought to encourage. The disproportionate national media coverage which these sculptures received, however, interpreted them as symbols of the inherent dysfunction and failure of the postwar state, and the inability of urban planning to create desirable, “organic” and “natural” landscapes. In this way, the representation of the Concrete Cows as laughable, ridiculous, and a “joke” formed part of a broader trend in British national media and political rhetoric, where broad understandings of postwar change were mapped into a singular representation of national decline which was leading into a potentially terminal crisis in the present. The Concrete Cows media coverage, in the immediate lead-up to the Winter of Discontent, indicates the extent to which media narratives of state functioning were implicated in the process of ideological change and in precluding the idea of interventionist urban planning as a political option during this period.
