ABSTRACT
This chapter locates Milton Keynes’ historical representations within a cultural history of landscape value traced through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This history is dominated by two main modes of value; the first of these locates cultural value and authority deriving from the ideal of tradition, from immemorialist and canonical historical norms. The second is a positivist idea of human interventionism as an absolute good, which is fundamentally open to the idea of value deriving from outside of precedent. Both of these attitudes have been entwined in imperial expansion, and also in postwar anxieties about declining national status; they also propose different modes of landscape value, depending on the relative role of human intervention as opposed to tradition. While traditionalist modes have consistently been prominent in British culture, the impact of the Second World War was to make a more interventionist social policy appear to be both desirable and necessary, even though the landscapes it created caused some contention. Milton Keynes was designated in 1967 within a context government recommitment to technocratic intervention, which sought to intervene on and correct earlier postwar urban planning as well as earlier historical models.
