ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the way in which Milton Keynes related to the broader political landscape of the 1980s, and the redefinitions of ideological and landscape norms which took place after the Winter of Discontent. Alongside the exceptionalist narratives discussed in Chapter 6, Milton Keynes also featured in a range of political debates during the 1980s around the idea of “the middle”, combining elements of an interest in political centrism, in the idea of political compromise or moderation, and the idea of a mundane, typical, or representative everyday landscape. These debates shaped the context in which postwar urban planned landscapes were reconfigured during a period in which the interventionism of the state was being recast as unacceptable, from both a Thatcherite economic perspective but also in terms of longer-term culturally conservative antipathies to newness which were reasserting themselves in late 1980s culture. While Milton Keynes was increasingly used as a touchstone to express compromise and political moderation, broader cultural antipathy to the idea of a new town as having value continued to limit the extent to which it could be seen as a typical or representative landscape.