The Free City

The main focus of this chapter, the new town of Milton Keynes, sits somewhat uneasily in this book. An hour by train to the north west of London, straddling two existing Buckinghamshire towns, Wolverton and Bletchley, it does not physically resemble any of the other places I describe. Centreless (at least in popular perception) and, with the one exception of the central shopping mall, architecturally unspectacular, it might well seem to mark a retreat from the urban rather than an accession to it. To the architectural historian Kenneth Frampton it was no more than a ‘collection of more or less well-designed housing estates’, which is to say, not a city at all (Frampton 1992: 286). Certainly, it resists those things that have lately become commonsense urban thinking: the idea of centre, the architectural spectacle, the neighbourhood, the pedestrian, the street café. ¹ The architecture that exists is for the most part inward-looking and self-effacing, and it was only in the mid-1990s, with the construction of a cultural quarter on its central axis that the city developed any sense of spectacle. ² It could be said with justification that it belongs to an earlier age of garden cities and post-war new towns, in which issues such as air quality and sanitation created a desire to decant urban populations into the quasi-countryside where such things could be better managed. After half a century of the NHS and of clean air, the old cities are not of themselves especially harmful places to live, and some of their oldest and grimiest parts have seen their populations modestly revive. New towns, after the gloomy experience of Skelmersdale, of Runcorn, of Cumbernauld – and internationally of Brasília and Chandigargh – are out of favour (Brett 1980; Bendixson and Platt 1992; Glendinning and Muthesisus 1994).