Excerpt from 'From the Land of the Concrete Cow'
This extract is from the Chapter 'From the Land of the Concrete Cow' in Faithfulness in the City, published by Monad Press in 2003. Price £9.99. ISBN 0 907450 334
"If Tony Blair were a place, he'd be like Milton Keynes"
(The Independent, 4th July 1996)
There is of course a downside to this Utopianism, as quite accurately summed up in this 'insult' levelled at Mr Blair by a newspaper columnist when he was leader of the opposition. His detractor was attempting to expose (as he saw it) the blandness and inoffensiveness that lay behind the New Labour repacking; a political edifice built around a gleaming modern image, but with no depth or substance, Milton Keynes is like a gleaming new edifice. The city centre for example is a fairly brutal foray into linear and rectangular architecture; huge swathes of glass and concrete which can look beautiful when they reflect the changing light of the sky. And yet that is all they do. They simply reflect back what is going on outside, and in that sense the buildings are extraordinarily passive. You can't see any human intimacy or interaction going on behind the opaque glass. And as a recent visitor pointed out to me, cities built on glass look and feel insubstantial and fragile: there is little sense of the solidity, history and evolving tradition one gets with buildings made of stone and wood.
There is a lack of identifying cultural or architectural landmarks, to the extent that even the older villages are now neutralised in their power to evoke a sense of history by their schizophrenic juxtaposition within vast tracts of suburban, executive housing. You can venture out to the shopping centre (or one of the conveniently provided monster retail parks within the city boundaries) in your car, never seeing a person en route (because all the pedestrians and cyclists are separated from the grid system of roads, enjoy the anonymity of mass participation in the ritualised consumption of leisure and retailing, and return to your new home, perhaps nodding to your neighbour as you put the car back in your garage.
Meanwhile behind the immaculately landscaped dual carriageways lie isolated estates, built in the early days of Milton Keynes, almost all social housing, containing within them the usual clusters of factors associated with social exclusion: poor housing, lack of cheap and reliable public transport, low paid work, poor school attendance, higher health risks and high incidence of drug related crime. Within these estates the so-called 'problem families' and those requiring emergency housing are constantly recycled. For some citizens of Milton Keynes, access to the glittering cathedrals of life-style retail therapy is a myth, as is access to the socially balanced environment so dear to Howard's original vision.