Name of collection Understanding

Contributors name: Contributors name: Katy Lock Liz McFall

Contributors name: Emeritus Professor Allan Cochrane

Contributors name: Roger Kitchen

Contributors name: Stuart Turner

Contributors name: Tim Skelton

Contributors name: Lee Shostak

Contributors name: Will Cousins

Contributors name: Ray Merrington

Contributors name: David Lock

Contributors name: Ian Revell

Contributors name: Theo Chalmers What do people normally say when you tell them you're from Milton Keynes?

I tend to get this look of pity, like, oh, you're from Milton Keynes. Because people don't really-- I think people think-- its really cliché-- they think roundabouts and concrete cows.

People say, oh, yeah, I know Milton Keynes. Roundabouts and concrete cows.

Concrete cows. [LAUGHS] And roundabouts.

Roundabouts and concrete cows.

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The New Towns program enabled the delivery of 32 new communities across the UK. It was a really ambitious program of house-building which was designed to provide the nation with a new future which it desperately needed following the ravages of the Second World War. But the New Towns program had actually been conceived and developed before peacetime had begun.

There's a history of New Towns that goes way back into the beginning of the 20th century, and maybe even before. So it's not a brand new post-War, post 1945 set of initiatives. So there's a whole, if you like, international movement associated with New Towns which has lots of different strands to it. Certainly, there was there was an English strand to it associated with Ebenezer Howard, who developed the Garden City movement, really, back in the-- well, back right at the beginning of the 20th century, and took it further.

Following the Garden Cities, at Letchworth and Welwyn and, in the interwar years, the program of a council house-building which had taken place.

And it's interesting, because in the '20s and '30s, the whole movement had lots of interaction, lots of people talking to each other, lots of different ideas, lots of ways of approaching, trying to understand what on Earth ought to be done. You had, well, more private sector-led New Towns, which were more like what you had in Britain and England, really, with Garden Cities. You had special sort of New Towns being thought about in the context of fascist Italy and in the context of the US.

So all of this was going on. It was rich. There was a lot of interaction between different sort of architects, planners, and so on, often with all sorts of very different ideas and different ways of thinking. I think one of the things that's really interesting about how one tackles the new terms in that sort of historical context is just thinking about new terms, in a way, we're about thinking about the utopia of the everyday-- every day, somehow, thinking through how people would live in the everyday in urban settings or, in some cases, in sort of post-urban settings. That was the way it came together.

But New Towns, in that context, were attempts, if you like, to plan for the growth that it was felt to be necessary, to plan for resolving some of the problems that were associated with, supposedly, the mass of the old cities, the way that the old cities, everything was on top of each other. Everything was clustered. Everything was overcrowded.

There were dreadful problems of agglomeration, supposedly, industrially and in terms of-- and socially, and in terms of housing.

Basically, when we first started building, we were building houses for Londoners who were being brought out from pretty bad housing conditions.

And that was the idea. New Towns were supposed to be part of solving that problem, but by doing it, planning it, thinking about it on a regional basis. And then, within the New Towns, the aim was always to think of ways of having connected communities, but also to have it around new industrial formations.

So there had been a lot of work going on during the war about what was going to take place once peacetime arrived. And the New Towns program happened extremely quickly. In 1946, the New Towns Act was passed, and within a matter of months. the first New Town at Stevenage had been designated.

The New Towns program enabled the delivery of 32 New Towns across the United Kingdom, which today provide homes for over 2.8 million people. It was delivered in three phases and enabled the delivery of 21 new towns in England alone. Milton Keynes was part of the third wave of New Towns, between 1967 and 1970. MK was designated in 1967. And it therefore benefited from a whole period of learning from the New Towns that had preceded it. And that's really evident in the way it was designed and masterplanned.

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Well, there was pressure, particularly on County Council, to do its bit in terms of having a New Town in their county. And, obviously, the Southern part was very precious, very rich, and everything else. I'm being very cynical here. [LAUGHS] But the North, the agricultural land, was-- it was fairly flat. And also, it was not seen as top-grade.

Buckinghamshire County Council set about doing its own plan. And this was the thing that was called Pooleyville, named after Fred Pooley, who was the chief architect and planner. And his assistant, a chap called Bill Berrett, was literally sent into a room for two or three weeks to come up with this plan. And this was the plan that had the monorail in it, the fixed monorail.

And the problem they had was that they were a county council trying to bear the cost of the New Town. They went to the government and said, look, would you, if you like, be our bankers here? Or would you give us loans? Or would you take the risk out of this?

And the government basically thought, well, why should we do that? If we're going to do anything, we're going to have control of it ourselves. And so they decided to appoint a development corporation. They were not going to go for this fixed monorail sort of system. And so they did the plan, and they came up with these two green books, The Plan of Milton Keynes, within which were these very clear goals.

The six goals-- opportunity and freedom of choice, easy movement and access, and good communications, balance and variety, an attractive city, public awareness and participation, and the sixth one, efficient and imaginative use of resources.

And these-- so that from the word go, Milton Keynes had a very clear vision of the kind of place that it wanted to be. It was the biggest of any of the New Towns in Britain in terms of its scale, and one could argue, in retrospect, probably the boldest in terms of the way that it set about doing things.

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New Town Development Corporations were set up under the New Towns Act in 1946 as government bodies to build New Towns. And so they had the planning authority on land that they owned, subject to government approval of plans and things like that. So they had the ability to buy land, secure planning permission or grant planning permission on it, and, if necessary, develop it themselves.

They appointed Lord Campbell of Eskan, a socialist peer-- been to Eton, worked in the family firm with Booker McConnell. Had gone out to the West Indies with their sugar plantations. Been very affected by the importance of decent social housing. And so he was a very idealistic kind of person.

The first general manager of Milton Keynes Development Corporation was Walter Ismay. He was deputy chairman and managing director, and he was appointed by John Campbell. He helped create the development corporation. He was a well- organized man and well-meaning, but he had no experience at all in building housing or building cities.

And so John Campbell, the rest of the board decided that they needed to recruit a new man or woman to look after the department process itself. And so they looked around the New Towns movement, learned about a chap called Fred Llloyd Roche, who was then running the development program at Runcorn New Town, and John Campbell recruited him to Milton Keynes.

Roche initially is the director of design and production, and then general manager, was charged with running the development program. And that's why he was recruited to the development corporation. Roach recruited Derek Walker as chief architect and planning officer to then recruit a very large, talented, multi-national team of architects and designers to design and secure the construction of Milton Keynes.

A lot has been written about the success of a developer corporation where you have control over the land, and you have control over the finances and the budget, and you have control over the making of the plans. So there is this sort of totalitarianism that goes with any big, big project.

The risks, of course, in many of that is about whether or not that is intrinsically against democracy, or free speech, or open speech. But I think the judgement call of the government of the day was to give that power and that influence to a group of people that were here around the Development Corporation.

At the time, you had a significant group of people, all with the clear belief and a commitment in creating a city. Now that, in itself, was quite unique.

And it was multidisciplinary working, which meant that architects, and planners, and landscape architects, engineers, economists, sociologists, everybody-- commercial team-- all worked together.

Myself, I was a chartered surveyor, so I was rubbing shoulders all the time, because I sat next to them, the architects and the engineers, so that we knew that if we'd had a meeting with a developer and offered him a piece of land, and when his scheme came in, we understood immediately what the concerns were, because these people were all my close working colleagues.

There was quite-- there was a lot of diversity, a lot of differences of opinion, and quite a lot of disagreement about certain things, about what it is you should do. And I think that created quite a-- first, it was quite an exciting, and creative, and stimulating environment, really.

We argue-- I mean, that was what was-- there was this tension, if you like, within the corporation between the architects, the planners, the commercial people, social development, and so on. But all of those people were after one thing-- making a great place.

Under those powers, it gave us the opportunity to think at that scale. And that was particularly important.

So every everything that you were planning was being built. It was very instant feedback.

You could actually have an idea that your department might sign off for-- a particular cheap housing scheme, or something like that-- and you could actually get a decision within, probably, a fortnight at the most as to whether you were to run with it. And that was actually fantastic.

And we talk about local government bureaucracy, but although, after the Corporation, when I left in '89, I always worked in the private sector, none of the organizations I worked for were ever as good as that in terms of administration, and everybody within the organization knowing the message and knowing what's happening.

No, I think that one of the things I would be very complimentary when talking about the Development Corporation is virtually all of their ideas have stood the test of time. And I think my disappointments are related to times when those ideas have been thrown out.

And interestingly, the number of people who were involved as planners and makers of the city are still here today, because they've made a great place. And I think we're crying out-- it's interesting. We've gone over and built these towns in China, Nigeria, wherever. They're all the spawning of Milton Keynes all over these countries, and other New Towns over there. But they can't bite the bullet and say, this is what we need to do.

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Llewelyn Davies, Weeks, Forester, Walker and Bohr were appointed as the master planners for Milton Keynes by Milton Keynes Development Corporation. They were appointed in September, 1967. Prior to that appointment, Richard Llewellyn Davies, the senior partner, and John Campbell had a period of pretty extensive discussions, both socially-- because they knew one another through the Labour Party-- and then in preparation for the plan from Milton Keynes. Some of those discussions-- all of them, really-- were informal, because there was a proper, competitive procurement process that the Development Corporation undertook in order to appoint the master planners.

When Llewelyn Davies were appointed, they started work in September of 1967, and the plan was finished by and published in March 1970. There are two different ways of looking at the appointment and the process of preparing the Master Plan. One way is that it was a competitive process, and then the Development Corporation board members-- John Campbell and the other board members-- worked on a collaborative basis for over two years to prepare the Master Plan. Another way of looking at it is that John Campbell knew what he was going to buy from Llewellyn Davies almost before they started, and the plan that they were going to buy was a grid road structure as you see in Milton Keynes today, not the proposals by Fred Pooley.

What is not widely known is that two years before they were appointed, Llewelyn Davies had prepared a Master Plan for Washington New Town, and that plan is remarkably similar to the plan for Milton Keynes. So you could say that Llewelyn Davies were strongly wedded to the grid road structure. John Campbell knew that was the case and appointed them accordingly.

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The original idea for Milton Keynes, this is the grid layout. This comes from the West Coast of America in the '60s, and work by Melvyn Webber, who came up with the phrase-- I think he came up with the phrase-- "community without propinquity," which was based on the fact we draw our friends from, not our neighbors, but our peer groups.

For a long time-- certainly since 1946-- the British New Towns had been developed on the neighborhood model. This had been going right back to Victorian model villages and all that, the idea that you could measure, in the walking distance of a human being, that there should be the school, the village shop, and all that, and that the neighborhood was the module on which you would build up big towns and cities.

This was a physically determined dimension, OK. They did it with feet, and then later with bicycles, and then with cars. But it was the idea that your dream scenario is that everything you need is within range, and that's your neighborhood, and then there would be a bus in the middle of the neighborhood that would take you to a town center where you'd get bigger things. What Melvin Webber exposed in his writings, and why he was brought in here, as I understand it, is that he was a bit of a pioneer in observing that in the modern world, life isn't like that anymore, not with the accessibility of the car and other forms of transport, but with television and radio-- and of course, he was writing before the ubiquity of the iPhone, cellular phones, and so on-- that people's life patterns are no longer physically constrained in that way.

I like the fact-- I mean, I live in Bletchley, and I work in central Milton Keynes-- I like the fact that, with very occasional exception, I can be from my home to my office in 15 minutes. And that's what's in my brain. I know if I've got to get to a meeting, or I've got to be on business with somebody, it's 15 minutes from the center to just about anywhere.

Whether to-- as I read his work, and as he had effect on those planners, was to say we do have to make physical arrangements for people, and so thinking about neighborhood structures is quite good as a foundation, of course, but in real life, that is only part of the story. And we have to design a system of open-edged networks, because there will be infinite patterns in the way people go about their lives. And they will change week by week, season by season as they go through the year.

That was a profoundly good observation. It sounds so obvious now. It was picked up by the master planners, and it was a very intelligent way of thinking about designing a city. Today, we have recurrence of a very repressive fashion of urban design, people trying to reinvent self-containment-- a stupid concept in Britain. It's too small.

Towns that have everything within them, neighborhood planning, urban compression. High densities, where people all walk and get together, that is trying to reinvent a way of life which is long, long gone. The lifestyle for people was like that, people might be happy to dwell in places and inhabitations such as that, but their life patterns aren't contained in that way. They're all over the place. So you have to design a city which can cope with infinite choice and variety.

It's polycentric. Not everybody gets in their car or bus in the morning and goes to the center, like in traditional cities.

There was another thing that was quite clearly floating around, which was associated with some of the early thinking-- at least some of the early presentation of the thinking-- which was associated with people like Melvin Webber from California. Because he had a way of thinking in which he was stressing the notion of the non- place urban realm-- in other words, the ability to have urban spaces which weren't defined by being rooted in basic communities.

What mattered was you could have community not just by being close to each other, but also by structuring networks and so on. And that's actually quite important, I think, in ways of thinking about today, in some respects, because I don't think community can be reduced to place. But it was quite interesting to think about, how do you bear that in mind when you're developing a new city? This is an anathema to design of modern cities, or modern villages and towns where high density is encouraged. But on a city scale, I wonder whether that is right. And I tried to see if there's any statistical information on this.

And the closest I got was the Community Foundation did some research about the number of clubs and societies there are here. And there are an astonishing number-- far more than you'd expect elsewhere. So there's really a wonderful piece research we've done. And is this actually the best way to build a city?

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Tell us something about this city.

Well, it's going to take between 15 and 20 years to build up to a population of 1/4 of a million-- which, incidentally, is the biggest New Town or New City previously planned in the Western world. When we started, there were 40,000 people living in the designated area, so 210,000 people have to come in. Houses have to be provided for them, jobs provided, roads, infrastructure, schools, hospitals, arts, recreation-- all have to go together for 210,000 people coming in over, as I say, from 15 to 20 years.

It will be a very open city. It will be built at low densities, about 10 houses to the acre. In the building schemes, there will be a lot of open spaces. The roads will be heavily landscaped, with wide reservations of land beside them. The areas of employment will be very diffused indeed. Even in the central area of Milton Keynes, what used to be called the city center, I think the plane trees there will be the highest features in the landscape.

I think one of the great things about Milton Keynes's design, its legacy, is that it did, in one sense, throw away the rulebook.

Within the New Town itself, there has constantly been a series of debates around what sort of community you can construct. How do you construct communities? How do you make communities where people live together, work together, and define themselves by their relationship with each other?

Many of the previous New Towns-- and, certainly, the Garden Cities-- perhaps hadn't quite had to confront issues of car ownership, and mobility, and transport planning. So Milton Keynes set about doing something quite different.

How are ordinary people going to live their lives? That's a fundamental question which can get missed in some of the big, grandiose plans that you sometimes see with urban megaprojects of one sort or another. But I think it's fundamental to understanding how cities work. I think movement around cities is another issue that really needs to be thought about very carefully, very seriously, when you're thinking about any sort of development.

And then, throwing away the rulebook, in most cities, where, if you think about those cities that have grown, certainly, over millennia, human beings-- pedestrians, cyclists, buses, and cars-- share the same thoroughfare. And in Milton Keynes, there was a conscious decision to segregate that. They also set about segregating cycle movement from vehicle movements and think about the cycleways.

I think the nature of the housing is quite important. What sort of housing mix do you want? How do you think about what that might be? And there are different houses at different times, but how do you cluster those houses around certain sorts of social amenities, commercial amenities, and so on is really important.

And when building a city, you build with that the obligation to provide schools and all the community facilities that a growing community needs.

There's another thing that I think, in practice, has to be thought about quite hard when you think about urban development, which is, in a way, what's it for for other reasons? It's quite easy to get trapped into a situation where you just focus on housing. And I think the question is always, how does that relate to whatever sorts of new economic and industrial formations might be emerging?

So when we're looking at master planning, in that sense, you're looking at, clearly, the disposition of homes. But an example here, which is Great Hove, the original plan for that. There's a sort of a pictorial sketch which shows the rough form of landscape and structure of it. But it's accompanied by a land use plan. And in that land use plan, you'll see it has parcels for different types of residential development-- family homes and, maybe, different tenure.

There are interesting questions there if you're thinking about new development, I think, which is, are you losing something from what you got in those older cities? What are the lessons? Sometimes, the lessons that have been taken feel like they're rather paradoxical. Because actually, it turns out that people quite like living close to each other. It turns out that people actually have begun to move back into the urban areas that previously everybody said they wanted to move out.

I think it's important to understand the way in which Milton Keynes was, also, conceived of as a regional center. It was never just a place that was plunked down in the middle of Buckinghamshire, or the North of Buckinghamshire. It was always conceived of as being somehow part of a wider pattern in the southeast in terms of the development of settlements. It was a place to which some people were supposed to be able to come from London, and indeed, that's what happened. I mean, most of the people, movers, were from London, and it was supposed to provide better housing for them.

But it was also supposed to be, if you like-- and this is there in some of the early writings-- almost the capital of the subregion, a place which would allow the development of that knowledge industry that everybody still talks about. And I think that's actually quite important. And in that sense, the networks, the connections, the roads in and through Milton Keynes, were as important, almost, as the roads that were there in Milton Keynes.

[MUSIC PLAYING] What the role of community development was-- and we also had arrivals workers that would visit people within the first week or two of them moving in with information and and offering help-- it was to sort of make that whole process of settling in, making friends, setting up groups, building community, if you like, a lot easier. And I was with a colleague called Margaret Liva. She was the arrivals worker. I was this young, very idealistic sort of I'm going to change the world sort of 25, 26-year-old. And we were in, at the very first, if you like, rental estate.

When you plant a new community in an open space, even here, where we had three towns and 13 villages until we planted them on the edges of those existing communities so they had some kind of thing to lean on, of course, then, the baggage of a neighborhood takes a little time to develop. A lot of what we're used to in our industrial cities took 200 years to develop. We're trying to do this in two weeks or something.

And to allow for the fact that it would take time for schools and community meeting places, literally, to be funded, designed, and built-- and they were all being funded yeah -- this excellent idea was developed. From day one, they would take a house, like a rented house if they were building houses for rent, or they'd buy a house or have a house as a part of a deal from a house builder if it was a private estate. And the house, or two houses knocked together, would be made a community house. And this would be the draft neighborhood center or community hall where mothers and toddlers would meet, and where the aerobic group, and the Pilates, and the Boy Scouts, and the Cubs, and the Brownies, and all the other sort of people would meet.

And they were a place not only where we had our offices, but where you could have small meetings. I mean, they were just ordinary domestic houses.

I merely observed that. I wasn't in the social development department. But I was really sympathetic and to tuned in to what they were doing. And they were often teased, and insulted, and provoked by architects and engineers who didn't get all that soft stuff. But I knew then, and it is confirmed with the passage of time, that what they were doing was equally as important as roads, and sewers, and architecture.

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And a driver which these two books tell us came very much from the chairman, Lord Jock Campbell, socialist peer, is that this should be a city that would have a place for everybody. And this idea of inclusivity was, I know, driven from him personally. He's written a lot about his person-- he did write a lot about his personal life, background as the owner of sugar plantations, trying to help the workers, and so on. Good, good. Good dude.

That was one of the things about Lord Campbell, I think. Because of his experience, he believed in social development. And he gave that. And that, within the plan, that's got a high-- the whole development of community activities, trying to get people to settle in quickly.

Because general social design was that everybody should benefit, but it's important to note that this was the last of a whole range of New Towns since 1946 in England, and-- sorry, in Great Britain. And there had been criticisms of the New Towns that they were only attracting healthy, young, white people. And so-- who were skilled and talented.

And it's hard to believe now, but there was a lot of sensitivity in building a New Town, starting a New Town in 1967, that didn't want to be criticized for that. And so considerable effort and special arrangements were made to encourage a diverse population in terms of age group, with a special arrangement that you could bring your mum and dad to come with you.

You got a job here, you got a house, a job, and there were some houses with little bungalows at the bottom of the garden where mum and dad could come and live with you, see? Live on this-- not with you, but down the bottom of the garden-- close enough, you know? And then for people to come here, and get training, and then get a job.

And I think what we did reasonably well-- what we did do well-- was to provide the basis for a city. What we couldn't do-- and it's a bit like having the framework, the skeleton-- but what we couldn't do is, necessarily, to put all the flesh on it straightaway. And that was only something that would build over time. So putting the color, if you like, into the city was that cultural diversity. And that goes back to its heritage. When you look at the older cities, that was about the heritage and that cultural diversity.

Now, that's what we're capturing, and I think that that's what we're, certainly, focusing on and I'm very conscious of all the time 50 years on. But that's where the richness and that's where the real value of a city and the wealth of a city will build.

It's also important to recognize, in the case of Milton Keynes, that it was, as I said earlier, partly a product of a particular moment of social democracy, of almost the challenges to welfare at the time. But it was an attempt to see what could be done which would produce a relatively fair, equal space which was not characterized by massive amounts of inequality or massive amounts of poverty.

There clearly was a strong policy in terms of public housing, affordable housing.

In those early days, one of the goals of Milton Keynes was that it should be 50% housing for sale, 50% housing for rent. It was going to be-- one of the goals was a balanced city, and one of that was in terms of balance in terms of class.

And it was felt that 50/50 would be an appropriate mix, because what we wanted to achieve was a balanced community. So alongside people who were happy to rent or didn't have the ability to buy were the people who had the ability to buy. And so-- but then, of course, things changed with the election of the Conservative government in 1979. Rental housing was basically scrapped.

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The pivot point in the growth of this city's short life-- it's only 50 years old-- but a pivot point was in 1979 when Mrs. Thatcher got elected. Up until then, Milton Keynes was being developed from 1967 to 1979 on lowercase socialist principles-- the common good for the common man, in a very generous, and open, and imaginative, and creative way.

What we had to do, at the Developer Corporation-- and I was there then-- is we had to switch almost overnight from being a wonderful exhibition of what small s "socialistic" planning can achieve in the modern age-- because it was already turning into a success-- we had to convert overnight to being a shining example of private enterprise and private investment. Credit goes to Lee Shostak, who was the planning director at the time, wrote a paper for the executive management team called--

--"Here Comes Maggie: What Are We Going To Do?" In that paper, I suggested that it would be likely that a new Conservative government might even want to review the future of Milton Keynes, but almost certainly would expect more of Milton Keynes to be funded by private investors, for more of the housing to be built for owner occupation, cutting back the amount of social housing that we built, and generally expect the city-- if it wished the city to continue-- to stand more on its own two feet and not be dependent on public expenditure for its ongoing development program.

So they set up a private housing unit to make us the hottest place to build houses for sale. I mean, building houses for rent, or houses for lease, that stopped overnight. She stopped that. Now we have to build housing for-- invented shared ownership housing- - which is now commonly done all over the country. We had to find some way of getting people into housing who couldn't afford to buy them regularly.

So shared ownership was invented in housing plots, for you to build your own house or have somebody build your house for you. 16% of Milton Keynes is done by plots. Not many people know that. This all had to be done to shift this balance around and present us as a shining example of enterprise.

And weren't they clever? Because Mrs. Thatcher visited, I think it was twice. I think she opened a shopping building or something like that. I don't know what it was; she did something important here, which two years earlier, or a year earlier would have been, she would have wanted to wash her mouth out if somebody had said to here, "Milton Keynes." It was representing everything she hated, a great public project. And yet, in a very short time, we managed to turn it so that she was pleased to be here. This is a go-getting place. I like this.

For a conservative government of the sort of free enterprise Stamp Milton Keynes fitted really well by the '80s and the '90s. It looked like a place which was dynamic, which was growing, which was showing how it could do things and was not tied up in all the sort of state-driven failure of some of the older cities, which were seen to be under the control of dangerous left-wing Labour authorities, or even just boring Labour authorities.

And actually, recognizing that Milton Keynes was a good thing to show off to people, with foreign companies working here and things like that. It was a good advert for Britain. So political fortune did-- to get back to your question-- did, affect the way Milton Keynes was laid out, because we then had to then lean, from 1979 onwards, on the private sector as the primary investor. We weren't allowed to borrow so much money from the government, weren't allowed to carry out so much development as a corporation. The corporation itself got wound up prematurely, the town far too young to lose its corporation. And a lot of good things started to fade away.

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The grid roads were-- there was space deliberately left to extend the grid roads out into the open countryside. Not saying it should be extended, but if it made sense, that if we wanted to extend, then the flexibility should be there. And what has happened is, over the-- well, probably, about 15 years ago, at about the turn of the Millennium, I guess, the people-- there were people who felt that Milton Keynes should be more like everywhere else.

Things have happened that I bitterly regret-- like, for instance, planning permission for the Western Expansion Area. Now, the Western Expansion Area is a development on the Western side of Milton Keynes the size of that has no grid roads and that basically forms a permanent block on the side of our city. And there's a similar one on the Eastern Expansion Area.

We did go through a rather bad period, which we're only just escaping from as a city, I mean, where those in charge quite lost the plot and tried to convert Milton Keynes into a post-industrial city, designed in a completely different way. And so a lot of the flexibilities that were in the original plan have been shut off by those ignorant interventions. And we will be cursed by those ignorances forever.

They're the ones who were giving powers to destroy the nub ends of the grid roads so they couldn't be expanded, or they'd turn them into what they called city streets. Now, city streets have been a huge failure, because they got speed humps. They've got the roadways are basically the pavements.

They've got houses right on those pavements. Instead of the houses being set back tens of yards behind trees, they're now right on the pavement. They've actually, on the extension of Chaffron Way, which is the H7 in the East, where it's called Countess Way, they've now had to ban lorries from it. That's how appallingly it works. And there are lots of other examples right across the city where they've destroyed its infinite expandability.

And I think it's a great shame that they've been going away from that with the expansion areas in recent years. I think that's a huge mistake. And I think not bringing the grid roads into those new expansion areas as well is also a huge mistake.

And the decision to do away with the extension of, sorry, to close off the middle of Mid-Summer Boulevard and Fourth. Very short-sighted. Obviously, so I think what I understand about it is it's some of the original ideas have been lost, rather than the original ideas have failed to do what they were expected to do. And this is now accepted, that it was a mistake, I think. And in the city center, some of the-- in one area, underpasses were filled in, which is crazy. But it happened. But again, it has been accepted that actually, the plan was a robust one.

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Yeah, it's just kind of, a, as you say, a grid system-- left, right, straight on, left, right, straight on.

Not good for your tires. [LAUGHING] So you've always told me.

I think the grid system is brilliant, and if I have one concern, it's that the developments are not sticking to that system.

As someone who doesn't live here, I still need my satnav to get to places.

I find them so easy to navigate. I can tell exactly where I am by which roundabout.

And if I go off track, [LAUGHS], I don't know where I am. I have stopped using the satnav now, and now I can get to work, the supermarket, and my gym, and back to the M1. But if I have to go anywhere else, I have to use a satnav, and I just get so lost, because everywhere just looks the same.

And roundabouts actually don't look that similar to each other once you get to know the place a bit better.

Because we like to walk in Barcelona. You walk to everywhere. And you simply wanted to walk from the coachway bus station to the Milton center. And we were lost.

And certainly, as I was growing up, I would sit in the front seat of my dad's car and learn where we were going, and work out where we were going, and go, oh, could we go this way, or can we go that way instead? So I saw the logic of it quite quickly.

My Auntie, one time, she drove me back from , and she went the wrong way up the road. And I'm like, no, no, no. This side. And she goes-- no, but she don't understand the roads around here either.

So you have to change the way you think about a city's roads in your head, but it's really good. There's always more than one way to get somewhere.

Well, if you've gone wrong, there's going to be another roundabout in a minute. You can turn around.

And so the road system is just a load of letters and numbers, and it took me years to understand where I was going, because there are no landmarks.

I was told when I first came here, it would take you about six months until you understand what the V the H roads are-- the streets and the ways. So out of-- from the planning of the city, I suppose in one respect, the sort of quintessential referencing that this is a planned city is that you've got the identity of grid roads either having an H or a V because they come off a plan-- off a plan which is directly on a drawing board, which is either lines that run horizontal or lines that run vertical.

And then, when you get it, you're kind of-- you have that moment where you go, oh, I understand how it works. And it's a bit like that. It kind of gets into you after it becomes part of your being. You work out how you fit in and how all the places fit. And then you know where you are. You're never lost.

You planned more than one grid square at a time. You looked at five or six. And those grid squares were being designed as a piece. And in doing so, we were then looking at the structure of a main local route that between that ran between all of those grid squares.

So it would be wrong, I think, in my mind, to think of the idea of a grid square being self-contained, being seen or conceived as a village.

I think an important part of the segregation is this concept of it being a tartan grid. So you think about the idea that a Scottish tartan is a series of grids overlaid on one another to create a pattern that enables-- so the blue lines running through one might be mean that's where the cars are. The green is where the park system is, and the red is where the cycle network is.

I mean, it's really interesting, because you'd think, with having all these grid squares, which are surrounded almost like by little moats of grid roads, that you think people would stay . isolated but it doesn't-- it's not like that.

Yeah, I think it creates a lot of little communities for the different people, but I think even though it's a grid system, it doesn't really separate some places out that much, because a lot of people have links.

And I think it's quite interesting that with different groups of people, different communities, some do actually see that and feel confident about that idea. Others are not so worried about it, because they move across the whole of the city and take out what's important to them in terms of their own recreation, their own leisure, where they work, where they shop. So there's no fixed pattern of how people behave.

The important bit about the grid system and the network of landscape that went with it is that it was-- you could say it was almost, in many respects, a single-purpose piece of infrastructure. It was really about the free-flowing vehicle movement in a beautifully landscaped setting. And it's not the most convivial place to be either a cyclist or a pedestrian. And in many respects, there's no reason to be there, because there's nothing on the grid road network that would make you, necessarily, want to walk along it.

But the consequence of that is that you need to, in a city of this size, find ways of crossing it. And it was either crossed by bridges-- which are usually pretty successful if the topography allows it. So where the road, the grid road is suppressed in the land, and the bridges run across relatively smoothly in terms of existing ground level, that works.

Or, you have to go underneath them, which are underpasses. And I think one of the important bits about the Milton Keynes experience from earlier New Towns is the knowledge that underpasses, even at that time in the early '70s, were regarded as being pretty inhospitable and unfriendly places, mostly because you couldn't see through them, or they were narrow. But the important bit about the Milton Keynes underpass standard was it was generous.

The work that was done to make sure that they were more open, they were all manageable, they were much, much friendlier in terms of separating carriageways, so you had natural light coming through the middle.

It was generous in width, and it was also generous in terms of its visual approach, in order for you to be able to see through from one side of the grid road to the other.

They brought buildings and housing right through, close to that footpath.

And you felt your journey was going to be secure and safe.

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A feature of the Master Plan is to distinguish between the corridors of movement, cross-city corridors of movement, which residents share, but so do visitors and passers-through, and the actual places where people live and work. And a feature of the master plan of this lazy grid idea of city corridors for movement was to distinguish between these two populations-- people rushing by, and people going about their daily lives.

And so the grid road, with its adjoining landscaping and earth mounding, was designed, it is said, specifically to shield the daily life of the city and its people from the noise and air pollution of fast movement, OK? And we go about our lives. We go to school. We go to work. And we only engage with that rush stuff if we want to rush. And when we finish rushing, we dive in and move back down to the local slow, OK? And so it works very well for us.

But I can see why people from outside come here and think, well, I can't actually see the markers. The traditional markers of the urban are not here.

But you know, when you get lost in an unfamiliar city, you can kind of look around and get a sense of where the center might be. Milton Keynes isn't really like that, and we're not used to-- sorry, we're not used to navigating spaces that way. And I think because of that, it makes it much easier for them to just use dual carriageways to go back and forth between the station and never do anything different. So they end up with lots of illusions and snobberies about the place.

So I used to have people that would come and visit me that would come off the M1 and fly through the M1 and out the other side, and phone me and say, you know, we missed your office. And then, where are you? Oh, you're heading towards Buckingham. Because they're expecting everything to be slow, everything to be like other cities, where it gets slower, and slower, and slower. But of course, in Milton Keynes, it's like that.

For visitors, however-- who fly by-- all they get to see, apart of the glimpses of schools, and factories, and office blocks, which were meant-- and local shopping centers, I mean, which were meant to be exposed. Not schools, but were meant to be exposed, no planting there, was that way finding if anything else, and they want to attract people in, but they couldn't work out, well, you never see anybody.

That was an act of conscious design. I think it's one of the features of the Plan of Milton Keynes, is these, the city grid roads. They're called "city roads," but everybody called them grid roads, colloquially. They are like parkways of Frank Lloyd Wright's visionary plan. And they are a kind of road which we don't have much of in the United Kingdom. We do have some, but they're basically generous boulevards, only with great landscaping.

And in Melbourne, where we have an office, they have great boulevards like that, and a tram down the middle, which we don't have. And they have buildings fronting this hugely wide boulevard. But the boulevards are so wide, it's OK to live there, because it's spacious and the noise is not crushed in. Still, they have problems, though, with noise and air quality.

So here, the idea is dealing with all that. And so it's like Richard Lodge's architecture. You put the plumbing of the city is working out on the grid roads, yeah? But the life of the city is on an alternative grid of local roads here. It confuses outsiders, and it confuses visiting consultants and analysts who-- they come here with their baggage of normal expectations about towns, particularly industrial and post-industrial, and they don't know what they're looking at.

So wave after wave come here, strangers, and they want to get everybody living back, they want frontage housing on grid roads. Hold on! That's the very thing that we don't want to create here. Those conditions exist in old towns because they were originally for stagecoaches and horses, and people hate living on those noisy streets.

So this kind of weirdness about Milton Keynes, that you're on and off grids fairly quickly. So when you're on the grids, you can't see the spaces that are off the grids. That's the way the city was designed.

And so I think the people who live here, we understand the urban markers of the place, even as others don't.

City roads, here, are deliberate pieces of design-- and clever pieces, mind-- and are meant to be like that. And the fact that you could drive through Milton Keynes-- certainly the original core area-- and see very little of local life is a deliberate design intention, and jolly nice it is, too.

But it comes at a price. And this is my point, again, about the-- you know. And when they were making those plans, they were making conscious trade-offs. They also-- I think the devil's in the detail. They made decisions about how people move traffic around the city based upon traffic engineering principles rather than, necessarily, what it was like to be a pedestrian.

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So the inventor of the Garden City-- he called himself an inventor, Ebenezer Howard, 1899-- he said there is the town, there is a country, what we need is the marriage of the two-- the town-country mix. And there's a famous diagram he did of the three magnets-- the magnet pulling into the countryside, the magnet pulling into the town, and then there's a town-country magnet, the Garden City, you see. "The marriage of town and country," is what he called it.

Whether Milton Keynes is a Garden City is actually quite a complex question. Of all of the New Towns which were direct descendants of the Garden City movement, Milton Keynes is probably one of the closest to the model.

Well, I mean, my background wasn't specifically committee work. I used to work in horticulture and all of that sort of stuff. That's what was my training. And I used to volunteer for a community organization.

And about 30 years ago, I swapped my hobby for my job, my job for my hobby. So it is not surprising that I feel at home in Milton Keynes because of the fact that it is such a green place. I think technically, we've checked this with the Parks Trust, but technically, we're a forest. We're a city in a forest.

Milton Keynes learned from one of the key principles of the Garden City movement in terms of providing residents with access to nature. And what's really interesting and a testament to Milton Keynes' designers and their long-term vision and the strength of the Master Plan itself is the landscaping today looks exactly as the visualizations did that were drawn 50 years ago. And I think that shows the real benefits of a long-term vision. Campbell Park, which rarely brings the nature into the city, that's Milton Keynes's Regent's Park.

There's not many places you can go to the city center-- I can walk from my office in the city center 10 minutes, and I could be amongst sheep in Campbell Park. I mean, that's just incredible.

But the green spaces are absolutely essential, because one of the major problems that we have now, I think, is that people who live in cities can become progressively more alienated from a natural environment. And I think it's from a natural environment that we draw a capacity to sustain ourselves and refresh ourselves.

Even you can live in a normal estate with lots of concrete, lots of buildings. But then, a two-minute walk, and then you're somewhere full of wildlife, and lots of trees, and lots of birds, and lots of ponds. And I think it's somewhere different. You can just go out and relax, and you feel like you're not in a busy town.

I think Milton Keynes is very good in that it feels modern, but at the same time, it has lots of green spaces. And having a kid myself, I find that to be very convenient. It's very child-friendly. Wow, I mean, who can't be-- who can fail to be knocked over by Willen Park or Willen Lake?

And that's nice-- to get away from all of the LEGO-looking buildings and gridwork roads.

If I went and visited a different city or town, it was really nice to come back to the open air, the clean smell of Milton Keynes, and the green space.

And one of the massive lessons, one of the key lessons from Milton Keynes, is the way it's managed its green infrastructure through the Parks Trust, which was set up, endowed with money and land to reinvest and look after Milton Keynes's green space in the long term. And it's done that extremely successfully. And it's a model which TCPA advocates all around the world when we're thinking about managing green infrastructure.

The Parks Trust was formed in 1992 by the Development Corporation. This time of year, everything is starting to wake up from winter. You've got all the earlier stuff in leaf. And that always tends to be the shrub layer.

One of the things that the founders did was they planned and implemented the parks before the development arrived. So housing and the industrial infrastructure had to fit in with the existing parkland. So you're looking at ways of opening up a woodland plantation like we've got here and allowing the understory to start coming through. You see there that the light's already got to it, and we've got the cowslicks and the primroses already coming through.

The Parks Trust was endowed with a substantial portfolio of property and investments that creates the money that goes back into the management of the parks and the grid roads within the city. So you're going to be looking at opening that up, removing a lot of the understory or coppicing it, and actually selectively thinning the trees, which allows those trees that you want to keep a chance to actually grow properly, and grow outwards and upwards, and fill those spaces that you're opened up by removing the overstocking of the trees.

Our volunteers are a very important part to the management. We have around 200 volunteers who come and help us, from everything from dry stone walling, like you see here, litter picking, and even patrolling the park. We have such, such a huge area of parkland, you can't be everywhere and see everything. If it wasn't for our volunteers, they're the ones that are our eyes and ears on the ground. They are a really important part to the infrastructure of the management of the park.

While that's going on, the understory is starting to regrow again, and you can then selectively decide which of that you want to keep. And by doing that, you get an age structure. So you get stuff of varying different heights, different ages, different colors, things are in flower at different times of the year. And you get this whole wonderful process going on of, if you like, a woodland, secondary woodland, working as a woodland should do, with all four layers working at the time of year that they should. Another great way of getting people to come and use the great resources is the events program that's put on throughout the city. By having people coming into the parks, they get to see parkland that they might have not seen before, and they'll come back and revisit.

Learning from one of the key principles of the Garden City movement, Milton Keynes provides its residents with fantastic access to green space and fantastic access to nature. Over the last 50 years, Milton Keynes has had planted in it over 22 million trees. It has a fantastic comprehensive green infrastructure network along its grid roads and its fantastic parks.

And also, in terms of the way people move around the city-- so Milton Keynes's gridway system, for example, means that you can cycle from one end of the city to the other without ever having to cross a main road. Now, people talk today about places like Copenhagen leading the way in sustainable transport. But actually, Milton Keynes was enabling people to do that 50 years ago. And that not only enables people to get away, get through the city in a cheap and safe way, but it means that they are able to experience nature in a way that you can't, necessarily, in other cities.

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