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Social Science Name of collection Understanding Milton Keynes 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. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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. [MUSIC PLAYING] Well, there was pressure, particularly on Buckinghamshire 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. [MUSIC PLAYING] 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.
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