Ever-changing Milton Keynes is a paradise … of sorts

People sneer at its roads and roundabouts, but MK works – and is the world’s most successful new city

Milton Keynes is halfway between Oxford and Cambridge, a geographical matter-of-fact now recognised by the exciting creation of a new university. People may laugh: it may want for Oxbridge’s romantic allure. But Milton Keynes is a paradise… of sorts.

John Betjeman, one time Poet Laureate, sneered at a dystopian future of dual carriageways and council houses. Milton Keynes became that place. But then Betjeman, at his worst, was a tweedy, sentimental old bore who thought crumpets, honey and a peal of bells would bring redemption. They do not.

True, there is a whiff of a failed Stalinist state as you leave the station to enter the bleak plaza of Central Milton Keynes, or CMK in the Orwellian demotic. But with uncorrupted eyes you can enjoy CMK’S “austere charm”. Only someone with a heart of lead and a brain of feathers would fail to sense the optimism.

Declared a new town in 1967, Milton Keynes was designed to be the perfect modern city. Not so much rus in urbe as urbs in rure: it was to have all the attributes of a city with the added benefits of village communities, space, fresh air and greenery. Serious architects were to be employed. Who has arguments against that?

It was the last city designed for the automobile, something which gives it a certain pathos: Milton Keynes was made for independent citizens in charge of their own destiny. The idea was to avoid the centralised mistakes of the first post-war New Towns – Stevenage and Peterlee, for example – and return to the idealism of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City Movement. So, Milton Keynes is atomised, with better roads than Stevenage and, as folklore relates, many more roundabouts.

It is a real city of separate, semiautonomous communities and the roads run between them, not through them. Of course, 50 years later owner-drivers seem an absurd solution to transport demands, but now Betjeman’s twee suburbia seems absurd as well. For all its period faults, the fact is: Milton Keynes is the most successful new city in the world: its population will double in 50 years.

Yet it is routinely mocked. The influential town-planner Francis Tibbalds described CMK as “bland, rigid, sterile and totally boring”. I see it as beautiful, disciplined and visionary. He was wrong and I am right. Today, the architectural conversation is about the coming “polycentric” city with nowhere more than 30 minutes from anywhere else. Milton Keynes achieved that half a century ago.

Let me conjure a picture. One day in the mid-seventies, the two young architects of CMK set up a laser on the site of their new shopping mall. As their enormous design rose above the ground, they were keen to make sure that its astonishing one kilometre long orthogonals were absolutely straight and true. They were. And remain.

These architects had drunk deep at the source: the architecture of Mies van der Rohe, last director of the Bauhaus. Straight lines and fine details were a sort of religion. And so too, on a larger scale, was a precious sense of community, of shared purpose. Milton Keynes has that esprit de corps.

Mrs Thatcher opened the completed CMK Shopping building on September 25 1979. It is now Grade-ii listed and, unusual for a shopping mall, has been unchanged for nearly 40 years: a testament to the intelligence and effectiveness of the original design. But there is more to Milton Keynes. It is the home of the Open University. Of course, the internet makes telly broadcasts of lectures seem as quaint as driving to work on a dual carriageway, but popular education, the prospect of democratic enlightenment, was fundamental to the urban philosophy.

So, when, circa 1980, Terence Conran and I were scouting sites for our planned new “design museum”, we chose Milton Keynes. The plan was to have a high-tech warehouse with robots plucking modern classics from shelving for students to contemplate. Somewhere in the city archives there is a drawing of Willen Lake with “proposed design museum” scribbled next door.

That never happened. God laughs at our plans. Things change. The great principle of urban design is: you don’t finish a city, you start it. Ignore simpleminded people who find concrete cows risible: Milton Keynes is changing. And change is how you define life itself.