Milton Keynes

Nostalgesia

Having grown up near the New Town of Basildon, I was totally unpeturbed to be introduced as an 8-year-old to the gleaming parallels of Milton Keynes' indoor shopping centre, surrounded by acres of car parking.  This is quite clearly The Future.  And this is all Quite Normal.  Why on earth would anyone want to shop on a High Street?

Random Milton Keynes memories leap up at me.  Paying £1.50 to use my first ever ATM, simply for the adult thrill of withdrawing money without a paying-in book (remember those...?).  The joy of the Christmas lights display (probably in October).  Being mocked in a guitar shop (thankfully now closed) because I didn't know everything in the world there is to know about guitars ("Dave!  Dave!  This one here doesn't even know if he wants humbuckers or single-coils!").  A Sixth Form leavers' dinner at a Mexican diner with some girls from the High School (girls who gave the grossly misleading impression that all women are aloof, confusing, exclusive and self-absorbed.  And mental).  The X5 coach, which took three-and-a-half-hours to crawl from Oxford to Cambridge via a selection of ringroad Tescos, circling Milton Keynes for the best part of an hour as it tried to find the train station, the shopping centre and the coach park.  And had no toilet.

It's not the place's fault.

The early Milton Keynes had a few 'iconic' features.  The concrete cows, for example.  Those ruminating on an approach road are apparently clones, with the real ones now standing in the very middle of the newest extension of the shopping centre ('Midsummer Place' - bless).  It seems strange to attempt to sum up the glass-and-underpass New Town with the unhappy mix of bucolic pasture and flatly industrial building material.  Mixed emotions.  Great to see them up close.  But they are actually crap and lumpy.

Hey, who're you calling crap civic art?

The 1979 spaceship futurism of the Point is still there.  The entrance to the cinema used to be through the improbable mirrored-glass stacked-box ziggurat.  However, the route through is now boarded up, and the ziggurat is occupied by Gala Bingo, Connexions (that achingly urban spelling that just reminds me of Nottingham ruralite DH Lawrence - he uses it six times in the first chapter of Lady Chatterley's Lover alone) and a YMCA charity shop.  We're all used to seeing bits of Victorian high street occupied by charity shops, but it is quite a shock to see these vintage-and-tat places in starkly modern buildings.

The red neon strips that described the pyramid shape

at night have sadly been removed.

I've spotted a few echoes of the Point around the town.  I wonder what the building's future is.

Like the Point, Milton Keynes' Bus Station, a strange travertine fantasy, is occupied by a 'vintage' shop, again incongruous in the brushed aluminium and marble futurism.  The building seems otherwise disused.

Precycle, recycle, decycle.

A scary waiting room / re-education centre

Day tripping

Arriving at the train station is somewhat unnerving.  You're clearly not supposed to.  A three-sided mirrored-glass court creates a vast, empty plaza reflecting nothingness.  The (unsignposted) shops are a brisk 15 minute walk away.  The John Lewis end is probably nearer 30. 

Oh hai.

It would appear that Milton Keynes, inside and out, has been almost entirely styled using the palette of the British seaside in winter - the Albion neutrals of verdigris sea, soft cool sand, slate-silver sky, and the saturated greens of marine vegetation.  And the glass.  The buildings efface themselves into reflections of the sky, of each other.  They wonderfully prefigure the Shard, the epic Ode to Invisibility currently being built near London Bridge.

Blanc.

Those triple-height ceilings like to collect children's 

lost helium balloons.  I can share their pain.

Modern Milton Keynes has been slightly painfully Branded.  Embarrassed by the Tellytubby utopia of tree-lined roads, lakes, fields and graffiti-free underpasses, the place has aped some urban text-speak.  The thecentre:mk (all one word and all lower case!  Yay!) is the theshopping centre (whereas MK Central, of course, is the thetrain station.  Lucky there are no tourists to confuse).  The indoor-skydiving airkix (ooh urban!  And all lower case!) and SNO!zone (caps-and-lower-case punctuation sandwich) and can be found inside the huge tapering semicylinder of the indoor ski slope, Xscape.  Surely the 's' there is redundant. Ecks-scape?

Milton Keynes has the air of the airport about it - the clean, untroubling modern lines, the endless car parks, the mysterious scale of all that must happen out of immediate sight, the frankly collosal number of mummy-class chain restaurants that live symbiotically in such places.  The thrill of the familiar Café Rouge, Ask!, Est Est Est, La Tasca, Pizza Express, Giraffe, Jamie's Italian...  This is precisely what the Brit on holiday wants - what s/he already knows, with a different backdrop.  The unfamiliar horror of the alien tempered and soothed by the oral delight of same again.  More Jamie's breast milk for me.

And Thamesmead

Milton Keynes and Thamesmead were both New Towns nobly seeking to correct the past.  Actually, in comparison with Milton Keynes, it's hard to think of Thamesmead as a town - it has no real shops, no centre, no function other than housing.  Milton Keynes, maligned and as sexy as Norwich it might be, is far more purposive and successful.  Perhaps it's also a fluke of architectural choice.  Thamesmead's concrete brutalism is now widely reviled, whereas Milton Keynes' high-tech modernism happens to remain contemporary - it could happily sit alongside the London Eye, the Gherkin, City Hall, Heathrow Terminal 5, almost any of Canary Wharf, the unfinished addition to Kings Cross, the unfinished Shard, the unfinished Pinnacle...

But it's not just luck.  Milton Keynes is simply Well Done.  And, just as crucially, Well Maintained.  Whereas Thamesmead reeks of abandonment and discontent, Milton Keynes remains fresh, appealing and relevant.  Even if the car parking is no longer free.

John Lewis en Plage

Cycle Path Fails: #1

There's a phone box in it.

Very Bad Things about London: #1 Euston (part one)

London, 1968.

Right, chaps. Thanks for coming.  Do sit down.  Take some tea.  And a biscuit.  Please.

So - we're building a new mainline station for London. Euston - we have a problem!   No seriously, let's stay focused.  And Apollo 13 doesn't launch till 1970.  

So - this station.  It'll serve the entire North West of the country, and up to Scotland too. There're two Underground lines here - well, three if you count to split branches of the Northern Line. So - how many escalators shall we put in?  Hmm.  It is a major London terminus.  A flagship late-60s development and modernisation programme.  Five?  Ha, no Perkins, I think not.  Hmm.  I reckon... one each way. Yeah.  There is no possible way that one escalator could not be enough. I mean, seriously - it would be ludicrous to put more in. Or even leave space for more. No, there could never be a freak set of circumstances in which one escalator would not be grossly generous.  Particularly at rush hour.  Yup, no problems here at all.

See!  Told you.  Huge amounts of capacity.  It's almost embarrassing.

A Sunday afternoon is clearly indicative of the busiest it'll ever get.  

Another thing - we need to help passengers understand the Tube setup here.  This new station should make best use of the brand new Victoria Line, which has only just started running.  It's really important that things are as simple and streamlined as possible.  I think I'll get that Escher guy in again - he did such a good job with the Thamesmead flying walkways.  I have a feeling that this brilliant decision will secure me an MBE...  Just mark my words.

Cyrstal.  Clear. 

Think we're pretty much there, chaps.  All we need now is to destroy the iconic arch out front, jam in a charmless and windswept plaza, and we're done.  

A good day's work, I think.  Pass the biscuits.

Thamesmead

I'd been to Thamesmead once before, a flying visit, safely in the car with the doors locked.  I remembered the road running between blank concrete walls, like the Death Star trench, and the simply huge flyovers that appear to go from and to nowhere.  But at that youthful time (2003, on the way back from France in a friend's mum's BMW which fascinated HM Customs), I was less sensitised to the esoteric delights of concrete housing blocks.  

But, excited by Owen Hatherley's 'New Ruins of Great Britain', and engorged by a recent viewing of Clockwork Orange (which has a slow-motion ultraviolence fight scene filmed along the concrete lake there), I set off again to view the massive 'town of the 21st century'.

Thamesmead is a late 60s New Town, the only one built in London.  It sits in a largely inaccessible part of Zone 4, just south of the East-widening river.  The nearest Tube or DLR station is Gallions Reach.  But getting there involves swimming the Thames.  For a bit of August tailwind fun, I cycled there.

Thamesmead is, by the way, huge.  I'd love to see an oblique aerial shot.  Aparallel row and angle after row and angle, slight shifts in style like a lucky dip selection of English Brutalist leitmotifs.  I saw a sign for garages numbered 2005-2018.  So, unless the numbering system is whimsically perverse, there are shed loads of flats.    Wikipedia suggest the population is 50,000.  The parts around the lake are easily the best, even if the lake is now largely clogged with pondweed and trolleys and other urban jetsam.

The highish rise blocks.  

And some swans wondering where Greenwich is.

Near the bit where Alex's droogs get cinematically beaten up.

Have those clothes been hung out to dry?  In a lake?

Thamesmead is enduring some scorched-earth gentrification, with boxy old concrete blocks being replaced by, um, boxy new concrete blocks with render. 

 Replacing crap old with crap new.

Almost acknowledging that the new bits aren't actually any better (just not blighted by our cultural association of exposed concrete with poverty and violence), a few of the highish rise concrete blocks have been given a whitewash facelift.  They really look just like the brand new bits.

Stunning (re)development.

In places, the redevelopment appears to have taken the form of a dab of blue paint (reminding me of the bright yellow staircase from another baffling and unfriendly concrete megastructure, Lasdun's South Bank Centre).

Happy now?

As all good psychologists, and no architects, know, the repetitive uniformity of concrete estates does not appeal to the Englishman [apologies for the sexism], whose home, albeit one built on the Thames floodplain, is his castle.  Said Englishman will therefore gleefully etch a little of his character on his home.  There are lots and lots of foul personal touches, like those naff novelty phone cases that you can buy to keep your HTC Rumba free of grease from your Gregg's pasty.

Because my concrete home is half timber-beam 

Tudorbethan and half Georgian.

Because my concrete house is a gated country estate

(and / or prison).

Because my concrete house is a foul Thatcherite Plexiglass Portal 

(cf Surrey Quays Shopping Centre).

I suppose Thamesmead hoped to emulate the success of the City's Barbican.  Whilst it fails at this, it has managed to emulate the some of the Barbican's 'I can see where I want to go, but I have no idea how to get there' / 'Oh, this walkway goes nowhere' hilarity.

A Thamesmead flying walkway.  By MC Escher.

'Aborted walkway (always seem that hardest words to say)'

Thamesmead's failure is attributed in some part to the crap public transport thereabouts (it might once've had a bridge over the Thames or a Fleet Line tube station), which knackered the place's ability to appeal to commuters or basically anyone with a job outside a Thamesmead corner shop.  I couldn't even find the nearest train station, Abbey Wood, because some wag / prick had turned the signs round.  Incidentally, if approaching by bike, strictly the road signs that will send you pedalling wildly past HMP Belmarsh (which scares the hell out of me) along a whopping dual carriageway before suddenly depositing you at the massive flying roundabout above and just to the north of the lake-and-towers part of Thamesmead.  It is a perhaps unintentional, but utterly appropriate, vista.

I love dated versions of the future.

Failed and unloved as it may be, Thamesmead interests me far more than the smug Georgiana of windswept and paranoid Blackheath.  #personalvendetta