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