Milton Kings, Central, MKDC Architects Fishermead Flickr @ Iqbal Aalam
to be the future of its economy. 34 At later advance units at Stacey Bushes it was claimed that ‘no industrialist need be ashamed to invite his most prestigious client to visit these factories’. 35 The second strand of the strategy was the System Building for Industry (SBI), the prototype of which was at Wavendon Tower, demolished in 2005. It was a svelte upmarket version of the Type 1 units by architects Barry Clayton, Surya Pawar and Derek Walker for the Corporation, and was capable of being an office or a manufacturing plant. It was in fact first occupied by the Development Corporation’s architects, who decked it out with green and yellow carpets. With its elegant Miesian cladding and spacious landscape setting, it was one of the most potent images of early Milton Keynes and featured in much of the publicity advertising it as a good place to live and work. Later advance units were much more consciously aimed at prestige office space. The large Butte Knit and Steinberg distribution centre was designed by the Development Corporation but was bespoke for a large
employer relocating to Milton Keynes. This building was widely published, being used as the cover illustration to a contemporary review of new towns, and was described by the Buildings of England as ‘among the best industrial buildings in MK’. 36 However, in spite of ultra-flexible planning deriving from the space-frame roof, exposed as a feature of the elevations, it has fallen out of use, is currently derelict and at risk of demolition. When asked to name the buildings of which he was most proud, Derek Walker cited the Shopping Building and Cotton Valley Sewage Works. The latter (by Trevor Denton and Derek Walker for the Development Corporation) is immaculately designed and indicative of the depth of the design culture in the I970s at Milton Keynes, so Walker’s choice is not flippant. It boasts elegant Miesian boxes for the offices and plant: the offices bronze glazed and the plant white clad. Alas, security, safety, and dense perimeter planting mean the site is unseen by all but staff. COMMUNITY WITHOUT PROPINQUITY The Milton Keynes Master Plan scarcely uttered the word ‘neighbourhood’. 37 This was in line with the func-
tional emphasis on ease of mobility and the decentralised nature of the city. Melvyn Webber’s emphasis on community without propinquity - voluntary choice-based associations of near and far relationships - and not on ‘neighbourliness’ also play a part. So, the local scale facilities of most grid squares was to be a local centre comprising shops, a ‘meeting place’ in the form of a small village hall, plus in most a pub or recreational facility. The Master Plan intended these local centres to be adjacent to the grid roads where they would have had a visual presence, articulating the low-density city to passers by. Most of the centres have in fact been buried deeper within their grid squares, a decision arising from the change of the main road junction device from crossroads and flyovers to roundabouts. The local centres would have required separate slip roads. The change has, however, robbed them of their function as navigational ‘flags’ on the grid roads and done considerable damage to the commercial viability of many, as they are unable to attract passing trade. One of the few local centres located on a grid road is that at Neath Hill, from 1973 (project architects Wayland Tunley and Dudley Alison). This enables it to serve two adjacent grid squares. Other
local centres have struggled to adapt to modern retailing. Perhaps the most successful retail development of early Milton Keynes is Cofferidge Close by Wayland Tunley for the Development Corporation, from 1970. Ironically, this was an insertion into the existing historic market town of Stoney Stratford, with Italian Rationalist facades and flexed contextual planning. Long thriving on a grid road, albeit the Roman Watling Street almost two millennia old, and occupying its site remarkably well, in 2012 Cotteridge Close faces radical changes and partial demolition. MILTON KEYNES HOUSING Milton Keynes offers an object lesson in the evolution of housing architecture and policy during the 1970s. It started in the new town tradition with large-scale housing for rent, a collective design ethos; a creation of dirigiste control from Whitehall. It ended with the very different assumptions and structures of the Thatcher period from 1979: home ownership, Right-to-Buy, the architecture of easy-to-mortgage units and individualist aesthetics. One can see these changes rapidly assuming an architectural expression in three main forms: the Heroic, Contextual and the Radical Eclectic. 38