Central Milton Keynes Shopping Centre - Architecture

Architecture

The cool, elegant, steel framed design was influenced by the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and envisaged glazed shopping streets or arcades on the grand scale of the Galleria in Milan. Derek Walker also likened it to the Crystal Palace. It was described in 1993 as "still the best-looking if no longer the biggest shopping centre in the British Isles". It is unusual for second generation shopping centres in Europe for the amount of daylight allowed into the public areas, for the rigorous control of retail facias along the arcades themselves, for its public art, the unusually high level of accessibility for visitors with limited mobility (and other users laden with children and shopping), the lavish extent of the public spaces and their interior planting (reduced since the buildings was completed) and for the cool mirrored exterior.

The building, designed by Derek Walker Associates for Milton Keynes Development Corporation, is a good example of Miesian modernist minimalism in glass and steel.

Milton Keynes Shopping Building was designed with the public access to all the shops is flush and at ground level. Some of the shops then have two or three floors inside. A service road for deliveries runs above the shops, so that large lorries may service the shops at roof level, removing the peripheral service roads and loading bays at ground level that mar so many large shopping centres. This means all deliveries take place out of view of the shoppers, though lorries can sometimes be seen from the arcades as they pass at high level.

The internal landscaping, designed by Roger Griffiths and Tony Couthard, was very lavish with 47 plant beds with large plants and trees; temperate in the northerly arcade and semi-tropical in the southerly one. The planters were finished in the same travertine as the floor, but approximately one third of these have been removed since the building was opened, with consequent loss of both planting and seating for shoppers, in order to accommodate market barrows and stalls.

There are two large public areas, intended as civic open spaces, one indoors and one open air. The open-air garden square (Queen's Court) is just west of centre and has been redesigned away from its original concept as a relaxation space for visitor' The indoor space (Middleton Hall) is 1,800-square-metre exhibition space near the east end. During 2010, Middleton Hall was used as a temporary home venue for the Milton Keynes Lions basketball team, housing a 1,200-seat arena.

Midsummer Place was a later phase, built around an existing oak tree in an open area (Oak Court) that survived until it succumbed to acute oak decline from about 2008.

In a central space outside the building (but contained by it on three sides) is an open-air market, much of it under Secklow Gate (a flyover that gives first-floor service access to the shops' loading bays, as well as a useful North-South route).