History of Milton Keynes - Milton Keynes Development Corporation: Designing A City For 250,000 People

Milton Keynes Development Corporation: Designing A City For 250,000 People

Following publication of the Draft Master Plan for Milton Keynes, the government appointed Lord Campbell ("Jock" Campbell) to lead the Milton Keynes Development Corporation. He and his Chief Executive, Walter Ismay, appointed Llewellyn Davies as principal planning consultants – the team included Richard Llewellyn-Davies, Walter Bor and John de Monchaux. Execution of the plan was led by Fred Roche. The goals declared in the master plan were these:

• opportunity and freedom of choice
• easy movement and access
• good communications
• balance and variety
• an attractive city
• public awareness and participation
• efficient and imaginative use of resources

The Corporation was determined to learn from the mistakes made in the earlier new towns and revisit the Garden City ideals. They set in place the characteristic grid roads that run between districts, the Redway system of independent cycle/pedestrian paths, and the intensive planting, lakes and parkland that are so appreciated today. Central Milton Keynes was not intended to be a traditional town centre but a business and shopping district that supplemented the Local Centres in most of the Grid Squares. This non-hierarchical devolved city plan was a departure from the English New Towns tradition and envisaged a wide range of industry and diversity of housing styles and tenures across the city. The radical grid plan was inspired by the work of Californian urban theorist Melvin M Webber (1921–2006), described by the founding architect of Milton Keynes, Derek Walker, as the city's "father". Webber thought that telecommunications meant that the old idea of a city as a concentric cluster was out of date and that cities that enabled people to travel around them readily would be the thing of the future, achieving "community without propinquity" for residents.

Urban design

Since the radical plan form and large scale of the New City attracted international attention, early phases of the city include work by celebrated architects, including Sir Richard MacCormac, Lord Norman Foster, Henning Larsen, Ralph Erskine, John Winter, and Martin Richardson. The Corporation itself attracted talented young architects led by the young and charismatic Derek Walker. Its strongly modernist designs featured regularly in the magazines Architectural Design and the Architects' Journal. Though strongly committed to sleek "Miesian" minimalism inspired by the German/ American architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, they also developed a strand of contextualism in advance of the wider adoption of commercial Post-Modernism as an architectural style in the 1980s. In the Miesian tradition were the Pineham Sewage Works, which Derek Walker regarded as his finest achievement, and the Shopping Building designed by Stuart Mosscrop and Christopher Woodward. The contextual tradition that ran alongside it is exemplified by the Coproration's infill scheme at Cofferidge Close, Stony Stratford, designed by Wayland Tunley, which inserts into a historic stretch of High Street a modern retail facility, offices and car park.

"City in the forest"

The original Development Corporation design concept aimed for a "forest city" and its foresters planted millions of trees from its own nursery in Newlands in the following years. As of 2006, the urban area has 20 million trees. Following the winding up of the Development Corporation, the lavish landscapes of the Grid Roads and of the major parks were transferred to the MK Parks Trust, an independent non-profit charity which is quite separate from the municipal authority and which was intended to resist pressures to build on the parks over time. The Parks Trust is endowed with a portfolio of commercial properties, the income from which pays for the upkeep of the green spaces, a city-wide maintenance model which has attracted international attention.

Public art

The Development Corporation had an ambitious public art programme and over 50 works were commissioned, mostly still extant. This programme also had two strands: a populist one which involved the local community in the works, the most famous of which is Liz Leyh's Concrete Cows, a group of concrete Friesian cows which have become the unofficial logo of the city; and a tradition of abstract geometrical art, such as Lilliane Lijn's "Circle of Light" hanging in the Midsummer Arcade of the Central Milton Keynes Shopping Centre.

Demographics

Unusually for a new town, Milton Keynes has arrived at a bias in favour of private sector investment, with about 80% of owner-occupied homes. The political climate determined this: previous new towns were mainly controlled by Labour Governments but Milton Keynes was mainly built during the Conservative years.