Milton Keynes in British Culture

Imagining England

Lauren Pikó

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429816178
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

The new town of Milton Keynes was designated in 1967 with a bold, flexible social vision to impose "no fixed conception of how people ought to live." Despite this progressive social vision, and its low density, flexible, green urban design, the town has been consistently represented in British media, political rhetoric and popular culture negatively. as a fundamentally sterile, paternalistic, concrete imposition on the landscape, as a "joke", and even as "Los Angeles in Buckinghamshire". How did these meanings develop at such odds from residents' and planners' experiences? Why have these meanings proved so resilient?

Milton Keynes in British Culture traces the representations of Milton Keynes in British national media, political rhetoric and popular culture in detail from 1967 to 1992, demonstrating how the town's founding principles came to be understood as symbolic of the worst excesses of a postwar state planning system which was falling from favour. Combining approaches from urban planning history, cultural history and cultural studies, political economy and heritage studies, the book maps the ways in which Milton Keynes' newness formed an existential challenge to ideals of English landscapes as receptacles of tradition and closed, fixed national identities. Far from being a marginal, "foreign" and atypical town, the book demonstrates how the changing political fortunes of state urban planned spaces were a key site of conflict around ideas of how the British state should function, how its landscapes should look, and who they should be for.

1
Landscape value in modern Britain

This chapter locates the intellectual traditions of urban planning history within wider and longer histories of political landscape symbolism throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century British culture. The development of the urban planning discipline in Britain negotiated tensions between two interrelated but ultimately conflicting visions of modernity. This involved attempts to reconcile a positivist, future-focused technocratic modernism which viewed rational interventionism as an absolute good, with a conservative approach that privileged an immediate, sensed experience of ideal tradition and unbroken cultural continuity as primary determinants of landscape value. The gradual political ascendancy of planning expertise up to and throughout the Second World War led to increased state sponsorship of more technocratically-focused, classically modernist urban planning solutions. This had the effect of drastically and definitively transforming much of the British landscape into forms that explicitly embraced this rationalist modernism, while increasingly prominent critiques of urban planning drew largely on the language of cultural conservatism, advocating for the value of continuity to the construction of ideal urban spaces.

The first term of the Wilson government from 1964 saw a renegotiation of the relationship between technocratic expertise and government policy, motivated by a desire to move away from totalising, determinist forms of state planning associated with postwar reconstructionism. This informed a changed approach to urban planning policy in favour of flexibility, inclusion, and actively learning from early new town planning. It was into this context that Milton Keynes would be designated in 1967, with the intention to provide a new solution to these conflicts between traditionalism and positivist landscape change.

Modernity and landscape value

Milton Keynes’ history, as a planned town designated under the 1965 New Towns Act, has primarily been framed in terms of the history of urban planning, both its development as a professional discipline, and the way in which that discipline developed in relationship to the British experience of the Industrial Revolution.¹ For the purposes of this book, this narrative framing of the development of a specialised professional discipline will be considered more explicitly within the broader political cultural context of industrial modernity, and the cultural political languages which shaped the ways that its economic transformations were negotiated and understood.

It has been well established that British political culture during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century was characterised by active debate around the forms and meanings of the British constitution, and particularly, the relative role of various interpretations of its traditional or ancient forms, as opposed to its radical reconception and evolution over time.² J. G. A. Pocock characterised such reference to the forms and functions of the British constitution as a “language” of interconnected referents; “modes of discourse stable enough to be available for the use of more than one discussant and to present the character of games defined by a structure of rules for more than one player”.³ Works from a range of historical traditions have characterised such a political language as suffusing not only elite political culture, but also shaping popular cultural understandings.⁴ Pocock conceptualised the uses of this language as reflecting an “ideology of the Ancient Constitution”:

the elaborate set of historical arguments by which it was sought to show that the common law, and the constitution as it now stood, had been essentially the same since pre-Conquest times and – if the argument were pressed home – since time immemorial, or at least since an unrecorded beginning in the woods of Germany.⁵

This ideological understanding posited the intrinsic political form of England as characterised above all by a singular continuity, whereby subsequent events seen to alter that “immemorial” vision of the common law were conceptualised as aberrations. Key themes in this narrative as used in late eighteenth century politics were the notion of the ongoing suffering imposed by the “Norman Yoke” on the “free and equal citizens” of Anglo-Saxon England.⁶

The American and French Revolutions further shaped the context of British political debates around the basis of legitimate authority, and the notion of revolution itself. Michael Gardiner’s consideration of Edmund Burke’s 1790 work Reflections on the Revolution in France links its version of constitutionalist argument for tradition to its conceptualisation of a broader vision of cultural canonicity.⁷ For Gardiner, Burke’s Reflections characterises the notion of authority as residing in not just in tradition, but in “a version of the past which takes its authority from never having been action undertaken by any person in any present”.⁸ Burke’s idea of political value characterises an unbroken chain of tradition which reaches far enough to be interchangeable with “nature”, and therefore locates value “outside history altogether”.⁹ Gardiner theorises this principle as “canonicity”: “a form of value which never had to show its own foundations as having been actively created”, and which fundamentally resists and opposes the ideals of intervention, action, and change.¹⁰

This notion of “canonical” cultural value can be seen therefore as cutting across a range of other ideological frameworks, by using a language which does not idealise any particular period or set of historical events, but instead locates value as deriving from association with the idea of tradition itself. While Gardiner’s work focuses on the types of canonicity which preclude historical action by locating value in an immemorialist space outside of history, there is a canonical logic to uses of the past which argue for historical return, in that they are unable to articulate value outside of precedent. This political cultural framework has been thoroughly traced through the early nineteenth century, influencing the directions and forms of elite and popular political debate throughout the period leading up to the Reform Act.¹¹ More recent work has traced its influence after this point, through its evolving use as a reference point in the Second Reform Act and on women’s suffrage movements.¹² As a political language, what Pocock framed as the “ideology of the Ancient Constitution” can be seen as not a narrowly defined set of principles about state functioning, but rather, a diverse set of cultural reference points which could be invoked in a range of settings, and by a range of actors, to explain the origins of valuable cultural forms.

The significance of this for the history of twentieth century urban planning, and responses to it, is how culturally conservative frameworks of value operated alongside and in tension with rationalist, interventionist understandings, both of which shaped attitudes to landscape. The principle of land’s value as being measured through its capacity to testify to human labour and regulation can be seen deriving from earlier Lockean conceptualisations of land value deriving from “improvement” and “cultivation”, which were used to justify the enclosure of common land, and also to justify violent colonial expansion of “waste” lands occupied by people who had not “improved” them.¹³ This principle can be seen informing the rise of nineteenth-century discourses of urban regulation and control which arose in response to the new economic forms of industrial capitalism. As industrialisation rationalised the means of production, it strained and dissolved existing social and spatial regulatory patterns; in this context, growing concerns about regulating the growth of cities can be seen as projects of rational-ising the spaces and forms of these new economic realities.¹⁴ This rationalising impetus informed a range of reformist social and political movements; including Catholic emancipationism, slavery abolitionism, and Chartism; it also motivated the development of literatures of spatial assessment which sought to document the new “condition of England” through documenting the forms of its cities.¹⁵ These literatures explicitly called for new forms of regulation to improve public health and hygiene, and limit urban overcrowding, poverty and crime. These movements were ultimately predisposed towards change; while many of them invoked aspects of precedent to legitimate their heritage, they also interpreted the present as requiring intervention and reform to actively improve upon existing historical models.

Hobsbawm has argued that it was the rationalising drive of nineteenth century progressive culture which encouraged a corresponding counter-drive, to construct and manufacture narratives of continuity to fill “voids” of meaning opened up by the loss of existing “social and authority ties”.¹⁶ In doing so, however, the “invented traditions” of nineteenth century British culture drew on longer trends in using historical logics to locate the origins of cultural value within the notion of tradition itself. This process has been traced through the way in which nineteenth century English literature utilised a language of idealised English landscapes to incorporate British imperialism within a singular and normalised cultural narrative.¹⁷ Ian Baucom has argued that “Englishness has consistently been defined through appeals to the identity-endowing properties of place”, theorising that particular symbolic sites, from ruined country houses to Gothic cathedrals, have functioned in nineteenth century British imperial culture as totems of Englishness. Baucom suggests that framing English culture through a combination of bucolic pastoral and deliberately archaic architectural reference points helped develop a sense of Englishness as a distinct cultural language. By deploying “English” cultural forms on colonised landscapes, from Gothic architectures to imposing English place names, Baucom argues that this invoked a language of cultural continuity which helped naturalise and conceal, from the perspective of the colonisers, the radical discontinuities and disruptions of tradition which were inherent to British imperial conquest.¹⁸ Such an approach to interpreting landscape value has been most systematically explored through studies of the works of Kingsley and Kipling, but such political invocation of landscape mysticism to justify imperialist politics can be seen at work in wider imperial politics of architecture and place-naming.¹⁹

More broadly, reading across histories of nineteenth-century art, architecture, poetry and religious expression, the notion of a canonical basis for cultural value can be seen shaping representations of ideal landscape forms across genres. These trends have been identified in diverse cultural manifestations, from Romantic poetry, through to nationalist invocations of Classical religion, Arthurian revival-ist art and religious practice and the growth of folklore studies and archaeology from amateur interests into academic disciplines.²⁰ Ronald Hutton’s surveys of these trends focus on the uses of imagined classical and domestic pagan traditions in nineteenth century attitudes to specific places such as Stonehenge or Arthurian sites in Wales and Somerset, but also to landscape types more broadly, especially those which were imagined as historically untouched.²¹ Ellen Meiksins Wo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• Abbreviations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Landscape value in modern Britain
• 2 The Plan for Milton Keynes, 1967–1972
• 3 The post-tower-block city? 1972–1975
• 4 Mirroring England, mirroring decline, 1976–1978
• 5 The Concrete Cows, 1978–1979
• 6 “You’ve never seen anything like it”: the aspirational turn, 1979–1986
• 7 Milton Keynes and “the middle”, c. 1980–1989
• 8 The wind-up, c. 1986–1992
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index