Ideal homes

Artists, poets and philosophers have not paid much attention to Milton Keynes …although comedians have. This urban experiment has been mocked by lazy satirists who find ambition derisory and concrete cows hilarious.

Milton Keynes is 50 this year and it has an honourable place in the history of that ancient chimera, the Ideal City. It was conceived in a decade when the improving influence of the ‘white heat of technology’ could be cited without irony (or embarrassment). In those days, technology involved calorific value, not cold, invisible bytes.

The name sounds like an ad-man’s invention. But until 23 January 1967, when the new city was designated, Milton Keynes was an old, quiet Buckinghamshire village near Bletchley, one of 15 that were absorbed into the whole. Its history involves utopias, the picturesque, Garden City idealism, a naive infatuation with America and a quaintly touching faith in the possibility of a tolerable future. Given the government’s recent announcement of the creation of 14 ‘garden villages’ (for what appears to be a bargain price of £6 million), it’s instructive to reflect on how Milton Keynes became very nearly, but not quite, the world’s greatest example of new place-making.