‘Turn left at the roundabout’

An East European shares some perspectives of England’s greenest ‘new’ city

By Pavel Antonov

While not a scientific observation, it seems that nine of ten Englanders, upon hearing mention of Milton Keynes, will tell you that car tyres wear out quicker there because all of the junctions are circular.

Considered by many to be among England’s most successful and thriving ‘new’ cities, Milton Keynes is also the butt of rude jokes and a subject of mockery for people who don’t actually live there. But those who do live in Milton Keynes are very much in love with it, thank you very much.

What is it exactly about Milton Keynes (or, MK) that draws such bipolar reactions? And how does one of Britain’s most commercial and car-dependant cities also manage to be one of its greenest? These are questions which continue to stump social scientists, journalists and ordinary citizens – myself included. Having lived in Milton Keynes for nearly a year, I was often reminded in the most unexpected ways that I was living in a large city. I might, for example, meet a mother pushing a baby pram while navigating a bicycle alongside the deserted riverbank. Or I’d spy the single hill sticking out from a panorama of green trees and red roofs: Xscape, the artificial ski slope. But the sensation occurred most frequently at night when the peaceful slumber of houses, gardens and hedges was interrupted – as if from nowhere – by a noise all too familiar to city-dwellers: the steady rumbling of passing motor vehicles.

Milton Keynes, lying north of London, takes its name from a small village and area comprising some 9,000 hectares, which just a few decades ago saw the establishment of a development corporation to help deal with an estimated inflow of 150,000 Londoners, in addition to some 50,000 locals. It was 1967, the year of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band; and even though the ‘summer of love’ was just around the corner, environmental thought as we know it today was in an embryonic stage. Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring had been published just five years earlier, while the authors-to-be of Limits to Growth had yet to graduate from university.

Back in the day, there could be no mention in the new city’s plan of ‘environmental compliance’ or ‘sustainable development’: these were still unknown concepts. But planners and consultants were deeply engaged in thinking how to embody six progressive principles in the project: citizen opportunities and freedom of choice; easy access and mobility; balance and diversity; creating an attractive city; public participation and involvement; and effective use of resources.

If the MK developers overdid any of the above, it was ‘mobility’, but not for lack of good intentions. Paul Brown, The Guardian’s former environmental correspondent, recalls that everyone thought back then that the automobile was the future of transportation. In any case, the city was built over a grid of major roads providing access to spread-out residential areas. ‘Roads’ is the right word, because urban ‘streets’ or ‘avenues’ are typically lined with pavements (sidewalks) and surrounded by buildings. MK’s grid roads feature nothing of the sort. Indeed, driving along these roads, you’ll seldom see anything other than trees and meadows. Most residential neighbourhoods lie out of view, hidden behind battlements of greenery.

The same does not hold true for the city centre, which features aluminium, glass and concrete in proportions that many find off-putting. Much of the area is given over to a giant shopping mall – of the UK’s largest – with its own streets, squares, benches, shops, shops and more shops.

It should come then as no surprise that many perceive MK as a shopping town, with no city centre and no soul; but Gillian Rose, a social researcher who spent years studying the impact of urban aesthetics on human emotions and perceptions thinks otherwise. The complex is much more than a temple of consumption, Rose claims. The centre is designed as a democratic space, she explains, and many locals continue to use it as a high street, even after overnight access was restricted over concerns for shop security.

And yes, it is green

Milton Keynes’ selected location placed it on the main road and railway connecting London with the north of England. For a decade now, nearby Luton Airport has been attracting low-cost airlines, which pleases certain Eastern European MK transplants to no end. Another exotic addition is that one of the country’s main navigable channels crosses the city, though the value at this point is mostly cosmetic and touristic. Grand Union Canal and the parallel rivers, the Ouse and Loughton Brook, are key elements of the two linear parks forming the city’s urban structure.

Impressive to date is an autonomous and well-maintained network of hiking and cycling paths, designed not to intersect the high-speed grid roads. Unfortunately, this great asset has remained underutilised for decades because of large distances contributing to residents’ car dependency, says Petr Jehlicka, a specialist in post-socialism and environmentally sustainable livelihoods.

Jehlicka and Rose are professors at the UK’s Open University, one of the pearls in Milton Keynes’ crown. Established contemporaneously with the city, the university embodies a dream to provide unrestricted access to higher education by means of telecommunication technologies. Denounced as “proletarian” by conservative circles upon its founding, the OU celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year with an undeniably strong academic reputation and a boast of being the UK’s most attended university.

Offering some perspective of my home corner of Europe, Elitsa Panayotova, a Sofia-based architect and urban planning specialist, finds it hard to see in Bulgaria and many other parts of South-Eastern Europe the sort of vision and conceptual thinking that went into the Milton Keynes project. “The [planning] level around here is still quite primitive, and what matters is quantity rather than quality,” she says.

Milton Keynes’ municipal governments have remained committed over the years to making the city a convenient and green place to live. The city was among the first to introduce separate waste collection and to build its own processing plant. In an attempt to rectify the shortcomings of past urban planners, the current government hopes to combine the grid roads with traditional high streets in MK’s newer areas. “Our goal is to make the urban areas livelier,” explains Lindsey Richards, Development Control Manager at the Milton Keynes Partnership, a successor of the old Development Corporation.

This new planning shift seems to be deeply rooted in local sentiments. A massive campaign to preserve the few remaining original high streets (i.e. prior to the founding of Milton Keynes) persuaded the city council to deny retail giant Tesco permission to plan construction of yet another hypermarket in the city. Recreating the traditional high street is a purely natural reaction to the effects of car dependency and urban sprawl, explains Maria Samardjieva, a Bulgarian landscape architect. She believes that such a shift in planning brings a city’s cultural heritage back into the picture and reinforces people’s sense of belonging to a place – something that Samardjieva and other community activists are trying to accomplish in their hometown of Sofia, the Bulgarian capital.

In any case, resident participation and commitment seem to be on the rise in Milton Keynes, judging from the letters pages in both local newspapers, as well as from numerous community events and citywide initiatives. Some local actions have even made international headlines, such as a spontaneous protest against Google Street View in April. Residents of Broughton, just outside Milton Keynes, blocked the camera vehicle to prevent their houses and front gardens from being photographed, thus ensuring their place in the global news feed. On another – and rather paradoxical – occasion, homeowners in the newly built Oxley Park estate blocked the way of a newly launched bus line with their shiny cars, arguing that buses are noisy and endanger children. For good measure, the MK Dons (est. 2004) are enjoying growing support while contesting in England’s Football League One.

Meanwhile, there seems to be no shortage of Bulgarians singing Milton Keynes’ praises. “This is the best place around London to settle with kids,” says Antoan Christov, a software specialist who has been developing his own business in England for over a decade. ”MK is a designer city. It’s cool,” he says proudly. He also confirms that the tyres of his new car are, indeed, wearing away rather quickly.