A school that has never seen children is a strange place. The carpets and walls are unnaturally clean; the building is eerily quiet. Elverby Primary School feels especially odd. It sits in a field north-east of Milton Keynes, amid mud and half-built roads. But the children will come, because some 5,000 homes are planned for the site. “And that’s only a fraction of what we can build, or want to,” says Peter Marland, leader of the Labour-run city council.
The Oxford-Cambridge Arc links three cities which, if they were guests at a wedding, would not be seated together. Cambridge and Oxford are small, ancient university cities (though Oxford has an industrial fringe). They are girdled by green belts and miserable to drive around. Milton Keynes is brash, modern and car-oriented. Although founded only in 1967, it already contains some 300,000 people, almost as many as Cambridge and Oxford put together. It shows the rest of the Arc, and the rest of Britain, how to build.
Milton Keynes’s most important and unusual feature is its grid of major roads connected by roundabouts, around which local people drive at alarming speed. Between the roads, behind trees, are neighbourhoods of roughly one square kilometre where everything moves more slowly. In other cities, people mobilise to protect beloved buildings. In Milton Keynes they defend the grid. Last September the council suggested adding traffic lights to a grid road. “Are you joking,” one respondent wrote. The council retreated.
Grids allow cities to expand quickly and neatly, as Barcelona and New York demonstrated in the 19th century. Milton Keynes’s grid has probably helped suppress local objections to the city’s expansion. It helps, too, that the city tends to build large suburbs with proper infrastructure, like Elverby Primary School, rather than allowing a few dozen homes here and there in the standard British fashion. And it helps that people are used to change. Chris Curtis, the mp for Milton Keynes North, suggests that the city is pro-growth because it has always grown.
Its ambition is to reach a population of 410,000 by 2050, which would make it bigger than Cardiff or Newcastle today. It seems likely to hit or comfortably exceed that target. The centre of Milton Keynes contains vast moats of surface parking and some decrepit office buildings, some of which will soon give way to blocks of flats. More important, on the outskirts of the city, the grid is reasserting itself.
Some of the developments that were built on the fringes of Milton Keynes this century are not plugged into the road grid. Instead of houses being set back from major roads behind banks of trees, they press up against them, as in a conventional modern suburb. Because the homes are so close, speed limits are low. Drive east out of central Milton Keynes along Chaffron Way, and a fast parkway turns into a slow residential road. Soon a driver is confronted by a 20mph zone, a crossroads, a T-junction and—horrors!—traffic lights.
The city authorities now regret that era. The new development, known as mk East, will be connected to the grid and will extend it. Not far from Elverby Primary School, earth-moving machines are constructing a road and a roundabout—the first time for many years that one has been added to the grid, claims Mr Marland. The new school is impressive; a nearby clinic and community centre is too. But he seems more delighted by the roundabout than by anything else. ■
For more expert analysis of the biggest stories in Britain, sign up to Blighty, our weekly subscriber-only newsletter.