Milton Keynes or Civilia? Real and imagined utopias of the Pop period.

Alan Powers

The British Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2014

The 1968 generation appears practically absent; their supposed dominance an apparent fiction.

Hay Wain business cardswww.zazzle.co.uk

Liz Leyh, Concrete Cows, 1978, in their original location in Milton Keynes shopping centre

Ebenezer Howard, The Three Magnets, 1898

A Clockwork Jerusalem, curated by Sam Jacob and Wouter Vanstiphout

2004

William Morris foliage and Silbury Hill

There might be a case for a new Letchworth as part of a balanced approach to increasing housing supply, but only alongside a couple more new towns the size of Milton Keynes.

Second, builders are not interested in wasting what they see as valuable development land on homes with generous front and back gardens. They want to squeeze in as many houses on a plot as they can.

Finally, even if a way is found of re-badging a new town as a garden city that will not prevent opposition. The nimbys will still hate it.

Larry Elliott, Guardian Business blog, 13 November 2013

Geoffrey Copcutt, Cumbernauld Centre, with Cliff Richard and Knossos

Cliff Richard, Wired for Sound, 1981

Lewis Womdersley and Hugh Wilson,Hulme Cresents (shown in conjunction with Barbican towers

‘Homes for Change’ Housing Co-operative, Hulme, Manchester,

Hulme Crescents with Royal Crescent, Bath

Villa Savoye in ruins, 1965(photo courtesy of Alan Irvine)

Ivor de Wofle, with Kenneth Browne, introduction by Ian Nairn, 1971

Civilia, Planner’s Report: Central Urban Space Theory by Rodney Carran and Michael Rowley

“To cater for a population increase plus a drift from the cities made possible by the car, town planners since the war have tended to rubber-stamp the same solution over and over again, they have irreversibly despoiled a vast area of food-growing countryside with a network of roads and suburbs. But vastly greater population growth is forecast. Life becomes unthinkable with coast-to-coast suburbia within thirty years, neither town nor country, to the exclusion of green and pleasant land. From a need to conserve land, coupled with a need for new high-density civilized cities, Civilia can spring to life covering nothing but spoiled land and turning the ugliness of the quarries into the splendor of marinas.”

Hubert De Cronin Hastings (1902-1986), part-owner and editor of AR (editor 1927-1971) in front of the Rolls Royce he converted into a caravan for his countryside travels in the 1950s

‘Exterior Furnishing’Architectural Review, January 1944Cover and illustration by Kenneth Rowntree

“Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy founded on the true rock of Sir Uvedale Price.”

AR, December 1949

Ivor de Wolfe, ‘Townscape – a plea for an English Visual Philosophy founded on the true rock of Sir Uvedale Price’, Architectural Review, December 1949

Harlow New Town, chief planner Sir Frederick Gibberd

‘The Bride of Denmark’, Queen Anne’s Gate

Hastings’ country retreat

The Ecologist, “A Blueprint for Survival” January 1972, vol. 2, no. 1 cover

Manplan, Opening statement, September 1969

…People need to feel that they are needed… (caption)

Ian Nairn, ‘London’s Last Chance’,Observer, 11 December 1966

Illustration from Non-Plan, New Society, 26 March 1969

“… decaying housing is ever

with us.” (caption)

“…one human being

has lost out in the

struggle…” (caption)

The eighteenth-century park

disappears under twentieth-

century hardware…(caption)

…vast office

complexes slip

through the

planning system…

(caption)

‘Civilia’s … aim is to recreate a race of urban, not suburban, men, in which cause its designers have done what lays in their power to bring together some of the lost charms of city life. Prominent (though not first) among which is the right to stand on a corner or sit on a step discussing an angle, the dry alternative to messing about in boats. All the better if there is a battlement and a view therefrom, providing the kind of confrontation between town and country which, outside Spain and Italy, is no longer easily found.’ p.98

Civilia – Pop End

Cedric Price, Potteries Thinkbelt’Published in New Society, 1966

Architectural Review cover – Canals issue by Eric de Maré, July, 1947

Architectural Review cover – The Thames as a linear National Park by Eric de Maré,July 1950

Covent Garden GLC plan

Milton Keynes Town Park proposal, ith Cone, Water Carpet and Glass Bridge

David Rudlin and Nicholas Falk (Urbed), Uxcester Garden City, Second Stage Submission, 2014 Wolfson Economics Prize

Wolfson Economics Prize SubmissionSusan Parham and colleagues

Tom Holbrook, 5th StudioCalvert, 2014