Milton Keynes in British Culture: Imagining England (Routledge Studies in Modern British History)

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. "Milton Keynes, one of post war Britain's largest and most ambitious state projects has often been maligned, derided, mocked and dismissed in politics and in popular culture alike. By integrating the cultural reception of Milton Keynes into wider histories of British politics and popular culture, this book also provides a wider history of how the backlash against state planning was achieved through the development of a mythology of "the bad old days". Despite this, Milton Keynes has functioned as a stubborn testament to the progressive and radical visions of a post war state, a political alternative to the present which rejects nostalgic and neoliberal conservatism alike"-- Provided by publisher