More burgers, fewer country walks: do Milton Keynes' concrete cows stand for the old way of building new towns? Photograph: Gill Dishart/Corbis
Twenty-one have been built in England over the past century, certainly with the best of intentions. The first - Stevenage, created out of the New Towns Act in 1946 - was also the first to have a traffic-free high street.
But despite being criss-crossed with dedicated cycle paths, nobody these days could call the roundabout-addled town car free - and Stevenage's most celebrated son is famous for driving vehicles extremely fast. It's as if all Milton Keynes' concrete cows spontaneously began burping methane.
And so building a new town to be both environmentally friendly and intrinsically slimming is going to be twice as hard. Radical measures are obviously needed. These should include:
- Kebab shops and trailers to be banned; all of the cooking oil to be used as biofuel.
- Lampposts (using low energy bulbs, of course) to automatically switch off every few hours or so. To switch them back on, people will have to climb up the pole and press a button.
- Still too many people driving? Mandatory ownership of the most eco-friendly vehicle invented, as demonstrated by Mr F. Flintstone.
- Any members of the town with an excessive BMI should be made to run on a giant treadmill three times a week in the town square. The electricity generated could then be used to power traffic lights, mobile phone masts, etc.
- Every child in the town should be regularly weighed. No, er, hang on. Nobody would stand for that level of government interference.
