Tomorrow's heritage? ... a new development in Milton Keynes
Byker Wall listed? Fireworks to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Milton Keynes? It's astonishing how what was once so very new, radical and more than occasionally disparaged becomes the stuff of history so very soon.
Milton Keynes entered middle age this morning. It even has middle-age spread: its idealistic 1960s plan is being increasingly bloated by new, third-rate, "executive" homes set in cul-de-sacs that belong anywhere in middle England except MK, designed to be a million miles away from half-baked Mock Tudor or New Georgian suburbia.
Meanwhile, Byker, the zigzag, polychrome 1970s housing estate designed by Ralph Erskine (a Quaker born in London who worked as an architect in Sweden for most of his life) is now a Grade II* listed development of historic and architectural importance. Anyone who has lived there in recent years (figures suggest one in three residents have been out of work) or followed the teenage TV soap Byker Grove would never have imagined such a thing.
But, in the world of architecture, planning and design, anything half-decent that lasts long enough - 30 years in today's reckoning - is likely to nudge its way into popular sentiment, and ultimately the listing system. Perhaps we should expect the commercial centre of Milton Keynes to be designated a Unesco World Heritage site, along with Stonehenge and Old Havana?
So are we being encouraged to look at Milton Keynes and Byker through rose-tinted specs? Maybe. Even so, both were fine, idealistic projects.
Byker was a tough, working-class quarter of Newcastle, its hilly site lined with rows of mean brick family homes. Erskine's extraordinary picturesque estate was a remarkable replacement: not only did local residents have a say in the design, but they were moved out of their old homes and into the new in a steady flow, with no break-up of the old community. For Erskine, architecture and landscape were intimately connected, and so too were people and architecture. He was a humanist, a socialist, a talented designer; he was also a great drinker and storyteller with a good sense of humour.
Before he left for Sweden in the late 1930s Erskine worked under Louis de Soissons with the design team at Welwyn Garden City. This, of course, was one major influence on the planning of Milton Keynes, as was Los Angeles and the architecture of Mies van der Rohe. The very name - Milton Keynes - combined, as Dick Crossman, minister of housing and local government in Harold Wilson's Labour government, said, a touch of both poetry and economic realism. If the latter outweighs the former today, and if the standard of architecture has declined, there is no doubt that MK is still special. It is a town of some 250,000 people and two million trees, a town set in parkland; albeit a town designed around the assumed needs of the car-bound nuclear family as seen through the eyes of 1960s architects and planners.
Perhaps Ralph Erskine should have worked on MK; after all, he had been much influenced by the thinking of the Architectural Review that had pushed for the development of new towns that might have been as densely planned, as rich in terms of experience, and as loved as historic Italian hill towns. The AR's managing director, Hubert de Cronin Hastings, even published a wonderful book in 1971 called Civilia, the name of the city he would have built in place of Milton Keynes ...
This is heady stuff. I wonder if - although it might be just a question of when - we'll announce the listing of the glorious new (Olympian, even) government-approved housing in the sodden Thames Gateway. My bet for Grade I listed, Unesco World Heritage status, and a grand fireworks display? The horrid new housing under the pylons at Barking Reach. It might look a bit of dog today, but in 30 or 40 years' time, this will surely be how we'll remember the privatised 90s and the iconic noughties.
