The drive from the motorway to Milton Keynes is gorgeous, tree-lined avenue after tree-lined avenue, a real pleasure to see, particularly now that it's autumn and the colours are glorious. And then it continued the same, except that there were buildings on either side and it slowly dawned on us that we were on Midsommer Boulevard, right in the middle of the city centre.
Midsummer Boulevard consists of this walkway in the middle, which is for pedestrians and is wonderful to walk along on.
on either side of the walk is the road for traffic, except there is very little
no pavements for pedestrians but signs that say 'pedestrians do not have priority'
buildings, shops and cafeterias on either side
and parking that is free for 3 hours, and which is where we parked.
Milton Keynes is a 'new town'. In the 1960s the government decided that a further generation of new towns in the south east of England was needed to relieve housing congestion in London. Milton Keynes was to be the biggest yet, with a population of 250,000 and area of 22,000 acres.
It was decided that a softer, more human-scaled landscape was needed with an emphatically modernist architecture. Recognising how traditional towns and cities had become choked in traffic, they established a grid of distributor roads about 1 kilometer between edges, leaving the spaces between to develop more organically. An extensive network of shared paths for leisure cyclists and pedestrians criss-crosses through and between them. The original design concept aimed for a 'forest city' and its foresters planted millions of trees. Parks, lakes and green spaces cover about 25% of Milton Keynes; as of 2018, there are 22 million trees and shrubs in public open spaces.
The urban design has not been universally praised. In 1980, the then president of the Royal Town Planning Institute, Francis Tibbalds, described Central Milton Keynes as 'bland, rigid, sterile and totally boring'.
This was our first time in Milton Keynes and we had come to see an exhibition of the works of Vanessa Bell
at the MK Gallery
which is next to the theatre.
After seeing the exhibition we decided to wander around and came upon this sculpture
Dangerous Liaisons by Philip Jackson, 1995, (bronze).
We then started exploring the area around and behind the gallery
Ah! Two people - the first we had seen since we started exploring
eerily empty - I looked in the restaurants and it was the same thing, no one there
When we realised that the large, long building in the distance was a shopping arcade, we turned around
interesting sculptures
back on Sommerville Boulevard - still no one about
except these two women who were crossing the road below the sign that reads 'pedestrians do not have priority' and we followed them on the other side of the wide avenue
first proper signs of human life - people sitting out at Costa
all along this side of the boulevard shopping arcades: not surprising as the guy in the gallery had told us that this is the city centre and where the shops and restaurants are. We are not interested in window shopping or shopping for that matter,
so we decided to go and explore the market that we had seen when we parked the car. It's a mixture of outdoor
and indoor market
and it's fabulous. You can find anything you want here: clothes
household textiles
household stuff
gardening
grocery stores which were a real pleasure to wander around as they sold stuff I had never seen before, stuff I had not heard of before
fruit and veg
these are the biggest pomegranades I have ever seen
aloe vera leaves - not easy to find
things that I had to ask what they were
and lots of stalls of food to take out or eat there.
We decided on this place, sat down, had a tasty dish each and then it was time to head on home.
I loved the market and the exhibition was very good indeed, so it was a good day. I found Milton Keynes bland, alienating and alienated. You did not get the sense of community you get in other towns, even ugly ones, there was nothing there - cold, impersonal, not much life.
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