Mark Steel’s In Town. Mark Steel
steel doors that open only after a biometric sensor scans your iris and a sugary automated voice with an American accent says, ‘Identity confirmed – you may proceed to the excavation section,’ and where an army of ex-Death Row inmates are building a tunnel to China in preparation for an invasion, I shan’t be entirely surprised.
With no churches or pubs or graffiti or bridges or landmarks to plot your position you find yourself not only lost, as you can be in any town, but unsure where you are in relation to the rest of the world, as if you were in a rowing boat in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. The grid numbers only make it more confusing, as you pull over and try to calculate that if you’ve just passed H5, and the one before that was V6, then H7 must be to the right, which, as H9 cancels out V3 over 5 divided by x, the angle of the line H2–V8 must be equal to the sum of V1 squared.
Milton Keynes is a town that must have been designed by a mathematician, one of those philosophical ones like Pythagoras who saw numbers as the only part of the universe that embody perfection. Even the one building you can see as you pass through the town on the train is a huge cube comprising hundreds of identical glass squares on all sides that looks like part of a puzzle for super-intelligent giants.
Outside the station all is chillingly symmetrical, with even the lamp posts having spherical tops so the pattern isn’t spoilt. I assume there must be bylaws to ensure that this picture is maintained, so that if you’re planning to walk down one side of highway H2, you have to get someone to walk down the other side at the same speed, to stop the place becoming lopsided. As an experiment, somebody should try something like leaving a kettle on the pavement to see whether an official would place one on the other side within minutes, maybe having emerged from a pipe that leads to the control room under River Island.
I took my son around Milton Keynes when he was twelve, and he found it bewildering, which I suppose was a good sign. Two years later I told him I was going back there to do a show and he said, ‘Oh no, you’ll be on stage and someone in the front row will slyly pass you a note that says “Please help us”.’
Defenders of the town point out that it’s a pleasant environment, with open spaces and lakes and a low crime rate and efficient schools and all sorts of activities, but the qualities advanced as positive aspects are all top-down, as if arranged by a happiness committee. They’ve been organised by the people who produce brochures that say: ‘And if ballooning is your preferred leisure activity, then it’s up, up and away with the Milton Keynes Hot Air Ballooning Association. Yes, whether it’s double word scores at the Indoor Scrabble Centre on H3 or artificial shark fishing at the hexagonal lake on the corner of V7 and H5, you’ll find all your desires are catered for here in Milton Keynes.’
Living there must feel as if you’re part of a social experiment, with cameras following you to monitor the effects of issues such as triangular shapes on the heart rate. It was born when a Labour housing minister, Richard Crossman, announced where it would be built in 1966. The chairman of the committee set up to oversee the building of the town told Crossman he wanted a ‘properly planned publicly owned town’, and there was clearly an idealism driving the project. Maybe the dream owed something to the dominant socialist view of the time, that aspired to create order from above, organised by the state, as practised by the Soviet Union. In which case, on top of the gulags and the pact with Hitler, we can blame Stalinism for Milton Keynes as well.
The result is a town that’s too clean and ordered. The state of mind of those most eager to defend the new town is shown in the book Milton Keynes: Image and Reality, which boasts: ‘By the mid-1980s we could aspire to be almost at the same level as Croydon.’
In some ways the place has been a success, like a mini-America, built on immigration and a promise of a stable community on a new frontier. If there’d been a properly funded public-relations department in Washington in the 1800s, they’d have probably made adverts saying ‘Come to America’ in which cowboy children ran across Kentucky holding red balloons.
But like the police officers who run the village in the film Hot Fuzz, who are so determined to keep their domain perfect that they arrange the murder of anyone who transgresses the etiquette of idyllic rural life, you feel the people who arrange Milton Keynes feel uneasy if anyone does anything to threaten the place’s controlled order of perfection.
It’s symbolic that in order to get a Football League team, Milton Keynes bypassed the route of developing a club within the community, and brought one in, the MK Dons, a team that had been Wimbledon in South London until its owners took it as a franchise and planted it in its new home.
What you feel the town needs is grubbiness. It needs a market with kids’ clothes tattily piled on a table next to a man with sideburns selling second-hand CDs by the Average White Band and Supertramp. It needs an area the rest of the town warns you not to go, a kebab shop that’s the subject of rumours about missing puppies and a pub that everyone claims to have been in on the night Mad Jimmy went berserk with a cattle prod.
Where the old socialist planners and modern corporate planners agree is that society, and the towns that make a society, should be organised from above. But in time Milton Keynes will develop a soul from within. There will inevitably be bands and rappers, poets and writers who complain eloquently about the town and so help to give it a human touch. Eventually the football supporters will identify with the team enough to moan incessantly about it, and it will become part of the community.
One day the protest groups, the graffiti artists, the eccentrics and flawed shards of humanity that make a town whole will emerge. They’ll shave corners off the angles and put irregular-shaped objects in the centre, and while the original architects might shudder at the unravelling of their plans, Milton Keynes will become a town at last.
I’m not sure why Birmingham is so disliked, but it is. People try to change its image by renovating the Bullring Centre every couple of years, and its citizens often tell you the city has more miles of canals than Venice, but it makes no difference. It’s like the last year of a discredited government, when ministers are changed, and policies relaunched, but no one notices, because by now the Chancellor could give everyone a bar of gold and people would say, ‘Typical of the thieving bastards.’
Maybe it’s the train station that does it. It’s surely the gloomiest, dingiest station for any major city in Britain. On the way there, you clatter past the airport and fields and light and the football ground, but this openness doesn’t make you feel at all free and airy, because you know it means you’re hurtling towards the damp darkness of New Street station, just as you wouldn’t think, ‘Ah, what a delightful breeze to set me up for the day,’ if you were a prisoner sailing across San Francisco Bay to start your time in Alcatraz.
The layout has been carefully designed so that on the platforms no sunlight can enter, even on midsummer day, like Stonehenge in reverse. The first time you go there you think, this can’t possibly be the station for Britain’s second city, and assume the train took a wrong turning and went down a disused mine-shaft. Then hundreds of people struggle with their cases along the unlit narrow platforms, like refugees from the Russian pogroms, though at least those lucky bastards had a crying family to greet them and put their luggage on a donkey. At New Street there’s a search for the stairs to the Bullring, where, even if you’ve been there fifty times before, you stand and look around for several minutes thinking, ‘Now where am I supposed to go?’
Because you’re in a traffic roundabout you can only escape from by navigating subways and uncrossable intersections that no map can help with. So you submerge yourself into the concrete, deciding to follow a path and seeing where it takes you, becoming so confused you wouldn’t be surprised if you came out opposite the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Even in the middle of the city you’re surrounded by flyovers and vast traffic islands that make you feel you’re really not meant to be there, as if you’ve accidentally wandered into a military zone, and you expect an official to come running towards you screaming at you to get down, and launching an investigation into how you got in without anyone noticing.
Even in a car you get hopelessly,