Planning Milton Keynes

Milton Keynes planning study 1969

An event featuring Professor Michael Edwards and Dr David Mountain

Monday 11th September 1830hrs

At The Gallery EC1 and streamed

How do you make a new town? This event will bring together Michael Edwards, who as a young planner worked on the original scheme for Milton Keynes, and David Mountain, who’s conducted extensive research into the history of the town’s development.

From the 1940s, London’s local government was committed to reducing the city’s population and dispersing thousands to a series new towns outside of the green belt. Yet during the 1950s, Britain’s Conservative national government put a stop to the London County Council’s (LCC) attempts to build further new towns. The idea of building a town in north Buckinghamshire, half way between London and Birmingham appears in LCC documents from the late 1950s, and was advanced by Buckinghamshire’s dynamic architect-planner Fred Pooley during the early 1960s. A change in national government in 1964 made the project possible.

Sketch of original monorail conception of Milton Keynes

Pooley’s vision was for a public transport oriented city, built around a connecting monorail. But as the project advanced, Pooley was sidelined, and instead Milton Keynes was planned around the private car. The subsequent history of Milton Keynes would pioneer approaches to British urban development that would become dominant from the 1980s onwards.

We will follow this talk with a cycling tour of Milton Keynes in spring 2024.

Michael Edwards studied economics, then planning at UCL 1964-6. He worked in Nathaniel Lichfield's practice, doing economic inputs to the Plan for Milton Keynes. He has enjoyed lecturing at the Bartlett School, UCL since 1969 and been involved in all the EiPs on London Plans since 2000, working with the network of community groups JustSpace.org.uk  His publications are at michaeledwards.org.uk  and he tweets as @michaellondonsf . His 2015 paper on housing, rent and land over the next 45 years, commissioned by the Government Office for Science Foresight project on the future of UK cities is at http://bit.ly/1NvjmV7. He was one of the founders of INURA.org which is going strong in its 30th year and is writing a book on King’s Cross with Jason Katz.

Dr David Mountain is Head of Research at the Royal Town Planning Institute, and an Honorary Research Fellow in Planning at the University of Manchester. A scholar of the intellectual history of architecture and planning, his research examines the end of the British new towns movement, and the emergence of urban regeneration in the 1970s. He completed his PhD in Architecture at the University of Manchester in 2022, and has lectured and taught widely in architecture and planning, including at Manchester School of Architecture. He has a Masters in Urban Studies from University College London, and a BA in History of Art from Goldsmiths.