A Bittersweet Love Letter to Britain's 'Crap' New Towns

(Top photo: an AFC Wimbledon fan wears a mask outside the MK Dons stadium. Photo: Nick Potts/PA Archive/PA Images)

Milton Keynes is turning 50, so loads of venerable old media outlets have decided it's time to re-evaluate that long demonised mess of Buckinghamshire concrete. The Spectator calls it "inspirational", The Guardian offers a convoluted list of "50 reasons to love Milton Keynes", and even the BBC has weighed in, saying that it's "much loved by its residents".

This media circle jerk is perfectly fine and expected, but seems a bit odd when we consider that Milton Keynes has existed for 50 years (albeit only in habitable form since the 1980s) on a diet of public ridicule. From its 130 roundabouts to its 20,000 parking spaces, Milton Keynes has been mercilessly mocked. Take, for example, Liz Leyh's iconic Concrete Cows sculpture, which has been repeatedly vandalised, beheaded and once taken hostage, in the name of humiliating the town's aspirations as a concrete metropolis. But consider: if you stuck that same, slightly ridiculous, cow family onto the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, tourists would spend hours applauding the artist's daring and panache. It's all a matter of perspective.

The perspective on Milton Keynes – and Britain's New Towns in general – is all wrong. I grew up in Crawley, one of the first five towns designated under the 1946 New Towns Act (when Milton Keynes was still just a glint in the milkman's eye), and the town was reviled. It was known for being crap. Indeed, the Crap Towns series of books said that it was "completely ruined by Brutalist architecture and high rise developments" and that it had "a cultural life that makes Milton Keynes look like the Weimar Republic".

I can't speak for the Weimar Republic, but residents of Crawley have long swallowed this line. Sure, there's a nice shopping centre (called the County Mall; a real fuck you to every other mall in the county), an enormous cinema and even a small zoo, but the idea that Crawley – like fellow New Towns such as Harlow, Basildon and Hemel Hempstead – exists to subsume the uncultured overspill from London persists. I spoke to Sam Jordison, editor of the Crap Towns books, who said he felt that people didn't like the New Towns because of "the fact that the architecture is so well planned", which makes them feel "less human".

Planned is exactly what the towns were meant to be, and it's not a dirty word. The foundational document for the New Towns is called the Reith Reports, and it was commissioned – perhaps unsurprisingly – by Lord Reith, the same guy who created the BBC. It's not an exciting read, but it makes clear something all New Town residents know in their hearts: these places were made for living. The reports account for every aspect of New Town life, writing that in each neighbourhood there should be "a centre with adequate provision of shops, places of recreation and refreshment, and a grouping of buildings containing a public hall and meeting rooms for various purposes".

As if to underline the slightly creepy utopianism of the project, an animated film, Charley in New Town, was released in 1948 to seduce the public into this vision of gridded urban landscapes. In it, our protagonist, Charley, encounters the town planners and residents who debate the proposals with all the intellectual rigour of a Twitter egg. When they come to discuss how the town is laid out, we get this exchange:

CHAIRMAN: Each neighbourhood must have its own…
WOMAN: Shopping district!
MAN: And lots of pubs right next door to me!
WOMAN: Oh no you don't!
CHAIRMAN: Oh, there'll be a pub quite near enough to you.

At the same time as the New Towns were springing up in the hinterland outside London, redevelopment programmes were taking place in the capital, squeezing high density housing into the rubble left by the Luftwaffe. Only estates like the Barbican, which was always private housing, paid any attention to the balance of living, working and playing. You can't blame them, when their priority was rehoming people from the 250,000 homes destroyed in the war, but it's confusing that these blocks and estates are now architectural and social gems – often commanding prices of more than £500,000 for a two-bed flat – whereas the New Towns, with the luxury of a spacious, meticulously planned design, are still featuring in comedy anthologies of shite towns.

This is the essential paradox of the New Towns. In the Londoncentric daydreams of the press – who throw around terms like "brutalist" without ever really understanding it – the towns only have merit when they conform to some abstract notion of post-war utopianism. The world brutalism, used to refer to much of the modernist architecture of the period, has become hopelessly vague: even the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture calls it a "term so loosely used it could mean anything intended by those employing it". The fact that the "brut" of brutalism comes from "beton brut" – a term for raw concrete used by architectural philosopher Le Corbusier – has been largely lost along the way. Instead, brutalism has become the backdrop to fashion editorials and music videos.

But the people who live and work inside the blocks – which are brutalist only when looked at from the outside – aren't concerned with the Dezeen or Wallpaper retrospective on Milton Keynes. A half century of condescending sighing about New Towns is more impactful. The reality is that the New Towns aren't especially beautiful or affluent or cultural, but in the suburban backwaters of Britain, these towns are, uniquely, laid out for their residents' convenience and enjoyment. On its 50th anniversary, Milton Keynes is neither beautiful nor crap: from Xscape to The Point, the town is a rare example of Britain's development ambitions made real.

@nickfthilton