Milton Keynes and Me

This is Milton Keynes.

And so is this.

And this.

With one of the fastest-growing economies in the country,

it's a place you've all heard of, but probably can't quite picture.

If you don't live in Milton Keynes, you might see it as a bit of a joke.

A soulless place.

The home of roundabouts...

..and concrete cows.

And that's how I felt about it when I was growing up here.

At 18, I left to go to university and never moved back.

Until now.

It's time for me to rediscover my hometown.

For the next few weeks, I'll be living with my mum and dad

while I make a film about the place that created me.

-Hello.

-Hello!

You see, the thing is both Milton Keynes and I

have reached an important milestone in life.

We are about to turn 50.

Enough?

Very good.

-ARCHIVE:

-Welcome to a city which doesn't exist yet.

It's surrounded by roads that lead to nowhere.

In fact, I'm standing right in the heart of England's secret city.

Milton Keynes wasn't just a building project.

It was a massive experiment in social engineering.

They're not building a new town here,

but at a cost of £1,500 million, they're building a new city,

a city as big as Cardiff, and starting from scratch.

Conceived in 1967, it was decided to locate it

exactly halfway between London and Birmingham.

Grid system is based 1km apart...

A master plan was drawn up,

which prescribed exactly how this perfect society would be built,

from each house down to the very last tree.

From the start, there'll be houses to suit workers, managers,

vicars and doctors.

It'll attract young men with bright new ideas.

They'll work in places like this - AFUs - advanced factory units.

At last, that's how Fred Roach sees it.

Well, I suppose we may be a bit biased, but we think that

Milton Keynes is probably about the most exciting thing

going on in Europe, and perhaps in the world.

In a way, the people who came to live there, like me,

were part of a wild, utopian adventure.

Two generations on, it now has its own indigenous population,

and surveys always show people really love living here.

So why was it never like that for me?

I used to hate being asked that question, "Where are you from?"

Because the answer would always elicit a smirk.

And people would always say the same thing -

"Oh, I know that place.

"It's got a lot of roundabouts, hasn't it?"

So perhaps it's appropriate that I begin my journey

with the thing that MK is most famous for.

There's nothing more expressive than the one-way gyratory.

You can put anything on a roundabout.

We've seen... What have we seen?

Windmills, duck ponds, pubs, planes, boats, trains...

You name it - anything can go on a roundabout.

We see, like, a roundabout as an oasis on a sea of tarmac.

They lift our sagging spirits, don't they, on tiresome journeys?

VOICEOVER: I'm joining

the Roundabout Appreciation Society of Great Britain on a road trip.

-So you're all fans of roundabouts, are you?

-Yes.

Our committee like to come here probably once a year

to Milton Keynes, cos the whole beauty of Milton Keynes

is there's a roundabout virtually on every corner, so it's ideal.

We see this as the Mecca for roundabout spotting.

I mean, they're all very nice, look -

we would call this roundabout a Titchmarsh.

Why do you call it a Titchmarsh?

Oh, a Titchmarsh is an island in full bloom or there's nice plants

or trees or a well-kept lawn, but we also call them Monty Dons as well.

We have the PMT, which is a painted mini traffic island.

-Tokers?

-Tokers!

A toker is a grass only, er, roundabout.

THEY LAUGH

Clive's what we call a bonking 'bouter.

-A what?

-A bonking 'bouter.

That's a guy who's made love on a roundabout.

That's another thing altogether.

We-we disapprove of that - the committee does - by the way.

Here we are.

Fox Milne Roundabout.

-I think we should all go over.

-Yeah, come on.

We'll do a bit of pointing.

Are you sure about this?!

There are no fewer than 300 roundabouts in Milton Keynes.

Come on!

Far more than most other cities in the country.

You've come back over!

Is the modern Milton Keynes really as dull as outsiders think,

or is this network of Monty Dons

actually part of something unique and remarkable?

They do say roundabouts have a zen-like quality about them.

They do have a calming effect on you.

Then I suppose there's always the karma aspect.

What goes around comes around on a roundabout!

You know, I've calculated that people in MK

spend 5% of their lives driving around roundabouts.

-ARCHIVE:

-Queen's Buildings, Southwark.

A tenement block just 1.5 miles from Piccadilly Circus...

..where the poor are powerless, the needy neglected

and the future dark for the children born here.

During the 1950s and '60s,

Britain was facing a housing crisis in London and other major cities,

and 2.5 million people lived in appalling slum conditions.

This room, eight feet by six feet, is the centre of the family's life.

Five children and two adults sleep here, in one cot and three beds.

Conditions understood all too well by headmistress Madge Taylor.

They're exhausted sometimes when they come into school.

We take things like darkness... just for granted, don't we?

We go to bed in a comfortable room, alone,

we switch off the light, we can sleep.

This is a luxury in some of the homes that I'm thinking of.

Milton Keynes was the last of 14 new towns

created to rehouse people from the slums,

and it was the largest and most ambitious of them all.

A development corporation was appointed,

which would act as parents to this infant town,

and nurture it into adulthood.

It was their idealistic beliefs about how a new society

could and should be that would make Milton Keynes unique.

The important thing, really, is that Milton Keynes,

although we're concerned about the beautiful buildings,

and the design that goes into it, essentially it's about people

and not about planners or architects or economists or accountants.

It's about freedom of choice, about leaving options open.

We don't think that we've got any crystal ball that tells us

what people's social and economic aspirations are going to be

during the next 20 years or so.

The skeleton of the city was a grid system of roads like LA

or San Francisco, but without traffic lights to slow you down.

Spread over 90 square kilometres, each one-kilometre square

was filled in like a giant bingo card,

with the ingredients for a perfect society.

A school. A doctor's surgery. A smattering of industry.

The housing estates would be set in wide, open spaces,

where, according the master plan,

no building would be taller than the tallest tree.

The house itself and the surroundings

are really marvellous.

I have every convenience here.

A lovely bathroom, two toilets, which I never had in Fulham -

I used to have to go to Fulham Baths to have a bath

because the bath was so bad in London.

I do not wish to go back to London at all.

This was to be nothing short of a utopia

fit for the modern world and a modern population,

and it would attract the most daring architects

who would share in this vision.

Sir Norman Foster created Beanhill.

Four men nicknamed The Pop Group,

who had come straight out of college, designed Netherfield.

On one estate, called Tinkers Bridge,

the architect David Byrne created homes with a decadent slanted roof.

And I found a couple who are still living there over 40 years later.

-Hello, Richard.

-Hello!

-Are you coming in?

-Thank you.

-Hello.

-Hello.

Yes, we've been here since they've been built. 43 years.

-What did you like about when you moved here?

-It's... It's...

-We liked...

-The open-plan design.

-..the open-plan design.

Can I...? I'm going to go up here, let me have a look down...

-You two stay there.

-That's squeaky!

-Squeaky stairs, yes!

We haven't touched them.

THEY LAUGH

Yeah, you see, it's quite a...quite a perspective, isn't it, really?

You can see why...what we were saying about the open-space plan.

It feels so, sort of, refreshingly different, doesn't it? Even today...

Claustrophobia, is that the word - you don't feel none of that at all.

Yes, cos it's so open and airy.

It's got a really nice - what's it called - aspect.

That's right, yeah. It's so spacious.

Linda, do you remember,

what's your recollection of walking in here for the first time?

Well, I just couldn't believe the actual size.

You cried, didn't you?

If you looked at my mother's house where I was staying at the time,

I could fit my mother's house into this house twice over.

It was... Everything was just on a much bigger scale.

Erm...

First thing she said to me was, "You were right about the windows!"

Yeah.

I can see why people like Ron and Linda

felt they'd found nirvana just 50 miles north of London.

Our house was part of an estate built in 1978

in the north of the city in an area called Great Linford.

-Ooh!

-Careful, Mum.

This says "family photos".

I can remember standing on this site where the house was going to be.

It was just a ploughed field,

and I was lucky enough to be able to go back to the developers

and say, "Actually, yes, I would like plot number 38."

Do you think there was a sense that you were joining

this newly created city?

Were you aware of that? Or was it just like any other place?

Um...

There was an air of excitement,

but it was still very much a muddy field,

if you can put it like that, because there was so much building

going on of the roads and the developments all around.

I was aware that it grew quite slowly, I think.

Like other immigrants here, my dad grew up in London

and was drawn to the idea of fresh air

and a better quality of life.

I've always yearned, I suppose, basically, for a village life.

I thought a village life was ideal

because it has such a community aspect to it.

Which we didn't have in suburban London, really.

Margaret came from a village in Norfolk,

and that was sort of the ideal situation, I thought,

for a nice family life, to have a...

To be brought up in a village.

So, in a sense, was Mum your passport out of London's slums?

-I suppose she was, really, yes. Yes.

-SHE LAUGHS

That was perhaps the truly unique feature of this place.

It felt like a village, but was actually a city.

When we were kids,

my older sister Catherine enjoyed making my life unbearable.

Like me, she left MK and never really came back.

She lived for many years in the Far East.

But she recently moved back to England,

and she's come to meet me at our family home.

-So, this is our back garden.

-Mm.

-Yeah. It feels small.

-Does it?

-Yeah.

It's interesting. I guess it felt big at one time.

I can remember leaning out of those windows

and dreaming of different places at various points in my life.

Do you remember choosing the bedrooms?

I remember looking at the plans for this house

and being terribly excited, really excited.

Yeah, and you got the biggest bedroom.

-I was never happy about that.

-No, no, but you wanted your bedroom.

-Did I?

-You chose it first.

I remember the house...smelling of paint and chipboard

and just being totally new,

the smell of the new wooden doors, and the floorboards.

It felt very clinical somehow.

It was, I would say, a bit soulless, actually.

It felt...empty, definitely.

Perhaps that's a kind of collective feeling that we had

together, almost, that I picked up on,

is this feeling of no belonging, because everyone was a migrant,

everyone was coming into the city from somewhere else.

And if you've got a lot of people who've just moved,

and everyone had really just moved, there is no community,

there is no sense of deep roots.

If we imagine, for a minute,

that Milton Keynes was an experiment in a laboratory,

the scientists who devised it were hoping to see signs of culture

growing on their Petri dish.

As this documentary from the early '80s shows,

an instant culture needs to be seeded.

When we started to plan a new city for 250,000 people,

we started here at Milton Keynes with green fields.

We didn't have the 1,000 years of tradition that London has,

we didn't have its sculpture, we didn't have its pictures.

So we've got to plan right from the start to get art

and architecture combined.

You can't build a city just of houses and factories and shops.

The Development Corporation

invested in works of public art by famous artists.

Octo is by Wendy Taylor.

The Horse by Elisabeth Frink.

These gave the town an instant sense of being culturally rich.

I don't think it was about trying to create an impression

that it was cultured,

I think it was actually about trying to build a culture.

They had to invent a new place, and art was certainly

seen as an important tool in developing communities.

Remarkably, that original artistic vision has remained intact.

I've come to the city's art gallery to meet its director, Anthony Spira.

He's just commissioned the town's biggest-ever piece of art

to commemorate its 50th birthday.

It's going to be installed

on one of the city's best examples of a Titchmarsh.

So this is a model for the sculpture that Richard Deacon proposes,

and to have one of the most successful artists of his generation

in Milton Keynes was very interesting for us.

So we were really keen to work with him.

And where will this structure go?

This structure will go on one of the main roundabouts

as you come off the M1,

it's called the Fox Milne Roundabout.

It will be about 25 metres tall.

We're hoping it will announce people's arrival in Milton Keynes.

In the early days, art was not just seen as something

the public could passively enjoy.

It was something they could get involved in creating.

-ARCHIVE:

-In Milton Keynes, the town artist employed by the new town's Development Corporation

is encouraging ordinary people to do art themselves.

The community on the Netherfield estate built a gigantic giraffe

out of spoil from the building site.

Beanhill residents created a tin man.

I've either got to take some off of here or some off the neck.

I don't know which way to angle it.

The Social Development Department set out from the start

to encourage artists to move into the area.

Elizabeth Leyh, an American sculptor,

has been here for two years.

People often say to me, "When do you get time for your own work?"

And I can't understand what they mean,

because I don't understand what my own work is.

I mean, I am a sculptor. And I work with the community.

So I guess I'm a community artist.

Liz Leyh worked here for five years

and some of the art she helped create

has become part of the fabric of the place.

I've lived on this farm for a year-and-a-half now

and all of a sudden, a few months ago, I thought,

"Well, I'd really like to see it stay a farm."

And so I want to make some cows,

some life-size, realistic cows down on the field.

The concrete cows are now icons.

And who would have predicted

they would become the most recognisable symbol of this city?

Docile, bovine ambassadors, if you will.

But as a teenager, they only reinforced doubts

that my hometown was a place

the rest of the country was laughing at.

After 30 years of separation,

I'm taking Liz back to see the originals,

lovingly put out to pasture in the grounds of the town's museum.

Oh, my goodness.

There they are.

Are you a bit speechless? SHE LAUGHS

Yes, I am. Don't know what to say.

They've changed their shapes quite a bit.

People were coming from everywhere.

People moved here and didn't know each other,

and Milton Keynes was being built around us.

That's one of the things I really loved about coming to

Milton Keynes, that...

..you're working in a place that's being built

and people living there can actually participate in the building

of the city by contributing to public spaces.

I'm a fan of the cows,

but I suppose they are an ironic cultural artefact,

reinforcing the idea that the city is lacking in real culture.

It makes me rather sad for the audacious architects team

at the Development Corporation,

because culture was as key to them as roads and houses.

In fact, they devised a kind of downtown district...

..that would have made Las Vegas blush.

City Club, as it was called,

was rather like a space-age Disneyland

for adults as well as for kids.

Not just consisting of theatres and cinemas and bars,

but also a souk and a wave pool and even a rodeo.

I think these drawings reveal Milton Keynes at its most utopian,

idealistic, aspirational and even hedonistic.

But it was never built,

deemed too ambitious by the Development Corporation board.

This says, "The original concept for the City Club and stadium

"was to incorporate on one site a wide range

"of recreational, entertainment, leisure and social facilities..."

"..to encourage participation at a local level

"by positive pricing policies...

"..to avoid regimented institutional control."

HE CHUCKLES

It's interesting, the vision of City Club,

bold and imaginative as it was, wasn't very practical, surely.

Is that a criticism or...?

THEY LAUGH

I think what was so exciting was that this was a group of

some of the most innovative, dynamic, well-connected architects

and designers of their day who were given a blank sheet of paper

to dream their dreams.

And it's amazing that any of it was built at all.

City Club may never have become a reality,

but the utopian ideals of Milton Keynes live on

in another institution which arrived in the city in 1969.

What I'm going to do now is to try

and shoot a pellet into the tube thing on top of the glider,

which is there only to catch the pellet,

so it doesn't go flying round the studio,

slaughtering everybody and sundry.

The Open University gave the opportunity for

advanced learning to everyone at a time

when it was really just a preserve of the middle classes.

Just when I thought I could do it, along came the second unit,

and that was on relativity, and that really floored me.

The Open University's philosophy of inclusivity

chimed with that of the town's planners.

But despite the Development Corporation's best endeavours,

by the early '80s,

the city had a growing reputation for being soulless and concrete.

And not enough people were moving there.

So a marketing campaign was launched to persuade people

to relocate to Milton Keynes.

A now-iconic TV advert of a boy with a red balloon hit our screens.

You can see my house in the commercial,

where the boy stops to skim some stones across a pond.

This TV advert portrays Milton Keynes

as a green, safe and even exciting place to live.

-CHILDREN:

-..three, two, one!

THEY CHEER

But the reality was it was also quite ordinary.

In our house, we had macaroni cheese every Tuesday

and my dad played bridge every Wednesday.

Wouldn't it be nice if all cities

were like Milton Keynes?

My father would come in every evening from the London train,

take his suit off and get stuck into

some epic creative project of his own.

Laying the patio.

It took months.

Sunbathing on my father's new patio,

we didn't feel like guinea pigs in a huge social experiment.

It didn't feel like we were part of a perfect society.

Evidently, lots of people were experiencing a sense of dislocation.

The press even created a name for it - "the new town blues".

At the Development Corporation, a team of workers provided

practical and emotional support to the newcomers.

Even shoulders to cry on.

Did you feel that you were at the start of something amazing?

Oh, I had no idea at the time how vast...

interesting, exciting,

depressing it would be,

and I loved every minute of it.

-ARCHIVE:

-Mal Booth is one of the 13 arrivals workers

employed by the Development Corporation.

Her job is to visit people when they've just arrived

and to go back a few months later to see how they're settling in.

I think it's a very unusual family who can move from an environment

that perhaps they're been in all their lives and come to somewhere

like Milton Keynes, which is so different for them, and settle.

I think it hits a lot of the families

where the husband's out to work, the mother has young children,

and she now finds herself in a situation where this is all foreign.

I heard a stat that there was a lot of single women

who came to Milton Keynes during the early days.

Is that something you were aware of?

Um...

I don't know about a lot of single mothers coming to Milton Keynes.

I do know that a lot of women became single parents

once they'd moved here.

You know, their marriages were...

What they thought perhaps were strong, weren't -

they had a lot of problems to deal with.

When you're young,

moving to a new area highlights the cracks in a relationship.

Do you think those times would have caused any tensions

between the two of you?

Oh, I'm sure they probably did, yes.

Yes, because I was working.

It was tough.

I didn't have any support network, ever.

Because my family and Dad's family were further away.

His family was in London and my family was in Norfolk.

So I never had a mother to call on to come and help me out

or anything like that.

-No.

-And...

-You just had to...

do the best you could.

But of course, having to go out to work,

for a woman with two children,

it does put some sort of pressure on them.

I suppose there was stress,

but she copes with stress quite well.

I cover up my stress.

Hmm.

We probably all experienced difficulties

in different ways at that time -

but what I'm only understanding now is that this adversity

created relationships between strangers

of real strength and intimacy.

We talked about everything.

I mean, I got to know a family on this estate.

Unfortunately, the mum of the two young girls became very ill,

and was diagnosed with cancer,

and I had been told that she was dying,

and it was very emotional,

one day when she asked me,

"Am I dying, have I got cancer?"

and I sat with her and talked her through it

and was able to let her come to terms with the fact

that, yes, she didn't have long -

and it was nice, helping her to write letters to her two girls

and to be able to talk to them before she eventually died.

That was a very moving experience, but one that taught me a lot.

So, yeah.

Oh...

-Are you all right?

-I remember her well, yeah.

How funny is that?

Oh.

Hidden among trees and spread thinly over a wide area,

Milton Keynes doesn't look like anywhere else in the country.

In fact, from ground level at least,

you can't really get a good perspective on it.

The city has more than 22 million trees.

Every new family was given one to plant in their garden.

Ours was a cherry.

I remember I nearly killed it one year

after an accident involving a tin of creosote.

Today, the city within a forest - as the master plan describes it -

is home to a greater variety of birds than when it was farmland.

Quite an achievement for the architects of this utopian vision...

..but not everything has been quite so successful.

Some of those bold, modernist housing estates

have experienced problems as a result of their avant-garde designs.

Many have needed modifications and repairs,

and some are even facing redevelopment...

..but I'm meeting a woman who thinks they're things of beauty,

which represent the original, utopian vision for the city...

..and therefore must be preserved.

What have you seen?

Nice light on trees and terrace,

stepped up the hill with a nice bit of slope,

fencing and hedge at the top,

and another terrace coming in -

and then, just the three trees providing a little balance.

I think the whole composition is very thoughtful.

Elaine Harwood is from Historic England,

an organisation that protects our most precious buildings.

I just need a couple more pictures.

This is Eaglestone, by Ralph Erskine.

Perfect.

Elaine's taking photographs for a book she's written

about modern towns.

I wonder if I can move that dustbin a minute?

-ARCHIVE:

-It sounds like the Industrial Revolution

all over again, but in the 19th century

they built houses in long, straight, terraced rows.

They became the slums of the 20th century.

This is the Netherfield estate,

and I wonder if, in 50 or 100 years' time, a television reporter

will be standing here saying, "We must have better housing."

I like the rigour of it.

The repetition of the spaces and the way...

Ooh, that's...

It really is the most simple form of housing, landscape,

in really straight rows,

that's just...

..taking...

..the traditional terrace down to its absolute essence.

It wasn't just the housing estates

that had grand architectural aspirations.

The shopping centre was equally ambitious in scale and look.

Thanks to a successful campaign by Elaine and Historic England,

it's now the only shopping centre in the country

which is a listed building.

BELL RINGS

-PA:

-Would Natasha, the sister of Daniel,

please come to the shopping information,

opposite the open market.

I've always loved the shopping centre.

It just feels so warm and bright and welcoming.

Like a giant greenhouse.

In the early '80s, I got a Saturday job in a menswear store

called Lord John, which is where Next is now.

I seem to remember it sold a lot of viscose trousers.

Unlike shopping centres today,

this one was funded entirely by government money.

THEY GIGGLE

What is it?

Steel.

The architects who created the shopping centre

were in their 20s when they arrived in Milton Keynes.

They didn't just want to create another shopping mall,

they were determined to build something amazing.

That late sun on the steelwork, Richard, can you see it?

That's beautiful.

What we're seeing here is the reflection

of the real bit of the building,

reflected in this glazed wall.

You get a ghost of the building outside.

It becomes rather...

I would say, poetic.

This is Roman travertine, and I'm sitting on it as well.

It's from the same quarries that the classical Romans used at..

-Tivoli.

-..Tivoli.

-Yep.

Most people think this is marble

and that it's terribly expensive, and the public aren't worthy of it.

It's certainly not extravagant.

It's not as cheap as concrete, but we knew that.

It's a beautiful material,

and I don't know anything else in England

that looks like that.

The pavements of Rome are paved in exactly this material.

What does it make you feel?

What's your overriding feeling about the work you've done?

So, there.

-What?

-That's what I feel about it. So, there!

-It's here.

-What does that mean, exactly?

-Well...

-There you are.

-Tant pis, that's it.

You've got it, that's what I feel -

it is here, it's here, look at this.

So, there.

It's January 2017,

just a couple of weeks before Milton Keynes turns 50.

Look at this road. This is... This is a city street

where the principles of the grid road have been abandoned.

The council has allowed the developer to build things like this

right on top of the street, with no landscaping.

Most people probably think,

"Oh, Milton Keynes has always looked like this." No, it hasn't!

Milton Keynes has looked fantastic in the past.

It makes you weep to see what's been done.

Rediscovering my hometown, I find an adolescent city

that has been cut free from its parents' apron strings.

In the early '90s, the Development Corporation was wound up,

and since then, the city's growth has been dictated

more by the private sector...

..but there are those who want to protect its childhood identity,

like Linda Inoki, who runs a residents' campaign group.

In a way, it's a delicate flower.

If you don't stop and think about it,

you can take all this connectivity and ease of access for granted -

and that's when things get lost.

Because people don't necessarily recognise

that they're worth fighting for.

They will assume that they'll always be there.

After all, it's only 50 years on - it's nothing.

50 years is nothing, nothing, in the life of a great city -

and yet the tragedy is that it's already being pulled apart.

A few years ago, a second shopping centre was built,

which appeared to disregard the city's founding principles.

We're driving up Midsummer Boulevard,

our grand, central boulevard, which was broken in two in 1996,

when the council of the day gave permission

for a new shopping centre to be built -

and it still drives people nuts,

the fact that our boulevard was broken in two for no good reason.

Originally, we were able to drive straight through the boulevard,

right to the end of the city centre.

Suddenly, the boulevard was blocked off,

and you couldn't go through here any more.

I could not believe my eyes - I thought, "What have they done?"

I mean...and this is what happens,

this is what happens when you mess with the master plan.

That's THE monstrosity, yes.

It just makes me feel angry -

they did not have to break our boulevard in two

to build this bloomin' shopping centre.

When I look back at my teenage self, I can see how I failed to notice

what a unique place was being created here.

-ARCHIVE:

-The morning after, it seemed I had been wrong

to be so gloomy about the future.

for I came to a place so far removed in concept

from the rest of England

that it was as if I had arrived on another planet.

A vast and shining spaceship beneath the sky.

Surely, I thought,

this must be a place devoted to religion or to the arts,

and we were all waiting for some concert to begin,

or some guru to arrive.

Mind how you go, Richard. You're walking backwards.

Do you like being filmed?

Oh, yes. Very much so.

-Do you really?

-Oh, yes. Yes.

-Why?

Well,

I like to expose myself to the general public, as it were.

RICHARD LAUGHS You must...

I think you phrased that really unfor...

Not expose myself in the way that's come to your mind immediately.

In a different way, in a more subtle way.

DRUMMING AND CHANTING

When the writer Beryl Bainbridge visited Milton Keynes

in the early 1980s, she found a place far from lacking in soul,

and actually quite spiritual.

At the time, I would have laughed at Beryl, but now,

as I visit the first Buddhist peace pagoda in the Western world

with my dad,

I can see what she found so beguiling about the city.

Quite imposing, isn't it?

It's right that the Japanese should build a temple here...

..and when you think about it,

a new city without memorials or monuments to the past

is a fitting place for an eastern ideology

which believes in the eventual perfection of man.

Always puzzles me. I never can quite fathom out Japanese culture.

It seems very complicated.

Have you got any words of wisdom for me

while I'm making the documentary?

I don't really know.

Words of wisdom? Er...

Oh...

Well, of course...

..talking about marriage,

Dr Johnson did say that...

..marriage...

..has some pains...

but celibacy has few pleasures.

After three, I want you all to shout,

"Happy birthday, Milton Keynes!"

One, two, three!

ALL: Happy birthday, Milton Keynes!

Bletchley Park, the home of the codebreakers,

is the most famous Milton Keynes tourist attraction

and is the venue for the town's 50th birthday party.

People here are celebrating one of Britain's greatest feats

of social engineering.

This is not the end,

we're not going to pack up and go home -

we've now got another 50 years to make Milton Keynes

an even better place,

and move on to the hundredth anniversary of Milton Keynes.

So, thank you very much indeed for turning up today.

APPLAUSE

The population of MK now exceeds the planners' wildest predictions.

When I drive around the city today as an adult,

I find a thriving commercial centre...

..but also a place I'd quite like to bring my kids up in.

It does feel green, safe, and inclusive...

..but what's it like to be a young person here?

What does the future hold for THEM and their city?

I'm going back to my old school, to meet the new indigenous generation.

SCHOOL ORCHESTRA PLAYS

Stantonbury Campus was a school very much in keeping

with the utopian ideals of the city.

There was no uniform.

The classrooms were carpeted.

You called the teachers by their first name,

and there was no such thing as detention.

-ARCHIVE:

-There's a liberal, club-like atmosphere here,

the floors are carpeted,

and there's every conceivable piece

of electronic educational gadgetry...

..and that includes what is perhaps the most advanced

language laboratory in the world.

-'Schnitzel.'

-Schnitzel.

'Schnitzel? Prima.'

Schnitzel? Prima.

Once a month, a whole day was given over to a single activity,

like trampolining or golf.

LAUGHTER

And that, after four weeks, I think, is a good swing.

How you swing in those shoes I don't know.

-CHILDREN:

-# Poke him in the eye

# Stick him on the bonfire and there let him die

# Guy, Guy, Guy

# Poke him in the eye... #

Of course, all that has changed now.

You know about this thing that we had to call day ten?

Day ten was a sort of interesting thing where they used to send out

these little pamphlets with loads of different activities

which you'd do for a whole day,

and it could be... doing things like maths -

maths for a whole day, who'd do that?

-I would.

-Who would?

-I would.

LAUGHTER

Yeah, I... Maths is definitely one of my favourite subjects

and I just had a complete interest in it.

But you know, on day ten, you could have chosen

a day of roller-skating instead of maths.

Oh, don't make me pick.

LAUGHTER

And how do you find living in Milton Keynes, you know...today?

It's quiet. I feel like there's not much to do.

Really? You find it quiet?

I don't think there's much to do.

Compared to, like, big cities and stuff.

It depends really on your interests.

Because here, you can always do something that's engaging

for everybody's interests here.

You don't have to look a certain way.

You don't have to be a certain person

or be a certain religion or anything like that to fit in with others.

You don't have to be a certain sexuality to do so.

Everybody has their right to be their own person

and that's what makes everything so diverse.

I was actually going to talk about this at some point.

I was going to say how diverse Milton Keynes is.

I just think it's nice how comfortable people are now

just walking down the street and being OK with who they are

and not getting discriminated and whatnot.

It's just nice to see someone from a different country, maybe,

come to Milton Keynes and live on the same street,

or go to the same school as you.

You're, like... We may not have the same culture,

but we can be friends... or something.

And do you think Milton Keynes is particularly tolerant?

Yeah, yeah.

More so than, perhaps, other places?

Yeah, I would say so, because...

I don't know, I think we kind of embrace,

kind of, the diversity we have here.

-Yeah.

-And that makes it unique from other places?

Yeah, because some places will never change.

Some places can't change, cos it's such a big environment or area,

but with Milton Keynes, they...

When I mean "they", we all are trying

to put something in to Milton Keynes.

I think it's more the public that make Milton Keynes what it is

than the actual places.

That's my opinion, anyway.

It's unbelievable to look back at this commercial

and realise there are almost no non-white people in it...

..because today's generation

of Milton Keynes' primary school children

are 42% non-white.

Wouldn't be nice if all cities

were like Milton Keynes?

I know you've had a sandwich, Richard,

but would you like something else?

No, I'm all right, thanks.

I think my problem with Milton Keynes

was, as a teenager, it defined me in a way I didn't like.

I didn't want to be uniform and mainstream.

But in my haste to turn my back on the place

and find a new identity,

I also turned my back on the people here.

David Sutton has lived nearly all his life in Milton Keynes

and was my closest friend for a decade.

Oh, got to have a nose down here, cos we were right down the bottom.

It was right down the bottom, on the left.

Yeah.

But we lost contact when I went to university.

I've asked him to meet me at our old school.

THEY LAUGH

You were a very talented sportsman, weren't you, David?

Uh...I wouldn't know that I was necessarily...

Well... All right, then.

HE LAUGHS

I think I used to, sort of, look up to you so much

for your sporting prowess

that I used to think that, hanging out with you, somehow,

some of it would rub off on me. DAVID CHUCKLES

Yeah...

It never did, obviously.

You know me really well, don't you?

Even though you don't know me, you've not known me for years...

-Yeah.

-..I get the sense that you still know me really well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Without a shadow. I mean, it's like I said to you,

for me, it's...you know, camera or no camera,

it's one of the big regrets in my life

and I just cannot believe

when I look back at how a unique friendship and special friendship

had been lost.

-Um...

-I started liking stuff like Janis Joplin and...

-Yes, yes.

-..Led Zeppelin -

I think you just didn't approve of all that sort of stuff.

DAVID LAUGHS

It wasn't a question of approving. I didn't know it, really.

That's what I'm saying.

It took you into a different world.

For you to, sort of, be anything other than, like I was,

a mad Queen advocate, was very painful,

cos at that time, I was the only mad Queen advocate that I knew,

apart from you.

But it just felt, to me, I think - and it was me, my fault -

it just felt like you were sort of ditching everything that...

..that we had, sort of, forged together, as it were,

and suddenly, that had all gone out the window and...

that included me.

My parents have come to feel very at home in Milton Keynes

in a way that I never did.

Perhaps part of the problem is that me and the city

are just too different.

Or are we?

Before I catch my train, there's a little test I want to do

with Mum and Dad, based on a survey by Milton Keynes Council.

They've spoken to a cross-section of the community of Milton Keynes,

and asked them to describe Milton Keynes as if it was a person.

-Right! Yes.

-As what?

-As if it was a person.

-As if it was a person.

-Oh...

-So, these are the findings. I'll read them to you, shall I?

-Yes.

"Milton Keynes is a unique and free-spirited place...

"..with a charm all of its own that makes it stand out from the crowd."

Hm. It's true.

Well, it is, because it was built out of nothing.

It was just farmland.

"Milton Keynes is guided by principles,

"sometimes at the expense of logic."

Yes.

"It has a high regard for a sense of aesthetics and beauty.

"It is a highly idealistic place to live.

"Yet it also has a colder, rational side."

Uh...no, I don't know. Haven't noticed it.

-"A colder, rational side"? Oh, my goodness me.

-No.

"Yet this can make it appear a bit unemotional to people

"that do not know the place."

-Mm, yes.

-And a bit aloof and uncaring and...

Yes, yes. Mm.

Yes, I can see that.

What's the time, please?

-Oh, yes...

-11:40. 12:40.

-12:40.

What time have you got to go?

Uh... At one.

Oh, at one?

May I quote Dr Johnson again?

"Anyone who is fed up with Milton Keynes is fed up with life."

Oh.

Quote, end quote.

Explore more about the history of Milton Keynes

and how things have changed.

Go to...

..and follow the links to the Open University.