I walked across Britain’s weirdest city

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Edited by @henryhopkin

Music:
Lemon Demon – Money Dollar Bills
Young Rich Pixies – Spy Fiction

Milton Keynes master plan from here:
https://www.theplanformiltonkeynes.co.uk/

Walking in Britain can
be a bit of a mixed bag. If you’re in the countryside, you’ll have
loads of places where it’s really easy to just go and have a nice stroll and
get a bit of peace and quiet. But in cities, you’re often stuck walking
next to noisy cars and busy roads, which is not as nice. But what if you were
building a city from scratch? You could design this problem away. You could just make
sure that cars and pedestrians are always
kept completely separate. It sounds like a futuristic
idea, but it’s actually already been done in Britain in a
place called Milton Keynes. After World War II, Britain
had a housing crisis, and the government decided to
start building brand new towns. This meant they could completely rethink
how a town should work for the modern world. After building about a
dozen of these new towns, the government saw an
opportunity to go even bigger. This is a map of the railways between
London and Birmingham. And this is a map of the motorways between
London and Birmingham. In the middle here, there’s a part where
both of those networks line up for a bit. This was one of the best connected parts
of the country, and it was currently providing an amazing service to… a few small villages
and a load of fields. So the government stole the
name of one of those villages and declared that the whole
area was going to be a new city. But how do you build a new city? Well, to answer that, the
planners came up with… a plan. At the time, cities were seen as even more
dirty and overcrowded than they are today. These days, you
probably wouldn’t put a coal power plant in the middle
of a major British city, and just let it pump out
fumes for everyone, but that is exactly what London’s
Battersea Power Station used to do. With Milton Keynes, the
planners wanted to combine the best of the countryside
with the best of the city. So large parts of the
city were left green, with plenty of parks
and trees to go around. To keep traffic flowing,
a grid of dedicated roads was laid out, each
about one kilometre apart. This means drivers and
buses can zoom around the city without having
much to slow them down. And pedestrians are catered
for as well, because they have their own network of walking
and cycling paths called redways. Sometimes these run alongside the roads,
but other times they’re completely separate, and they can
let you navigate from grid square to grid square
without really seeing any cars. The planning of the individual grid squares
was left open to different approaches. Some of the first ones to be built used a
grid system of their own, but most of the later ones ended up going
for a more free-form design. On paper, this all sounds
like it might be a good idea. But in reality, Milton Keynes
is known as a very car-heavy place, and it’s often
described as lacking any soul. Walking and cycling are options,
but it’s clear that for journeys across the city, the planners intended that most
people would get into their car and drive. But what if you don’t? I wanted to find out
what it’s like to walk across a British city
without meeting any cars. So I mapped out a route that would take me
from one side of the city to the other, a distance of about 17 kilometres,
using only the pedestrian walking paths. Joining me on the journey was urban
planning YouTuber CityEd. I was hoping he could shed some light on
the thinking behind the design. And maybe help me to
understand how we would build it differently if
we were doing it today. So this, I believe, is the
edge of Milton Keynes. I think it’s a bit debatable
because there’s like different limits of where people say
Milton Keynes starts and ends. But what I decided was this is Newport
Pagnell, and once we cross under this little bridge here,
this will be Milton Keynes. – So we’ve got a lot of walking ahead of us.
– Welcome to Milton Keynes. So Milton Keynes was founded in 1967, so
that’s quite late for the new town movement. A lot of these new towns were planned
really from 1945 onwards. Milton Keynes had 10, 15 years of lessons
learned from those towns. That’s interesting because it feels like
we’re coming at this from the perspective of, well, we’ve got 50 years of more
progress and we’ve learned more about urban planning since
Milton Keynes was built. But actually, they were also
building on, they were also looking back and saying,
“well, we can beat what they did.” They were, yeah. So here’s the first time we actually have
to cross a road here. Okay, yeah. I don’t know how much
you want to talk about road design, but… Yeah, what have you got? They’ve kind of made it very, very narrow. And they’ve obviously
used this as a speed bump, but it means that it’s a
level crossing, basically. So if you’re in a wheelchair or something,
you can just go across a lot easier. Yeah, that’s true. You don’t actually have to
step down onto the road and then keep going. See, I wouldn’t even have noticed that.
I’d have just walked right across it. At this point, it still felt like
we were in the middle of nowhere, but we were starting
to get further into the city. It didn’t really look like that yet,
but there was one clue. We’re starting to see what I think is one
of the problems with Milton Keynes, which is that it is almost impossible to
escape the constant sound of the road. – I’ve noticed that.
– Because of the way they laid it out with a grid of roads, you’re never more than half a
kilometre away from a busy road. We took a minute to walk up to a bus stop
because this was one of our only chances to get a good look at the grid roads where
cars drive around the city. This is one of the big roads that cars use
to get through Milton Keynes. – I mean, this is also very leafy, to be fair.
– It is. All right, let’s get back to our
segregated pedestrian path. Leave the cars to their business. But when we got back to the redways,
something unexpected happened. We started getting a bit bored. When you think about walkability,
there’s actually two aspects to it. There’s obviously the pedestrian safety
aspect, which Milton Keynes have nailed. But there is another aspect that maybe the
urban planners weren’t considering, which is to make the walk interesting. We haven’t passed a café.
We haven’t passed a shop. We haven’t passed
anything really that would make me want to do this
walk again, necessarily. One of the other problems
with the redways is that we still have to get past
the grid roads somehow. It’s kind of like a reverse “Bear Hunt”. We can’t go over it. We can’t go
through it. We’ll have to go under it. This was the ideal in the post-war era. Subways and overpasses
and things like that and really separating cars and
pedestrians. But then… loads of crime took place in the subways and
people decided, I don’t want to use the subway. I’m going to cross the road at grade,
at surface level. And so now, road design has
moved back towards, actually, we’ll just have a zebra
crossing on the road itself. We were about to walk through one of the
city’s ancient woodlands. These were here long
before the city was built. And the fact that they
were retained is really nice. I will say, my lungs feel clean. It’s just another thing
where I’m so conflicted. Because on the one hand, we’re walking
along all these paths and we’re complaining about how it doesn’t feel like
we’re being connected with the city. But also, it’s really nice to not be
connected with the city. And as we left the woods,
we passed under another grid road and entered the grid
square of Conniburrow. This was one of the city’s earliest
residential areas and it meant that we were finally going to
actually be able to see things. These are kind of the first buildings
that we’ve seen for like an hour. Yeah, it’s been a while, hasn’t it? Because Conniburrow is one of
the oldest parts of Milton Keynes it’s now considered to
be in need of regeneration. But there are some cool things about it. If you live here, you could easily walk a
dog in the nearby forest and children can walk to the city centre without
having to cross any busy roads. But the layout here also feels like it’s
accommodating pedestrians begrudgingly. – I don’t feel like we’ve been prioritised here.
– No. While cars are given their own special
highways to zip around the city, as pedestrians, it really feels like I’m
walking down a back alley right now. Yeah, we’re sort of sandwiched in between
the houses and the road here. How would you achieve this now? I think you would make it so
that the pedestrian paths are much more integrated into
the overall design of the streets. If you had a path like this, you would
have much broader sightlines onto it. So these houses would maybe,
instead of opening up onto the road on the other side,
they would open up onto here. That means that you have
people in those houses watching the path and then that
almost keeps it safe in itself. Because if you’re someone that wants to
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not be the nicest part of Milton Keynes, but there are
still some cool ideas in its design. This is essentially an
extension of your garden. Say you wanted a barbecue with your
neighbors, you could come out here and, I don’t know, maybe you can have… I
don’t know, can you have a barbecue here? Whatever. Maybe you can have
a picnic, something with less fire. I think, as well as having this sort of
American feeling of cars being everywhere, it also feels like the zoning system and
stuff of America, where you say, “well, this is just residential,
this is just commercial” and stuff. – There’s a bit of a feeling of that here, I feel like.
– There is, you’re right. And I think where modern urban planning is
moving towards, or I think we’re already there, to be fair, is this idea of mixed
use. Like you can have apartments with a shop
on the ground floor and then you can have, you know, like a park there and then maybe
some businesses and a school. Have it all mixed in so that people can
walk to places dead easy. As we left Conniburrow,
we were about to encounter one of the most controversial
bits of Milton Keynes. We’re now right on the periphery of the
city centre and what we immediately see is – that a very, very large portion of the city center is a car park.
– Yes. The city centre pretty much encapsulates
how the lofty ambitions of the planners led to some sadly less than impressive
results. They wanted it to be accessible to
everyone. They wanted to separate
people from cars and they wanted to avoid the use
of “dark, tortuous staircases”. So what they came up with was… a big mall surrounded
by ground level car parks. That does achieve a lot
of the goals they had but it means that there’s not
really any heart to the city. You don’t get a Soho or a Royal Mile here. And yeah, an air-conditioned
mall is nice and it was certainly very busy but it
doesn’t quite feel the same. I think this is why people say Milton
Keynes feels soulless. As we left the mall and started walking
towards the train station I was reminded of a concept that I’ve been wanting to
talk to Ed about for a while. Can we, at this point,
talk about placemaking? Sure. Placemaking is a very important
concept in modern urban planning. It developed in response
to some of the trends that we see in places
like Milton Keynes. The basic idea is that, while planners
were concentrating very hard on helping people to travel around cities like this,
they were forgetting to actually make places that people
would want to travel to. I think placemaking is one of the things
where those post-war planners that were trying to get away from what they saw as
the ills of the city, the crowdedness, the busyness, the dirtiness, in getting
rid of all of that, they’ve actually also accidentally, maybe, gotten rid of that
thing that makes cities special, which is a sense of place. Fortunately for Milton
Keynes, there is some hope. The council recently published a plan that
would see this entire road closed to traffic, because, after all, there are two
other roads either side of it. This would open up a big bit of the city
centre for new development and they’ve suggested turning it into a major
walking and cycling route, lined with shops and cafés, leading up to a big new outdoor
space next to the original mall. The route would even continue beyond the
mall and lead all the way to Campbell Park, a really nice bit of Milton Keynes that,
unfortunately, we didn’t get to see on our visit. Anyway, I’m sure this plan wouldn’t be perfect, but
it does sound like it would be a lot better than this. In the same way that we
spent so long walking through nature that we actually
started to get bored of it, now we’re starting to get
that with this next thing. I’m quickly getting bored of this type of
architecture here as well. Eventually we reached
the southern end of the city centre, which is home to the
Milton Keynes train station. – I can’t really see it. Is it trainy?
– It’s a train station, yeah. One of the weird things about Milton
Keynes is that, literally as soon as you leave the city centre, you suddenly drop
straight back in to quiet suburban streets. How many other places in the UK do you
reckon you can live in a house like that a two-minute walk from
the main train station? I can’t think of anywhere in London. The remainder of our journey was going to
take us through some really nice looking parks, but before we could get there,
we had to walk pretty much parallel to the A5, a major road which cuts right through
the city. This is maybe the most
comical version of “it feels like we’re in nature, but
we can hear a really loud road.” We were about to head into the residential
grid squares of Furzton and Emerson Valley. These parts were built more recently in
the 80s and 90s, so I was hoping they would have learned some lessons from the
bits that we walked through earlier. “If you had a path like this, you would
have much broader sight lines onto it.” And to my relief, they had. These parts are almost like a
mirror image of Conniburrow. Instead of being crammed into a back alley, we
were going right through the middle of the area. Instead of using all this space to make
big wide roads for cars to drive on, it was used to make nice big
parks dotted with playgrounds. – This feels… closer to the dream.
– It’s lovely. I mean, again, imagine living in these
houses and having this park. And it feels like Milton Keynes has a lot
of those, like, incidental green spaces. Those, like, not necessarily a big planned
out park, but just places like this that you happen upon just while
walking down a path like this. I imagine it’s a pretty good
place to be a kid, Milton Keynes. The final stretch took us through another
of the city’s ancient woodlands and past a new area of the city which
is still under construction. As we approached the end
of our journey, we reflected on a few things that we’d taken
for granted along the way. We’ve walked across an entire city today, and
we can maybe count on our fingers the number of times we’ve had to cross a
busy road or even seen a car. Yeah, I don’t know if
we’ve ever had to wait for a gap in traffic
or anything like that. No, we’ve not had to be stood at a
pedestrian crossing pressing a button. We haven’t interacted with a single
pedestrian crossing, have we, actually? We haven’t had to interact with, like, a single
traffic light crossing or anything like that. We’ve just dived
underneath all of the roads. I almost can’t hear
the cars at this point. – No.
– They’re fading. – Maybe we’re just getting used to them.
– Yeah. And so after almost six hours of walking,
we had come to the end of our journey. And after a short scramble through an
overgrown country path, we emerged onto what was very clearly
the edge of the city. – Well, there we go.
– Wow. That is very much representative
of the edge of town, the sheep. What have we learned? We’ve learned that when my legs
get to 30k steps, they start to hurt. Our journey was by no means perfect. There were moments when we felt like
the city didn’t want us there, and a lot of times when we weren’t even
sure where the hell we were. I like a city walk that has, like,
maybe a little café here, or then, like, a row of shops here, and then,
like, a little park here. And I feel like I was missing some of that
urban element of walking through a city. But on the other hand, we did walk across
an entire city, and apart from the centre, we barely even noticed. I don’t feel like I’ve walked
across a city, necessarily. I feel like I’ve walked through nature.
We’ve had, like, a nature walk today. And that’s not a bad thing at all,
really, when you think about it. So I think, before anyone writes Milton
Keynes off as a car-bound relic of the 1960s, they should go out and try getting
lost on the redway network, because, if nothing else, it is definitely unique. – I don’t know what else to say about it, really.
– I think that’s it. Bye. Let’s get the hell out of Milton Keynes. Let’s stumble our way back. Yeah.