Professor Alan Powers - Milton Keynes or Civilia? Real and imagined utopia of the Pop period

1. Milton Keynes or Civilia? Real and
imagined utopias of the Pop period.
Alan Powers

2. The British Pavilion, Venice Architecture Biennale, 2014

3. The 1968 generation appears
practically absent; their
supposed dominance an
apparent fiction.

4. Hay Wain business cards
www.zazzle.co.uk

5. Liz Leyh, Concrete Cows, 1978, in their original location in Milton Keynes shopping centre

6. Ebenezer Howard, The Three Magnets, 1898

7. A Clockwork Jerusalem, curated by Sam Jacob and Wouter
Vanstiphout

8. 2004

9. William Morris foliage and Silbury Hill

10. There might be a case for a new Letchworth as part of a
balanced approach to increasing housing supply, but only
alongside a couple more new towns the size of Milton Keynes.
Second, builders are not interested in wasting what they see
as valuable development land on homes with generous front
and back gardens. They want to squeeze in as many houses on
a plot as they can.
Finally, even if a way is found of re-badging a new town as a
garden city that will not prevent opposition. The nimbys will
still hate it.
Larry Elliott, Guardian Business blog, 13 November 2013

11. Geoffrey Copcutt, Cumbernauld Centre, with Cliff Richard and Knossos

12. Cliff Richard, Wired for Sound, 1981

14. Lewis Womdersley and Hugh Wilson,
Hulme Cresents (shown in conjunction
with Barbican towers

16. ‘Homes for Change’ Housing Co-operative, Hulme, Manchester,

17. Hulme Crescents with Royal Crescent, Bath

18. Villa Savoye in ruins, 1965
(photo courtesy of Alan
Irvine)

19. Ivor de Wofle, with Kenneth Browne, introduction by Ian Nairn, 1971

22. Civilia, Planner’s Report: Central Urban Space Theory by Rodney Carran and Michael Rowley

23. “To cater for a population increase plus a drift
from the cities made possible by the car, town
planners since the war have tended to rubber-
stamp the same solution over and over again,
they have irreversibly despoiled a vast area of
food-growing countryside with a network of
roads and suburbs. But vastly greater
population growth is forecast. Life becomes
unthinkable with coast-to-coast suburbia
within thirty years, neither town nor country,
to the exclusion of green and pleasant land.
From a need to conserve land, coupled with a
need for new high-density civilized cities,
Civilia can spring to life covering nothing but
spoiled land and turning the ugliness of the
quarries into the splendor of marinas.”

24. Hubert De Cronin Hastings (1902-1986), part-owner
and editor of AR (editor 1927-1971) in front of the
Rolls Royce he converted into a caravan for his
countryside travels in the 1950s

25. ‘Exterior Furnishing’
Architectural Review, January
1944
Cover and illustration by
Kenneth Rowntree

26. “Townscape: A Plea for an English Visual Philosophy founded on the true rock of Sir Uvedale Price.”
AR, December 1949
Ivor de Wolfe, ‘Townscape – a plea for an English Visual Philosophy founded on the
true rock of Sir Uvedale Price’, Architectural Review, December 1949

27. Harlow New Town, chief planner Sir Frederick Gibberd

29. ‘The Bride of Denmark’, Queen Anne’s
Gate
Hastings’ country
retreat

30. The Ecologist,
“A Blueprint for Survival” January
1972, vol. 2, no. 1 cover

31. Manplan, Opening statement,
September 1969
…People need to feel that they are
needed… (caption)

32. Ian Nairn, ‘London’s Last Chance’,
Observer, 11 December 1966

33. Illustration from Non-Plan, New Society, 26 March 1969

34. “… decaying housing is ever
with us.” (caption)
“…one human being
has lost out in the
struggle…” (caption)
The eighteenth-century park
disappears under twentieth-
century hardware…(caption)
…vast office
complexes slip
through the
planning
system…(caption)

36. ‘Civilia’s … aim is to recreate a race of
urban, not suburban, men, in which
cause its designers have done what lays
in their power to bring together some of
the lost charms of city life.
Prominent (though not first) among
which is the right to stand on a corner or
sit on a step discussing an angle, the dry
alternative to messing about in boats.
All the better if there is a battlement
and a view therefrom, providing the
kind of confrontation between town and
country which, outside Spain and Italy, is
no longer easily found.’ p.98

37. Civilia – Pop End

39. Cedric Price, Potteries
Thinkbelt’
Published in New Society,
1966

41. Architectural Review cover – Canals
issue by Eric de Maré, July, 1947
Architectural Review cover – The
Thames as a linear National Park by Eric
de Maré,July 1950

42. Covent Garden GLC plan

46. Milton Keynes Town Park proposal, ith Cone, Water Carpet and Glass Bridge

47. David Rudlin and
Nicholas Falk
(Urbed),
Uxcester Garden
City, Second Stage
Submission, 2014
Wolfson
Economics Prize

48. Wolfson
Economics Prize
Submission
Susan Parham
and colleagues

49. Tom Holbrook, 5th
Studio
Calvert, 2014