It's been announced that the Milton Keynes shopping centre is to become a Grade II listed building. The centre's owners are, predictably, hopping mad: the building's new status makes any future changes to the structure a bureaucratic kerfuffle. And given the rate of growth in MK recently, it's likely a good number of tinkerings were in the pipeline. These may no longer be possible. To that extent, their frustration is understandable.
But there is another view.
In many ways, the history of the shopping mall (now ickily called 'the centre:mk') and the mixed feelings it evokes, mirror the history and reception of Milton Keynes itself. Constructed between the mid-1960s and 1980, the city is the newest of Britain's major post-war urban developments. Its hub and spoke design, with village-like residential communities jutting out from the high-modernist town centre, is generously peppered with lakes, parks, trees and cycle tracks.
Occasional visitors to MK and passers-through tend to be fairly scathing, I've found. The labyrinth of roundabouts doesn't exactly endear ever-dizzier motorists to this apparently nondescript staging post between Oxford and Cambridge. The sight from the road only helps confirm the city's reputation as a concrete nightmare.
Long-time inhabitants, however - those who walk beneath the road bridges - frequently sing MK's praises. In weighing its virtues, they point to the gamut of shops and restaurants, the theatre, the indoor ski-slope, the sailing, the transport links.
And MK's modernism is not of the cold-blooded variety. The town was never just conceived as a 'machine for living'. The shopping centre at its heart is dazzlingly bright and spacious. Marble benches line the main thoroughfares, enclosing palm trees and other exotic grafts. The covered square is a site of regular street entertainments. Bustling stalls stake their place outside - even while markets elswhere sink into decline.
More generally, I think the construction of a city from scratch - one that meets people's day-to-day needs, while striving to lift their quality of life to a higher plane - is exciting and commendable; a form of exploration, if you like.
Other cities, it's true, have failed miserably in this endeavour. Chandigarh and Brasilia spring to mind.
Milton Keyes has done better. Much better.
Before commercial expediency pulls apart this minor masterpiece, then, let's protect not only a part of Britain's heritage, but a fine icon to an idealistic vision of city planning.
For Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt, the very thought of listing a shopping centre in Milton Keynes must have seemed barmy at first glance.
In the end he took the tougher, less obvious decision - and the right one.
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