When my wife Faye and I first started talking about swapping houses with an English family, I envisioned a vacation in a quaint 18th Century cottage, complete with thatched roof and terrible plumbing.
I got it backward, however. We swapped houses, but we spent a month in a three-year-old compact brick townhouse in an English city that didn’t exist 27 years ago. Our British swappees, on the other hand, stayed in our 55-year-old house in a 225-year-old city.
The swap worked wonderfully well, enabling us to stay a full month in England at the cost of a much shorter stay, but that’s another story. What’s more interesting is the new city where we resided. Named Milton Keynes, after an old village of the same name, it was created by the British government to try to accommodate a surging population and to take some growth pressure off London, 45 miles away.
Planners were given $800 million to buy and develop a mostly rural area of 40 square miles into a near-perfect city of up to 250,000 people. The current population is 185,000 and is expected to hit 200,000 by the end of this decade, although development has been slowed by England’s long, difficult recession.
The planners had a field day, creating a grid street system, a central office and shopping complex about the size of SouthPark, dozens of residential villages of a few hundred homes each, separate industrial areas, 100 public schools, three colleges and universities, sewer systems, parks, 200 miles of walkways for pedestrians and bicyclists, even horse trails.
It’s worked, too. So far it has attracted more than $4 billion in private investment.
One thing is abundantly clear talking with Andy Nelson of Milton Keynes Marketing Ltd: Factors that draw businesses to some of the top industrial parks in American cities like Charlotte also are responsible for Milton Keynes’ spurt.
The English do not always take kindly to new things, particularly when the new disrupts something old. In Charlotte, local newspapers are full of zoning disputes.
Milton Keynes, on the other hand, can offer environmentally clean, expandable building sites without zoning hassles and with a young, well-educated work force rushing to take advantage of new jobs.
There are some lessons in Milton Keynes that the U.S. could do well to study. For example:
– Roads. With the exception of an occasional service station, no business or residence faces directly on a major street. No South Boulevard-type congestion, no blocked traffic waiting for a left-turning vehicle.
– Traffic controls. There are only nine stoplights, all in the central business core. Traffic circles-called roundabouts in Britain-are used at all other intersections. It’s not a perfect system, but it works a whole lot better than the huge intersections that turn into bottlenecks.
– Density. By American standards, residential building lots are tiny. The house in which we stayed, for example, had two dining room table-size grassy plots out front, plus a 40-by-60-foot back yard, where nine varieties of flowers were blooming. The compact neighborhoods avoid suburban sprawl.
In the eyes of many English, Milton Keynes is a brash young upstart.
“It’s Lego-Land,” one Briton said. “It isn’t a city. It has no cathedral,” added a Scot. “People just go there to shop,” one woman grumbled. In a way she’s right. The shopping complex draws a million shoppers a month.
More to the point, a graduate student complained: “It has no sense of community. There is no reason for it to exist.”
There’s some truth to all that. Milton Keynes reeks of newness in a nation that cherishes the old.
