Composition
Urban Eden MK Ltd (Company Reg. No: 6140209) is a company limited by guarantee. Full details are here.
Overview
Urban Eden is, with its many members from all fields of activity, the movement to promote a sustainable extension of the original masterplan for Milton Keynes.
We are all dedicated to ensuring that those who know and love Milton Keynes do not sleepwalk through the planned major changes being developed by local and national authorities, land owners including Milton Keynes City Council’s wholly-owned Milton Keynes Development Partnership and The Parks Trust – an extensive land-owning and land-developing registered charity.
Many planners and developers are seemingly intent on watering down many of the best things about our beautiful, user-friendly city for a fast return on investment and a slow regret in the fullness of time. Nevertheless, we do support the realistic expansion of Milton Keynes through growth, and welcome any anticipated improvements to our city and its public realm.
However we are hugely concerned that the fundamentals of the Master Plan and Original Vision are clearly being lost in the process and will create a city that is no longer user-friendly but congested and crude.
So many new estates have been built where no-one has a dedicated parking space, where the roads are so narrow that the rubbish collectors can only get down them in small vans and where a housefire would cause the fire brigade to destroy a hundred cars for simple access
Priorities
Our priorities were set out in our document called “Urban Eden MK2050 – Principles for a Master Plan” which can be found by clicking this link Urban Eden 2050: Principles for a Master Plan.
We summarise as follows.
Green City
We urgently need to preserve and extend our green environment and the linear parks. There are advanced plans to cut down many of the existing trees, notably in the City Centre, and to build right up to the roadways in other parts of the City.
We need to encourage organisations such as the Parks Trust, which owns not only the parks, but also many of the road verges, to plant more.
Successes and Challenges
Through the determination of Urban Eden and others, the V10 Brickhilll Street was saved as a grid road, rather than a “City Street”.
Secklow Gate and the street market next to the listed centre:mk, one of the top 10 shopping destinations in the UK, was saved from destruction.
Recent plans to demolish The Point, the UK’s first multiplex cinema opened in 1985, and once a red-lit pyramid visible from the M1, have divided opinion somewhat. Urban Eden’s position is that the architecturally interesting but poorly-fabricated entertainment complex is beyond realistic saving but must be replaced with architecturally exciting buildings which acknowledge the past with, perhaps, a red-lit roof pyramid, rather than the boring blocks of flats on offer.
CMK Boulevards
They are still under threat. The public boulevard structure is already being substantially modified and altered by new developments, such as The Hub and OneMK / Sainsburys.
The result is a reduction in the width of the Boulevards from a width of 75 metres to an ugly, narrow wind-tunnel pinch point of 40 metres set between tall buildings, with reduced car parking provision at street level.
Elsewhere there are plans to construct new and taller buildings over existing areas of car parking and reduce the open aspect of the boulevards to narrow streets, bounded by architecturally unimaginative buildings.
We will lose the porte cocheres, a unique feature of central Milton Keynes, and many of the trees will be cut down. There is a already a planting plan where the mighty Plane trees, which are just beginning to join at the crowns as originally planned, are to be replaced with tiny flowering cherries or pear trees as ‘signature’ trees.
A few spindly hornbeams are planned elsewhere so that the planners can claim ‘trees are safe’ or that the ‘net tree losses’ are minimal.
Grid Roads and the Natural Expansion of the System
We all know that the grid roads are one of the key factors that make living in Milton Keynes unique in Britain. Indeed, both travel times and ease of use figure in the adverts that our Government once propagated in overcrowded, user-unfriendly cities elsewhere.
It is ironic then that greed for development land and the money it brought to the exchequer and its successor, MK Development Partnership, is placing it under such threat.
The Grid system must not only be preserved it must be extended to make sure that the expansion is viable.
For instance, the A5130 between Broughton and Fen Farm should have become the new V12 not a so-called “City Street” with ridiculous and dangerous traffic restrictions and shared spaces.
The effect of this forces all the commercial traffic from the new Fen Farm warehousing development onto the V11 and Childs Way in order to get access to the M1.
Let us not allow the desperate excuse that we must use our cars less to prevail. In a few years we may all have carbon-neutral, hydrogen-powered cars which expire only water vapour.
What will happen when we have no roads to use them on?
Any expansion areas to the City must include an extension of the Grid Roads, which have the added benefit of being wide enough to allow for the inclusion of a tram system or other public transport facility, if funds permit.
Sadly, the Council’s idea of a rapid transport “tram” system is simply renamed buses preventing any other traffic on newly-painted bus lanes, causing more delays and bringing no advantage for public transport-users.
Public Transport System that Suits Milton Keynes
The original plan for MK included large central reservations and borders on the Grid roads to take a tram or monorail system.
Where trams have been built, such as Central Manchester and Croydon in South London, they are enormously popular and successful.
Whose heart would not leap to see one running down Midsummer Boulevard to the station, right through an opening in the Midsummer Place glass-walled shopping centre?
Urban Eden fully supports a high quality, aspirational and comprehensive public transport policy and one that lives up to the intentions of the original Master Plan, not the ill-thought-out and largely-empty bus lanes, which cause increased traffic congestion and ill-serve the potential users of public transport.
Redways
Redways have been studied, admired and emulated all over the World. So why are ours under threat?
Surely the very fact that they separate pedestrians and cyclists from motorised vehicles means they have saved countless lives here. Let’s protect and extend them.
While we’re at it let’s stop MKCC filling in any more pedestrian underpasses such as the one near the Hub (Avebury Boulevard / Witan Gate).
It was totally infilled, then unfilled to access heating systems, then refilled to make more building land, thus forcing people to cross two busy dual carriageways.
Principles of the Original Master Plan
The original Master Plan was the most successful ever example of the new towns movement.
If it isn’t broken, why fix it?
Once it is all swept away we will live to regret it. We Urban Edenites love Milton Keynes and yes, we are happy for it to expand in a structured and qualitative way.
But we are not happy for the very things that make Milton Keynes a uniquely easy-to-use city be swept away.
We must all fight for them before it is too late.