This article recovers Buckinghamshire county council's proposal to build a monorail city for 250,000 residents during the 1960s. The project was eventually taken over by Whitehall, which proceeded to establish Britain's largest new town of Milton Keynes instead, but from 1962 to 1968 local officials pursued their monorail metropolis. By telling the story of ‘North Bucks New City’, the article develops a series of claims. First, the proposal should be understood not as the eccentric creation of a single British county, but rather as one iteration of larger state efforts to manage the densities and distributions of growing populations. Second, while the 1960s witnessed the automobile's decisive triumph as a means of personal mobility in Britain, that very triumph ironically generated critiques of the car and quests for alternatives. Third, the monorail was part of a complex social vision that anticipated – and, in part through the facilitation of recreational shopping, sought to alleviate – a crisis of delinquency expected to result from a world of automation and affluence. Fourth, despite its ‘futuristic’ monorail, the plan ultimately represented an effort by experts and the state to manage social change along congenial lines. Fifth, the proposal advanced a nationalist urbanism, promising renewed global stature for post-imperial Britain by building upon its long urban history. Finally, the article concludes by arguing that this unrealized vision points to the limitations of ‘modernism’ in the history of urban planning, and to the problems of teleology in the history of the 1960s.

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heruntergeladen über Website Dieser Beitrag kann vom Nutzer zu eigenen nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken heruntergeladen und/oder ausgedruckt werden. Darüber hinausgehende Nutzungen sind ohne weitere Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber nur im Rahmen der gesetzlichen Schrankenbestimmungen ( § § 44a-63a UrhG) zulässig.In 1979 Pete Wrong of the art collective and Punk band Crass was being interviewed by New Society about his graffiti operation on the London Underground: 'We don't just rip the posters down or spray them. We use stencils, neatly, to qualify them. Especially sexist posters, war posters and the sort of posters for sterile things like Milton Keynes.' He spits those two words out. 'But what have you got against Milton Keynes? What is wrong with it?' the interviewer asked. 'I was actually working on the plans for the place. I started discovering what a complete shithole it is. Cardboard houses, no facilities. Its just a work camp, totally sterile, offers nothing.' Guy Ortolano is wryly aware that the subject of his new history can provoke bemusement or even derision. He quotes Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett: 'Milton Keynes was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.' Ortolano largely sidesteps the New Town's later reputation (which is the focus of Lauren Pikó's admirable new monograph Milton Keynes in British Culture, Imagining England). The main aim of Thatcher's Progress is historical rather than evaluative, distinguishing it from earlier histories of Milton Keynes such as Mark Clapson's Milton Keynes: Middle England/ Edge City (2004), or John Platt and Terence Bendixson's Milton Keynes: Image and Reality (1992). Thatcher's Progress uses a close, intensively archival study of Milton Keynes to make important arguments about the ideological switch from a social democratic to a market dominated polity. Histories of market liberalism-more commonly labelled neoliberalism-tend to either be concerned with tracing its genesis in intellectual history, or to treat it and its effects in highly abstracted terms. It is therefore hugely valuable to read an account that grounds a history of ideological change within the specificities of a particular time and place. This is a book in which concepts like social democracy or market liberalism are not just waves that wash over society, but things that are actively lived through and grappled with by people. It is a wide-ranging, elegantly written, deeply serious, forcefully argued book, with an impressive command of multiple historiographies. Ortolano demonstrates how a locally situated case study, grounded in the minutiae of an archive, needn't be provincial, and one of the most remarkable things to emerge from his book is how much the history of Milton Keynes happened within globally transnational networks. An important argument emerges that Britain did not become less global through becoming post-imperial. Thatcher's Progress is ingeniously structured around a driving tour Margaret Thatcher made of Milton Ke...

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Walt Rostow wanted his landmark contribution to modernization theory, The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto (1960), to offer an alternative to Marxist analysis, and in service of that effort he sought to replace class with nation as the agent of history. Britain figured prominently in the resulting account, functioning as everything from a trailblazing pioneer to an idiosyncratic anomaly to a cautionary tale for weak-kneed Americans, but it never explicitly offered the model for other nations to follow that historians today associate with the text. In explaining how that misreading came to dominate discussions of Stages, this essay rethinks a US historiography that collapses modernization theory with American exceptionalism, and a UK historiography premised on the claim that Britain made the modern world. Attending to the function of Britain in Stages reinserts British history into postwar conceptions of world history—not as a paradigmatic case, but nevertheless as a significant one.