The opinion polls suggest Keir Starmer is heading for a majority at the next election, with a Labour victory in Milton Keynes North. Given the party only has 202 seats, securing a majority will require the biggest influx of new Labour MPs since 1945 — roughly 140 new MPs to get up to the 340 mark, which would entail a majority of about 30. Add to this the usual “retirements” — perhaps 40-50 existing MPs — and the current selection processes taking part across the country will determine not just the texture of Starmer’s forces in the Commons, but also the pool of MPs from whom his ministers would be appointed.

Starmer’s team knows this, and is quietly managing the process in minute detail. This battle is being overseen by Labour’s election campaign director Morgan McSweeney, who worked on Starmer’s leadership campaign and was briefly his chief-of-staff. McSweeney “doesn’t have room for compromise with the hard Left”, says his friend Nick Forbes, a former leader of Newcastle City Council. “He thinks they need to be eradicated from the party because they are so dangerous.” This ruthlessness now underscores every Labour selection process, as Lauren Townsend discovered last month.

Townsend was backed by six major trades unions, which would normally have guaranteed her a place on the long-list. But Labour’s National Executive Committee panel blocked her. Among the reasons given was that Townsend had “liked” a tweet by Nicola Sturgeon in 2021 in which the Scottish First Minister announced a Covid test she had taken was negative. Her offence, it seems, was “supporting other parties”. Townsend was also accused of being involved with the Green New Deal campaign, whose policies go further than Labour’s official Green New Deal. “I feel gutted,” Townsend said after she was blocked, “not just for me but for what this says to the wider membership of our party and especially to other young women and/or mothers who desperately want to get more involved in politics, but find it an impossible and somewhat intimidating prospect”.

Bigger names than Townsend have been purged too. Lisa Forbes, who was MP for Peterborough until she was unseated in 2019, was kept off the long-list this time round. Emma Dent-Coad, another prominent Left-winger who was MP for Kensington from 2017 to 2019, was also kept off the long-list for her old seat, despite building a formidable reputation for her response to the Grenfell fire tragedy in her constituency just after she was elected.

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Meanwhile, Labour’s Candidates Team is busy working in the background, deciding seat-by-seat who they do want. They have to operate surreptitiously, as local parties guard their independence and do not like to be pushed around. Nor does it do a candidate any good to be known as the choice of the Leader of the Opposition’s Office — the LOTO contender. But in most selections, it doesn’t take much to work out who LOTO is backing.

There are, for instance, striking similarities about the preferred contenders’ campaign videos and websites, where they advised what to say and, more importantly, what not to say. Don’t mention that you went to Oxford or Cambridge — that looks elitist. If you are a London councillor, just say you’re a councillor, and people may think it’s for the seat you’re going for. Be very careful saying what job you do. Community activists, overseas development, charities, mental health — indeed, anything to do with the NHS — all are occupations to shout about. If you’re in banking, financial services, management consultancy, it’s best to keep schtum.

LOTO contenders will be advised about how to make the most of any local roots, and they’ll be introduced to key local Labour figures. The chosen ones may even be consulted by national Labour fixers on when the selection should ideally take place. Nor do Labour officials appear to care if a favoured candidate breaks the party’s tight spending rules for candidate campaigns. It’s amazing how much some candidates manage to do with their limited budgets.

But the most contentious issue is the highly prized list in each constituency of each party member and their contact details. Having spoken to a number of those involved in the selection process, anointed or LOTO contenders appear to have a remarkable ability to obtain membership lists before their ordinary rivals. They may have been leaked by local party officials, or by local councillors, or from someone on high in regional or national HQ — and any such lack almost certainly breaks data protection law. Contenders who stick to the rules are only sent local members’ details once the shortlist has been drawn up. This gives them about a fortnight to contact every voter, which is almost impossible to do individually given some parties have 2,000 members.

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Then, when it comes to the selection meeting itself, there have been numerous complaints about supporters of unfavoured candidates being excluded unfairly. It’s also suspected that LOTO contenders sometimes get advance notice of the common questions which every contender is asked at the final selection meeting where the vote is taken. And full-time regional Labour officials sometimes make no secret of where their loyalties lie.

Perhaps the most egregious example is Pearleen Sangha, acting director of the London Labour party, who previously worked for Labour to Win, an umbrella group for organisations on the Labour Right. Half an hour before the selection in Camberwell and Peckham last month, Sangha publicly tweeted that the favourite, Miatta Fahnbulleh, was “a class act”. A few weeks earlier, when the shortlist was announced for Thurrock, just outside of London, Sangha publicly wished the favoured contender Jen Craft “good luck” on Twitter. Both Fahnbulleh and Craft went on to win.

More recently, a group of activists in Bolsover — Dennis Skinner’s old seat — wrote to the chair of the Labour NEC calling for an investigation into “corruption” and irregularities in the East Midlands regional office. These complaints concerned the exclusion of strong local applicants from the long list to favour another contender, and the alleged leaking of the membership list to the supposedly favoured contender. The anonymous complainants asked for the selection in Bolsover to be frozen pending such an investigation.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that, so far, the Labour Left has been trounced in this round of selections. Of almost 60 selections, only one has produced a candidate who is firmly on the Left — Faiza Shaheen, who was picked for Iain Duncan Smith’s seat, Chingford and Woodford Green, the constituency she contested in 2019. At the same time, there are only a handful of candidates who have any experience of working in manual or low-paid jobs. Around two thirds of Labour candidates for winnable seats so far are, or have been, councillors, with roughly a quarter serving as council leaders or deputy leaders.

There’s nothing wrong with councillors in parliament, but the parliamentary Labour Party is in danger of being over-run with them, at a time when it urgently needs experts on the economy, foreign policy and defence. Of course, the extremely tight manipulation of the candidate selection system may help prevent mishaps during the election campaign, and avoid having more dud MPs such as Jared O’Mara, accused of sexual misconduct and fraud, and Fiona Onasanya, who went to jail for perverting the course of justice. Luke Akehurst, a Labour First stalwart who sits on the Labour National Executive and chairs many of the NEC panels, says: “This is not about factional advantage or stitch-ups, it is about getting ready for power and being the professional organisation we should be.”

But while organising the selection process may help avoid internal rows within a Starmer government, it could still weaken the party and any government in the long run. The shared fate of the Johnson and Truss regimes show the perils of confining your ministerial team to a narrow range of loyalists. By contrast, the successful Labour administrations of Attlee, Wilson and even Blair all had significant representation from the Left — Nye Bevan, Dick Crossman, Barbara Castle, Michael Foot, Tony Benn, Claire Short and John Prescott, to name a few.

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There’s a more worrying issue too. What does this tell us about how a Starmer government will handle its critics? Labour’s selection processes appear to be deeply unjust, open to abuse, and verge on the corrupt. Left-wingers, passionate trades unionists, troublemakers and mavericks need not apply. The plan seems to be to wipe out the Left completely, to find the flimsiest excuse to block anyone who doesn’t toe the party line. It is not inconceivable that if Angela Rayner, John Prescott, Margaret Beckett, or Neil Kinnock now applied to be a candidate, they would be blocked at the first hurdle by an NEC panel.

Of course, bigwigs in all parties have long tried to fix certain parliamentary selections, and the Labour high command has probably interfered more than most. The Corbynites were ruthless in purging their opponents, often on seemingly trumped-up charges, but their efforts were never on this scale. The Starmer team looks fixated on achieving total control, intent on stamping out anything that might embarrass the party. Their tactics go way beyond the dark arts of Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell and New Labour, though it’s not clear how much Starmer knows about how the selection system is being rigged, and whether he — a former human rights lawyer — turns a blind eye to the abuses.

Yet regardless of how involved he is, it seems likely the key players in fixing these 200 selections will be rewarded with substantial jobs in Downing Street. One has to wonder whether, amid the pressures of office, a Starmer premiership would have much respect for dissent. For pluralism is the key to democratic politics — without it lies the road to incompetent government.

Yet Annie Ernaux, who last Thursday became the first Frenchwoman to take the literature Nobel, moved to the new town of Cergy-Pontoise — 30 kilometres north-west of central Paris — in 1975. She has remained there, in her house on a bend in the Oise, ever since. She writes all her works in Cergy: a long-settled outsider among other incomers, “in the midst of lives started elsewhere” (as she reflects in her journal Exteriors) “in Vietnam, the Maghreb, Côte d’Ivoire, the French provinces or, as was mine, in Normandy”.

After the Swedish Academy announced its choice for 2022, the reporter from Le Figaro hurried up to Cergy, put in some sterling legwork, and found the retired neighbour who looks after the author’s cat. She who told him that Ernaux stood for “Auchan” (read Tesco, maybe Asda), “the provinces, the ordinary, women”. Over in Cergy’s monumental civic centre, the Axe Majeur, the kids hanging around in the sun hadn’t heard of their illustrious fellow-citizen. But they soon began pounding their mobiles to find out about her. “At last, people are going to say something good about Cergy,” one hoped.

There’s much that’s good — or at any rate rich, complicated and interesting — to be said about Cergy-Pontoise and the other planned communities that spread across Europe in the decades after the Second World War. For the most part, however, mainstream literature, film and even journalism is not where you will find it. For sure, Ernaux — born in Normandy in 1940 to peasant-born parents who became the proprietors of a small-town café-grocery — writes in pared-down, pin-sharp prose about intimate experiences shared across classes, cultures and continents.

Since the late Seventies, her creative memoirs have pierced the veils of shame, silence and taboo to dramatise the most intimate wounds: her father’s class-bound rage (in A Man’s Place), her mother’s thwarted life and descent into Alzheimer’s (A Woman’s Story), a convulsive affair (Simple Passion), a bruising sexual initiation (A Girl’s Story), an illegal abortion (Happening). She gave shape, grace, even beauty, to the mucky froth of memory. Then, in her 2008 book The Years, she turned the stray junk of consumer culture that accumulates in everybody’s brain into material for a masterly collective autobiography of France from the war’s end to the millennium. It was like building a literary Chartres Cathedral out of ring-pulls, bottle-tops, milk cartons and fag packets.

Read some recent Anglophone tributes to Ernaux, however, and you might think that she writes the brand of abstract, disembodied auto-fiction that floats mistily above everyday existence until it comes to rest in its spiritual home: the university seminar-room. Au contraire. Just as she roots her writing in the frail, fleshly, vulnerable (female) body, so she grounds it in specific, closely-observed places. She tells stories about the events or feelings that give rise to scorn, embarrassment, even disgust. And she sets them in spaces that polite voices will (still) patronise as tacky, vulgar and soulless.

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“Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!” cursed John Betjeman — the bard of an older, more sedate variety of suburbia — in 1937 about a boom-town that prefigured many later developments. A dozen stops up the RER line from Charles de Gaulle-Etoile, Cergy has never quite attracted Slough levels of disdain. But Ernaux’s stubborn loyalty to it reveals much about her career as an author and the fault-lines that still splinter culture in France, Britain, or elsewhere in the West. Yes, we’re talking class — though not in the way that an older generation of socially-committed writers would have conceived it.

Ernaux does not eulogise a mythological proletariat, or a persecuted underclass in the tower-block banlieue, from a safe perch in a Left Bank café or a fine converted mas on some Provençal hillside. Rather, she lives in and writes from the kind of mixed community where people come to make, or remake themselves, amid the shopping centres, the flagstoned plazas, the geometric parks and boxy housing estates of the exurban dream. At first, this new-minted townscape disoriented her, as, in the Seventies, it rapidly sprang from blueprint to building-site. She felt marooned among “the windswept esplanades, the concrete façades, pink or blue, and the empty residential avenues”. Then the people came; the supermarkets opened; the commuter trains to Paris filled. In and around Cergy she found the right stage on which to mount her exploration of “the violence and shame inherent in society”, and her quest to discover the human essence of “anything that appears to be unimportant or meaningless simply because it is familiar or ordinary”.

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Cergy, like four other new towns ringed around Paris, came into being in the wake of the SDAURP (Schema d’Amenagement et d’Urbanisme de la Region Parisienne) plan of 1965: almost 20 years later than Britain’s first wave of New Towns, but roughly at the same time as Milton Keynes. In 2022, it marks 50 years of official existence after Paris master-planner Paul Delouvrier saw his cherished villes nouvelles begin to rise. They offered an alternative — more socially diverse, integrated and architecturally ambitious — to the housing projects of the banlieue that had fast descended into sink estates. Places like Cergy (in France or Britain) can boast neither a chic pedigree — though Pissarro and Cézanne painted on the still-wooded banks of the Oise — nor the pathos and heroism of deprivation. Taste-makers tend to treat them with sheer indifference, lofty pity, or mocking condescension. So Ernaux’s insistence that we find a key to unlock the secrets of modern social and emotional lives in the new-town grocery queue, the hairdresser’s salon, or the crowded Tube carriage, counts as a quietly revolutionary act. For her, “a supermarket can provide just as much meaning and truth as a concert hall”.

Britain’s new towns and cities still await their Ernaux. True, we have Mike Leigh-style social comedy aplenty: aspiration, embarrassment and humiliation in off-the-peg executive homes or kitsch bistros. You can argue until the (concrete) cows come home about whether this mode grows from a place of love or hate. But, even at its best, it soon runs into strict limits of tone and scope. Elsewhere, the strong British tradition of satirical urbanism — tart and witty in an architectural writer like Ian Nairn, florid and visionary in the exurban rambles of Iain Sinclair — does not exactly condescend to dwellers in new towns or in the residential sprawl that Nairn dubbed “subtopia”.

It inclines to treat them as victims, specimens or casualties. Worse, new towns became dystopian backdrops for tales of social anomie and breakdown: Stanley Kubrick filmed some of A Clockwork Orange on the brutalist Southmere Estate in Thamesmead. JG Ballard (in fiction) and Jean Baudrillard (in critical theory) have much to answer for in this prefab notion of the planned urban ensemble as an inevitable hell-hole of alienation. Invest properly in amenities and services, and the metaphysical anguish supposedly bred by new-town architecture mysteriously dissolves. True, Cergy for Ernaux — even in its more stylish, affluent corners — may figure as a microcosm of consumer capitalism, with all its anxieties and insecurities. But she never pretends that you’d escape it by moving to Menton or Montparnasse.

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In Ernaux’s work, we make the memories that matter out of anywhere and anything. And I should confess that my fondness for her work has a little to do with another, richly recollected, version of the suburban scene. Much of her 2016 book A Girl’s Story recounts, with her trademark candour, clarity and insight, a teenage sexual encounter at a summer camp in Normandy. Its final act, however, moves on to the young Annie’s stint in 1960 as an au pair in North Finchley, London N12. We lived a few hundred yards away from the shops at Tally Ho Corner where the young French help gleefully guzzles “lemon curds, shortbreads, trifles, Smarties and Milky Ways, bars of Caramac and Dairy Milk”. A couple of years later, I would have bought the same sweets at the same counters she evokes in some positively rhapsodic passages. Take that, Monsieur Proust with your tisane-dunked madeleine (Ernaux certainly knows, and loves, her A la recherche du temps perdu).

When, in 1989, she took a nostalgic trip up the Northern Line to revisit North Finchley, even the Gaumont cinema (where I spent many Saturday mornings) had gone and “only the Woolworth’s remained”. Alas, not for much longer. In London, as in Normandy, Annie suffers the traumas and terrors of adolescence. They unfold, though, in the midst of all the mundane actualities that anchor our memories in both place and time. One late-summer Sunday in 1960, she sits “alone on a bench in a park near Woodside Park Station. Children are playing. I have brought things to write with. I start a novel…” Thus the six decades of a Nobel laureate’s literary career launch from a park bench (almost) at the outer-suburban end of a Tube line. Ernaux still lives, and writes, from the end of the line. There are worse places to start from.

Indeed I only found that out last week, when word got out that North Lanarkshire Council had agreed to purchase Cumbernauld’s town centre, but only in order to raze it to the ground. The responses adhered to a familiar script. Architectural historians, of course, were appalled; they argued that, as Britain’s first shopping centre and a radical experiment in building a town centre that went up instead of down, the eight storey “megastructure” was an important part of our cultural legacy. But there was no popular outrage at the news that the rotting eyesore in the centre of the town might soon be gone.

In fact, the destruction of The Centre Cumbernauld (to give it its proper name), which was erected on concrete stilts over a dual carriageway in 1967, has been a dream of many people for a long time. In 2005 it topped a poll of 10,000 people in the UK as the building in Britain that people most wanted to see demolished. Cumbernauld itself, like many of the 27 New Towns that were built in the UK after the war, does not have a great reputation. The comedian Craig Ferguson (who grew up there) once derided it as a “modernist experiment”, where “clueless” town planners had provided “soulless housing for ground-down workers”, before adding that the houses looked like “German machine gun turrets”. My cousins on the west coast of Scotland were pithier: they called it “Scumbernauld”.

Yet for a brief moment in the Sixties and Seventies, Cumbernauld represented an exciting vision of the future, in which a projected population of 70,000 workers and their families would move through the town via a network of pavements, underpasses and bridges. They would never have to cross a road, and never have to spend more than 20 minutes walking to reach the “brilliantly logical” town centre, which housed shops, a library, offices, apartments and even a few penthouses.

When Princess Margaret visited The Centre Cumbernauld in 1967, she pronounced it “fabulous”; that same year it won the Reynolds Memorial Award from the American Institute of Architects. My grandparents lived there in the last years of their lives and greatly preferred their Cumbernauld flat to the one they had lived in on Sauchiehall Street in Glasgow; likewise my Aunt Janet, who lived there between 1972 and 1982, still remembers how novel it was to go shopping without being rained on.

Indeed, even if it had been pouring when I paid a visit last week, I would have remained dry: when I stepped off the bus, I was already inside the centre, confronted with its “brilliant logic”. Is it possible, I wondered, that the architectural historians are right: does Cumbernauld’s town centre deserve to be preserved for future generations? I followed a ramp (there were no stairs or lifts) to the first floor, where I entered the retail complex which had so impressed Princess Margaret 55 years earlier.

The years have not been kind to the place. Where once it featured well-known retailers, such as Halford’s, M & Co. and the supermarket chain Presto, now it is clearly the part of the complex where rents are cheapest (an additional shopping centre, the Antonine, was grafted onto the original building in 2007; that one was opened by Princess Anne); it is here that the eyebrow threaders, tattoo artists, “vintage” shops and suicide prevention centres set up shop. The interior had been remodelled so all traces of its late Sixties utopia-lite origins were gone: bizarrely, the enormous clock from St Enoch’s train station in Glasgow had been embedded in the wall of a mezzanine in the new section, where it kept the time at a permanent 8:20.

After about ten minutes, a security guard informed me that it is forbidden to take pictures in the centre, because it is private property. I moved to the next level, which contains the library and a children’s day-care. This section has not been remodelled; it is very close to the original: lots of brick and tile and concrete, the pipes and wires were exposed. The corridors had names, as if they were streets, but the doors granting entry to them were locked. A service lift was out of order; a weird bench was moulded into the concrete; the glass overhead was filthy. Through it, I could make out the windows of the penthouses, long since abandoned. At the far end, a roof garden for toddlers hung suspended in the air over the dual carriageway beneath.

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The library itself was cheerful enough, but overall, I felt as though I had stumbled upon a vision of Logan’s Run as reimagined by Seventies British trade unionists, only the death squads that were supposed to kill you after you turned 30 had all gone, and everyone had long since taken the opportunity to run away, or simply grow older. It was pretty grim.

But if it was grim on the inside, then it was much worse from the outside. Glimpses of Cumbernauld’s town centre from the window of the bus over the years had not done justice to the scale of the architectural catastrophe. It reminded me of the vast Izhmash plant in Udmurtia, Russia, where they pump out AK 47s and other weapons. But Izhmash at least had a decorative historical entrance; with the general absence of windows and the abundance of pipes and wires in the town centre, everything looked like the back of something. The only feature the eye was drawn towards was the long rectangular section with porthole windows suspended on stilts that hung over the road. Locals call it “the alien’s head”.

From there I took a stroll over the bridges and through the underpasses of the town. Certainly it was convenient, though obviously the planners had not thought about the canvas that endless concrete represents to bored teenagers and the threatening atmosphere it can present at night. I was passing through a particularly luminous underpass when I was accosted by a man with a hammer and sickle tattoo on his arm. “They paint it and then it gets graffitied the next day,” he said.

When I asked him how long he had lived in the town, he replied: “Most of my life, on and off. Cumbernauld is a social experiment: it’s driven me doolally. Have you seen the centre? It’s full of people like that.”

Returning, I felt a sense of coercion: the ghostly hand of the planners had arranged everything so that I was more or less obliged to follow the same route through extremely functional housing. Obviously the working classes had no need of freedom, beauty, or variety: they could get by with a few trees. Behold, Le Corbusier’s “machine for living in”, in the Lanarkshire hills.

When I arrived in Cumbernauld, I was open to the idea that the town centre might be worth saving. Now, not so much. It was not the brutalism; having spent a lot of time in the former USSR I have developed a taste for brutalism when done right. In Central Asia, in particular, architects took eastern motifs and incorporated them into their concrete structures, giving a character to blocks of flats, universities and national libraries that is entirely lacking in Cumbernauld. Those structures are worth preserving, though the cheapness of the materials likely means that one day those buildings too will disappear. Nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the USSR embraced brutalism in the Seventies, after “communism” had withered to mean a fridge and a TV in every house, and an annual beach holiday. In the end, the ideology was not that dissimilar to the modest utopianism of Britain’s post-war town planners.

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Cumbernauld’s town centre was pioneering, but it was also a failure. There is no disgrace in that failure, however: the first generation of occupants, like my grandparents, found these homes a huge improvement on the Glasgow tenements they had grown up in; indeed, New Towns across the country were an improvement on conditions in the slums they were designed to replace. Instead of a single room, kitchen and shared toilet, families now had extra bedrooms, bathrooms and a living room. Later generations did not have this point of comparison, however, and lived in the town once it was already decaying.

The problem with preserving architectural experiments is that they are not like novels lacking the letter “e” or repurposed urinals that live unobtrusively on bookshelves and in museums; they are infrastructure, and it is very hard to persuade people that they should pass their lives in crumbling buildings that they hate because of the interesting ideas that inspired them.

It would be nice, of course, if you could take all those decaying brutalist buildings from around Britain and move them to an open-air park where architectural historians could admire these daring visions, while others could reflect on the dangers of falling for ideas that look good on paper. But that isn’t going to happen: some of these buildings will be preserved, but most of them are going to disappear, just as most of everything has disappeared.

The truth is, we often judge New Towns too harshly: it takes centuries for a city to become interesting, and even then, many old places are also quite boring and squalid. And as it turns out, many New Towns were simply a step in a broader evolutionary process. Just as Milton Keynes has realised its destiny as a sleeper town for middle class people priced out of London and Oxford, so Cumbernauld is discovering its destiny. It was never to be a self-contained social unit built around an eight-storey mixed use retail, office and residential complex — but rather a bedroom community on the edge of the larger metropolis of Glasgow.

This faceless collection of houses and shops and retail parks, without any particular centre or identity, will ultimately surrender to a vast urban sprawl: that’s progress. In time, other New Towns will see that this too is their best option; or, if they are not located close enough to a major city, continue to crumble, until one day they vanish and are forgotten forever.

To British eyes, however, the robots are not the most striking thing about the piece. (Stories about how autonomous technologies could change the world, if only the world stopped being so damned complicated, are ten a penny these days.) The striking thing is the identity of the place that San Francisco’s Starship Technologies has identified as offering “ideal conditions… perfectly suited to rolling robots”. The city of the future is Milton Keynes.

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To anyone who grew up in Britain, this feels a bit like seeing the grey lady describe Michael Portillo as a “popular public intellectual”: you can see how they got there, but no. Futuristic tech dystopias should be exciting and alluring, the sort of places you’re fascinated by even as you find them repulsive. Milton Keynes is none of those things: it’s desolate and suburban, an overgrown housing estate whose search for an identity that didn’t involve roundabouts led it to steal Wimbledon’s football team and convince itself that some cows made of concrete are in some way good. Silicon Valley may be on course to wipe out civilisation, but it is, at least, cool. Milton Keynes is absolutely not cool. Milton Keynes is a joke. (Q: What’s the difference between Milton Keynes and a yoghurt? A: A yoghurt has culture.)

The odd thing about MK — as, with the upsetting air of a 15-year-old boy trying to invent his own nickname, it likes to call itself — is that, from any perspective other than public esteem, it’s been a huge success. The area of north Buckinghamshire that the city now occupies was designated as the site of a new settlement in 1967, as part of the government’s third and final wave of planned “new towns”. The site, roughly halfway between London and Birmingham, was expected to take some of the overspill population from both. It would incorporate three existing towns (Bletchley, Wolverton, and Stony Stratford) and over a dozen villages, turning each into the focal point of one of its districts. The goal was a whole new city, with a target population of 250,000.

Throughout the 1980s and ’90s, in its quest to make this plan a reality, the Milton Keynes Development Corporation took the unusual approach of advertising its city on television. One 1984 ad follows a boy on a day out around the town — fishing, cycling, and so forth — with only a red balloon for company, all the while accompanied by the sort of music that would better suit the heroic climax of a film; at the end it asks, as if the question were in some way justified by the two minutes of film we’ve just watched, “Wouldn’t it be nice if all cities were like Milton Keynes?” In another, a different boy (Milton Keynes: no girls allowed) catalogues some of the uglier aspects of London life from a car window, discovers that Milton Keynes has fields, cows and so forth, and concludes, breathlessly, “I wish I lived here!”

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Many people agreed with him. The ads made Milton Keynes a target for mockery in a way no other new town managed — there was a Jasper Carrott parody version of the latter — but in the three decades after 1981, the city’s population doubled, and it passed its target sometime around 2013. The Government is now talking of doubling it again. That’d make it bigger than Edinburgh.

Its success is not merely demographic, but economic, too. Some British cities have well-paid residents; some have relatively affordable housing. Milton Keynes is almost unique in having both. Its enthusiastic expansion means prices have stayed relatively low — there are still three bed houses to be had for £250,000 — yet residents can be at their desks in London or Birmingham, Oxford or Cambridge, in little more than an hour. Its architectural styles are varied; its streets green and parks spacious; it’s even an unexpectedly great place to be a cyclist in, thanks to the network of segregated “red routes” cycleways. Little wonder it’s a boom town.

If it’s so easy to argue that Milton Keynes has worked, why do we hate it so? In Good Omens, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman credit this to straightforward perversity (“It was built to be modern, efficient, healthy, and, all in all, a pleasant place to live. Many Britons find this amusing.”) That’s no doubt a factor, but at least part of the problem lies with Milton Keynes itself: to visit it is to visit the uncanny valley, where nothing seems quite right. The shopping centre is a mile from the railway station, via a vast, empty plaza that somehow bypasses grand and hits windswept instead. To get to the commercial district on foot means using a system of meandering pedestrian routes that frequently vanish into subways, and are perfect if you’re, say, a wheeled delivery robot, but less so if you’re a human being who likes to see where they’re going.

Along the way, you’ll spot what appears to be the town hall but turns out to be a church; the actual town hall looks more like a light industrial park. You’ll pass umpteen hotels and low-rise office blocks, set back from their dual carriageway behind a sea of cars, a form of urbanism familiar from any American city you could name but strange and alien here in England. (This, perhaps, is why the NYT likes it.) And you will struggle to spot a cafe or a pub, an independent shop or a cultural venue — anything, really, that one might actually think of as one of the benefits of urban life.

And Milton Keynes, remember, was planned. Many cities are ugly or unfriendly by accident. Few are so ugly or unfriendly by design.

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By Nicholas Boys Smith

Most attempts to use autonomous delivery robots in the wild have stuck to university or corporate campuses: carefully designed, closed environments that lack the unpredictability of normal urban street life. The reason Starship Technologies chose Milton Keynes for the first commercial deployment is in large part because of its resemblance to one of those campuses.

But it’s in the density and messiness of urban living that you’ll find most of its joys: the serendipitous meeting, the new restaurant you find while you were looking for something else. Milton Keynes is too spread out to offer any of that. The wide, open spaces built into its street plan may make it perfectly suited for social distancing. But the very characteristics that make it perfect for robots prevent it from feeling like a real city. A city is more than a lot of houses and offices in one place.

When the American humourist Bill Bryson toured Britain for his 1995 book Notes From A Small Island, he visited Milton Keynes and struggled to find it. A quarter of a century later, it’s the fastest growing city in England, but in some ways it’s still barely there at all.