Meeting Bambi

Midway through summer last year, my girlfriend (Ellie) went to visit her Nan and Grandad for the weekend. There was no space for me to stay with her so I stayed at home – no biggie. I had no plans, the weather was looking alright and I needed to nurse the remnants of an xtra-lite hangover I’d picked up from the day before. I’d received signal that some mates would be about later in the afternoon so thought I’d spend the initial two thirds of the day out on my bike.

I’d just bought this bike brand new (looking back now: stupidly expensive, but who cares?)and had spent nearly every day riding it since it arrived. We’re your average Driverless™ couple so had mutually made the decision to find ourselves a form of transportation in lieu of owning a car and the bike seemed the logical and cheap (LOL) choice. I hadn’t bought a bike in over 10 years and hadn’t ridden consistently since the beginning of lockdown – Ellie had never ridden a bike at all, except for the two or three Lime bike rides that led to our wheel-based epiphany. I’m about a month back into it at this point and had worked out the majority of the links and routes to get me around Milton Keynes; I grew up here but hadn’t ridden since I stopped skateboarding and moved away. This day was different though, I had nowhere I needed to be, and nowhere I needed to go.

It was a pretty standard hot summer’s day ride and I meandered about leisurely. Rode past the lakes, stopped at the Peace Pagoda, all the good stuff (right?). By late afternoon, I’d bumped into some of the Crew® at the Theatre District and was planning to make my way closer to home for the evening. I hadn’t used Google Maps all day – it wasn’t a super-direct-responsive-fast-commuter-travel kinda day. But for some reason (maybe a combo of heat stroke and Hair-of-the-dog) I felt compelled to use SatNav™ to guide me a Casa safely.

Nothing out of the regular right, I knew The Route to get me home. But today, for whatever reason, once the directions loaded, the app instructed me to ride through Linford Wood. Now, I’d never bothered with this route before, no real reason why. I just thought it wasn’t sending me in the right direction (I now refer to this as Car-Brain: navigating yourself as a pedestrian/cyclist/etc in the same manner as a car). I thought to myself “Fuck it, why not?” It’s bright, it’s warm and the route takes the same amount of time without cycling next to a main road or up a hill. I took the route and the map didn’t lie – it was just as fast as my usual, and it got me back in one piece. Not really anything exceptional about Google’s ability to provide GPS navigation but whatever, right?… Except, maybe, for one thing.

Now before I go on – it’s probably worth mentioning, at some length, that I’d respectfully picked up the hangover, mentioned at the beginning, drinking (surprise, surprise…) in London the night before. And said drinking was in celebration, not solely but in part, due to Ellie having a little letter published in the newspaper. She’d been riled up by a bad case of Shit Journalism™ about our dearly beloved ‘MK’ and had responded to an article discussing Labour’s proposals for new ‘New Towns’. Milton Keynes – justifiably in some cases, unjustifiably in others – gets a bad wrap. Roundabouts, concrete cows, MK Dons? Tell me something new. In all honestly, I don’t expect anyone who hasn’t spent more than 5 fucking minutes here to see it in any other way, considering the only landmarks you see by car are literally: roundabouts, The Concrete Cows™ and Stadium MK, so complaints about the city’s blandness from commuters and day-trippers make sense, but they still ring kinda empty.

Anyway, this little article Ellie decided to reply to was an interview with a leading British Architect who was chatting shit about ‘MK’, which is funny because – and personally I believe – there are two demographics of people who see Milton Keynes for what it actually is and can critically comment on its design: Architects and Skateboarders.

So – as a ‘retired’ (tired) Skateboarder myself, I remember the ridiculous number of professional skateboarders (athletes: now that’s its in the olympics lol) that would fly from the other side of the fucking planet to come and skate the humble ‘bus station’ and how they still talk, to this day, about the mythical marble ledges and flooring of this infamous skate plaza (if you thought the Foo Fighters coming to town was craaazzzyyy, you never saw P-Rod skating the DC Pad). Does a single soul outside of the skate community know how revered Milton Keynes is globally, let alone ‘MK’ citizens and the council (cough cough)? And given the (dis)respect the community has received over the years, all things considered, if anyone’s permitted to chat crud about this place, its us.

In the same way, through meeting Ellie (who is in the final stages of a PhD in Shopping Centre architecture), I learnt that architects adore Milton Keynes. Even better – the people who designed Milton Keynes adored architecture. It might be hard to believe, but underneath all of the ridiculous monstrous shit that keeps popping up, is the DNA of Mies, Corbusier and the rest. The amount of detail they painstakingly put into every millimetre of this ‘City’ (Development Corporation logos under every paving slab etc etc), you start to get the idea that they actually cared when designing it. And it wasn’t just the city centre: the housing developments, the flood plains and balancing lakes, the cycle and pedestrian infrastructure, the close-knit communities – the entire bloody city was planned like this on purpose: for people to love and enjoy.

So – this article. Unfortunately for those architects (and us) the crystal ball hadn’t and still hasn’t been invented yet, so neither of us expected it to turn out like this…but what is this? Well, at the moment, ‘this’ is: Urban Sprawl® and lack of Green Space™, according to this guy:

Look – I’m gonna try and wrap this up now as I think it speaks for itself, but everything I’m trying to say boils down to this. This city gets a lot of things wrong, for sure. And it’s pretty polarising for a lot of people outside of its perimeter. I don’t expect everyone to understand what ‘MK’ is and I don’t think that everyone should. But given the state of things at the moment (not even worth mentioning lol), I feel that even with all of its flaws and stereotypes, there’s something here that we should be proud of and that we can enjoy. Maybe there’s something here that other places could learn from too, irrespective of those borrrrring stereotypes that Milton Keynes can’t seem to shake.

—

Riding home that late afternoon, just as I mounted the path to enter Linford Wood, I saw two deer. In broad daylight, about ten metres in front of me. Smack bang in the middle of ‘MK’. Not even 24 hours after that article was published: our infamous Urban Sprawl® and lack of Green Space™, and here I am staring at fucking Bambi. I was born here in ’94, moved away in 2017 and I’ve only seen deer a) driving through the Chilterns at night and b) in Clissold Park.

I’d already loosely had the idea to start Hands® by this point, but this was the moment that cemented it. We all know there are deer everywhere in the UK, and yes, we have all seen deer before. But the last place any of us would expect to see one (let alone two) is right in the heart of the ‘concrete-grey dystopia’ that is supposedly Milton Keynes.